We desperately need a new generation of collaboration tools

A tremendous amount of electronic ink and human hot air has been expended heralding the return of knowledge workers to their corporate offices.?Employees are being given unprecedented flexibility in determining their work locations and working hours as offices reopen.

?The great irony of this new world order is that knowledge workers spend the majority of their day in a digital cocoon in which they struggle to do ‘real work’ while dealing with an incessant barrage of emails, voicemails, text messages, Jira tickets, ServiceNow requests, application alerts, project status updates, etc.?Employees operate in this virtual cocoon by donning headphones and staring blankly into their computer screens whether they are sitting at home or in an office.?

?No wonder so many workers are nonplussed about returning to the office.?The physical location of their digital cocoons is completely immaterial to them.?In fact, their primary interest in returning to an office is social in nature and has little to do with their work performance or productivity.

?The second great irony of this new world order is that the smorgasbord of collaboration tools inhabiting the virtual-first workplace are – in many cases – undermining the productivity they were intended to foster.?At the outbreak of the Covid crisis a series of point solutions for email and text communication, videoconferencing, document sharing and task prioritization were deployed on a wholesale basis to ensure the continuity of business operations.?These 2019 era tools were never designed to address the collaboration needs of the physically dispersed, virtual-first, always-on, asynchronous and increasingly self-managed workplace of the 2020s.

?Knowledge workers are being victimized by the open access lottery for their time and attention created by today’s collection of collaboration tools.?The burnout phenomenon that has been so widely reported in the popular press stems in part from the endless context switching triggered by these tools and the corresponding need to work longer hours to compensate for the time lost to collaborative distractions.?

?The time is ripe – some would say overdue – for a new generation of collaboration tools that offer fundamentally new capabilities in the following areas.

?Communication management

?An abstraction service is needed that can pre-process the information employees receive through the multiple communication channels referenced above.?This service needs to filter irrelevant or unnecessary inbound communications; establish a contextual basis for correlating and deduping cross-channel communications; differentiate communications in terms of their explicit or implied response requirements; and prioritize communications in terms of time criticality, business criticality, recency and sentiment.

?This service should be configurable to mirror the requirements, interests and preferences of individual employees.?It should serve as a customized communication console that evolves over time as an employee’s information needs and priorities change.?Its utility increases as messaging interactions with co-workers become increasingly asynchronous.

?Most of the functions described above are routinely performed by human assistants supporting C-level executives in Fortune 500 companies.?Executive assistants routinely screen all incoming communications and, in some instances, even suggest or prepare appropriate responses.?They escalate business-critical, time-sensitive communications and relegate business as usual messages to a discretionary reading file or disregard them altogether.?The service envisioned here would provide every knowledge worker with a dedicated and personalized communications assistant.

?Work prioritization and scheduling

?The current generation of work management tools are generally designed to orchestrate team-related work tasks or personal work tasks.?No one tool is sufficiently holistic to encompass the full spectrum of work-related activities that most workers are expected to perform.

?Both types of tools have similar limitations.?Tasks are frequently defined in a coarse grained fashion when, in fact, they’re composed of multiple subtasks that must be scheduled semi-independently.?Task prioritization across multiple projects or operational workstreams is left to the discretion of individual employees.?And both types of tools are generally incapable of estimating the time required to perform specific activities, limiting their ability to optimize work schedules.?

?Next-gen prioritization and scheduling tools will be designed to answer the seemingly simple but incredibly important question facing every knowledge worker: ‘what’s the best use of my working time this morning, this day, this week?’.?These tools will deconstruct work assignments and recurring work responsibilities into a far more granular set of tasks.?They will recommend work schedules based upon past patterns of task performance as well as business priorities and co-worker needs.?In addition, they will identify learning opportunities for skill development that will enable employees to perform similar tasks more efficiently in the future.?????

?Worklife well-being

?The global pandemic has forced knowledge workers of all ages to take a much more critical and holistic view of their mental, physical and emotional health.?Many do not like what they see.?During the past two years they have generally worked longer hours, in more confined spaces, in sitting positions, staring into computer screens with limited interruptions and little or no physical contact with co-workers.?It would be difficult to describe this as a healthy work environment.?

?Worklife well-being and personal well-being are two different things.?Individuals may derive health benefits from their worklife that are undermined or overwhelmed by adverse homelife issues.?Conversely, individuals may offset the effects of an unhealthy worklife by having a physically fit, mentally stimulating and emotionally rewarding homelife.?In reality, most knowledge workers devote far too much time to their jobs for their work experiences to not impact their personal well-being.??

?Collaboration tools should bring a sense of order and coherence to the demands being placed on a knowledge worker’s time and should foster a sense of daily and weekly accomplishment.?In today’s work environment, they all too frequently contribute to heightened levels of job-related stress and frustration.?

?Next-gen tools need to support a virtual-first workplace which nurtures the physical and mental hygiene of its workers by delivering information, reserving time, prompting breaks and providing diversions that alleviate the stress created by dawn to dusk meetings and messages.?Next-gen tools will provide employees with a greater sense of control over stressful aspects of their worklife by enabling them to establish schedules that reflect their personal preferences for performing different types of work at different times of day or different times of the week; to compile information that will make them better prepared for specific meetings or activities; to survey the opinions of co-workers on key questions or issues; and to obtain frequent performance feedback from business partners.?While some of these capabilities are not direct forms of collaboration per se, they enable collaboration – when it does occur – to be more meaningful and productive.?

?A CIO leadership opportunity

?The capabilities envisioned in this article will have a revolutionary impact on the productivity and sanity of modern knowledge workers.?With a little foresight and a lot of intestinal fortitude CIOs can not only join this revolution, they can, in fact, lead it.?

?Many CIOs are genuinely concerned about employee experience in today’s hybrid workplace.?They’ve taken concrete steps to reduce IT friction by re-engineering existing procedures for employee onboarding, incident response, application provisioning, laptop procurement, etc.?While these efforts are commendable, their collective impact pales in comparison to the revolutionary impact that next-gen collaboration tools can have upon employee productivity and job satisfaction.

?CIOs who are truly committed to transforming employee experience and not just improving it have a unique opportunity to do so by becoming early adopters of new tools for communication management, task prioritization and scheduling, and worklife well-being.???

??Author’s Note: the ideas presented here are based upon Re-Imagining the Next Generation of Workplace Collaboration Tools, a more extensive white paper that can be downloaded here .

This article was originally posted on Forbes.com CIO Network

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