Enabling knowledge & info to be shared is essential for organisational alignment

The underutilisation of shared resources, ideas and data is a massive problem — especially with a dispersed workforce that’s trying to figure out how to collaborate effectively while working remotely.

A major differentiator in any competitive market is when businesses understand the value of sharing knowledge and resources, empowering their employees with the wealth of information available to them, thereby creating that critical alignment within the organisation.

However, according to a recent study by Slack, The Reinvention of Work, the lack of quick and easy access to files is a major frustration for 7 in 10 Indian knowledge workers (71%). And Indian organisations are missing out on maximising the impact of their work by not providing easy access to shared knowledge and valuable resources that exist within the walls of the organisation. The underutilisation of shared resources, ideas and data is a massive problem — especially with a dispersed workforce that's trying to figure out how to collaborate effectively while working remotely.

What's contributing to the problem is the lack of a central platform to bring all essential apps together. Time that could be better spent on high-value work, like building relationships with new customers, is wasted switching between different apps for communication, collaboration, file storage, document sharing and more.

According to the Slack study — which was based on a survey of 2,000 Indian knowledge workers in companies with over 100 employees — respondents, on average, were found to be wasting around 10 hours a week moving between the different apps they used for work. Alarmingly, this adds up to nearly 10 working weeks of lost productivity a year.

Just imagine a workplace where everyone is wasting 10 weeks of productivity per year — just moving back and forth between apps to find the right information, messages and files. Across a whole company, that's an enormous and very expensive area of inefficiency.

Worse still, without a single point for apps to converge, the impact is more than just lost time — it's the errors, duplicated work, inability to onboard new people to a project, and misalignments across teams that can end up increasing workloads and overburdening employees.

A single place to connect, communicate and collaborate

To unlock the full potential of their employees, increase efficiency and maintain strong working relationships with partners and customers, businesses need to bring together all the information, files and apps that their workers use into a single platform — a digital HQ.

According to the Slack study, nearly 9 in 10 Indian knowledge workers agreed that having a common collaboration platform would enable a better way of working, not only internally, but also when working with people outside the organisation (88%).

This external collaboration challenge is particularly important, with 97% of Indian employees saying they worked with external parties, including customers, industry associations, partners, suppliers and government bodies. They also said they were using five apps a day, on average, just to communicate and collaborate with these external parties.

While app proliferation and scattered information is a challenge, almost 9 in 10 knowledge workers would like to continue using the technologies and workflow processes that were adopted during the pandemic, even when they return to the office in some capacity (86%).

By implementing a common collaboration platform, like Slack, organisations can save time that otherwise would be wasted by employees searching across multiple apps — allowing them to stay aligned on projects, priorities and goals. It also makes it easier for workers to find the information and files they need to collaborate with external parties, which has a positive flow-on effect for sales, customer service, vendor relationships and more.

In this new era of work, the digital HQ should become the cornerstone of every successful business' technology stack, creating an open workplace that promotes knowledge sharing and empowers its employees to make faster, informed decisions.

After all, if information is the key to unlocking productivity, innovation and growth, then it's vital that Indian knowledge workers have the right technology in place to make that information easily accessible, empower employees to share their knowledge and foster alignment within an organisation.

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

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