Working from home is not for everyone. Yet anyone who still has a job and is able has been thrust into it. From the early days of the work-from-home mandate I have been watching how this distributed teamwork is impacting both organizations and employees.
That’s the subject of the latest update to consulting firm Creative Strategies’ workplace collaboration research study, in which we asked nearly a thousand U.S. (remote) workers about their go-to tools for working on projects with peers. These are some of the highlights.
DIVERSE SET OF TOOLS IN USE EVERY DAY
If you listen to Microsoft talk about Office, or Google talk about GSuite, you’d think each of their paying customers uses only their software and nothing else. In the modern workplace, that is simply not the case. More and more employees want to choose the software and services that work best for them and their team. More often than not, employees are choosing those solutions from many different companies, not just one.
Our study suggests that there is no one-company monopoly on tools for any single work-related use case. Just because workers use Microsoft’s Office apps every day does not mean they don’t also use Google’s GSuite apps. Video meetings are the new norm, and remote workers use a variety of platforms including Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and even Apple’s FaceTime.
A quarter of respondents in our study said they use at least one app from four different tech companies on a daily basis as a part of their workflow. The most common overlaps are with Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and Apple (with iMessage).
Almost a third of respondents said they use at least three different apps for video meetings on a weekly basis. Zoom, Skype, and FaceTime were the videoconferencing apps most often associated with collaboration by people under 30.
Employees commonly choose their own corporate-owned hardware, their own software, and even their own cloud services. Increasingly, the role of IT is to validate and bless a wide range of technology, rather than dictating which options employees can use. In some cases companies use this kind of freedom as a perk to attract talent. Just as the option of working from anywhere is likely to become more widely accepted, so is this software flexibility.
THE END OF EMAIL (FINALLY)?
For every age bracket above 30, email was among the top things they considered a collaboration tool. This changes dramatically when we looked at responses from those under 30. For that demographic Google Docs was, by far, the app workers most associated with collaboration. Zoom’s videoconferencing app ranked second, followed by Apple’s iMessage.