Switching between apps draining 10 weeks of productivity per year: Slack study

In today’s world, there’s an app for everything. And while having best-of-breed apps to get work done is handy, too many can make people a lot less productive. In fact, the amount of time employees spend just switching between apps should be a wake-up call for Indian organisations to radically rethink how their people are working.

According to a new Slack study, The Reinvention of Work — based on a survey of more than 2,000 Indian knowledge workers in companies with over 100 employees — hustling from app to app has put a significant strain on employees. The research found respondents were, on average, switching between 10 apps a day, while 1 in 10 knowledge workers were juggling over 20 apps daily.

The impact of this really comes down to productivity and time lost. Most workers, according to the study, were wasting around four hours a week (47 minutes a day) simply moving back and forth between the apps they need to do their jobs. For one in five, that number is even higher, spending up to 10 hours a week, which equates to a staggering 10 working weeks a year. If every employee in a workforce of 100 was wasting 10 weeks of productivity per year, that would become an enormous area of inefficiency for a business — one that would demand action.

Bringing apps into one place brings back productivity

As Indian organisations start formalising their hybrid working arrangements — turning what was a short-term fix into a long-term strategy — they need to take a good look at their technology stack and prioritise setting their teams up for efficient collaboration, both internally and externally.

Many apps hold an integral function for a business, so the problem is less the number of apps that are being used, rather how those apps are being navigated.

According to the Slack study, seven in 10 Indian knowledge workers identified a lack of quick and easy access to information and files (71%) as a challenge with the number of apps they use. In fact, nearly two-thirds said it was the most frustrating aspect of their work day (63%).

And without a single point for apps to converge, the impact is more than just lost time — errors, duplicated work, and misalignments can end up increasing workloads and overburdening employees.

The benefits of a single collaborative platform extends beyond internal use, with 97% of Indian employees saying they worked with people outside their organisation to get work done. That includes customers (61%), industry associations (46%), partners (45%), suppliers (39%), and government bodies (30%). Not being able to communicate effectively with these external parties can have broader implications on sales, marketing, customer service, vendor relationships, and more.

Those who participated in the study agreed that implementing a common platform to communicate and collaborate with people outside their organisation would help solve their challenges, including by keeping teams aligned (88%). And 61% of respondents flagged that not having a single collaborative platform was a major roadblock when working with external parties (61%).

The digital HQ is the nexus of workplace empowerment

A Digital HQ can alleviate the challenge of having to search across multiple apps to keep track of conversations, or find the information and files needed to collaborate with external parties.

By bringing people, information, files, and apps into a single platform, the digital HQ will become the cornerstone of every successful business’s technology stack, creating an open workplace that promotes knowledge-sharing and enables faster decision-making.

Now that Indian employees have a new perspective on work, a common collaboration platform, like Slack, that integrates all the essential apps they need to do their work, will be vital to setting them up for long-term success.

Discover more insights in Slack’s The Reinvention of Work study.

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