Workplace Stats Part II: Remote Work and App Overload Cause Confusion and Distraction

Around this time last year, we explored Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index to better understand how employees in the U.S. and around the world spend their time at work. This year’s Anatomy of Work Global Index surveyed 10,624 knowledge workers across the globe to find out what most impacts productivity, efficiency, and agility within a wide range of organizations.

In a two-part series, we are taking a look at this year’s report to find out what’s the same, what’s changed, and how the Glances no-code integration platform can help companies reprioritize skilled work and decrease wasted time. Part I reviews two of the survey’s key lessons regarding “work about work” and burnout. Part II reviews learnings about remote work and app overload.

Let’s dive into Part II:

The increase in work-from-home and hybrid schedules is overall a positive change, but too much flexibility has blurred shared responsibilities and individual expectations.

In Asana’s report, Professor Nicholas Bloom explains that remote work is here to stay. “To put numbers on it, just 5% of full-time workdays were from home pre-pandemic, and now my research suggests this will be 25% once pandemic restrictions are lifted. That is a five-fold increase.”

This unprecedented change has created both wonderful opportunities and major challenges in the workplace. Employees, managers, and leaders are all reevaluating and restructuring how they perform job duties, attend meetings, take training courses, collaborate on projects, and meet goals. In many cases, this has meant an increase in the use of SaaS platforms, communication tools, and online team-building activities, all of which come with a learning curve and additional work-about-work tasks.

Also, remote and hybrid work often lack clear boundaries. Workers report that although it’s easier to concentrate at home and manage non-work activities, they spend more time outside of business hours thinking about work and checking emails. This leads to fuzzy start and end times for their workday.

“Forty-one percent of workers feel more isolated when working remotely and 49% see the office as more of a social space than they used to.”

- Asana

An ever-increasing reliance on dozens of apps leaves workers distracted and projects disjointed.

We’ve all experienced it—that subconscious urge to check an app the first moment a notification pops up. We give into it before we even realize what’s happening, and in the process, our concentration goes right out the window.

With workers continually shifting their attention to whichever reminder pings next, is it any wonder that 33% of workers say their attention span is shorter than it was a year ago? “Workers have a plethora of tools and technologies at their disposal designed to make work easier, faster, and smarter. Instead of moving at lightspeed, though, too many disconnected apps have the opposite of the intended effect—they slow things down and make work too complicated,” the Asana study reports.

Infographic courtesy of Asana, Anatomy of Work Global Index 2022

However, the report also notes that when teams reduce the number of apps they’re using or choose tools that streamline data, employees are better able to focus on their skilled work. Leveraging app integrations is one of the key ways to achieve this.

What was true in 2021 is still true in 2022: Unclear remote work parameters and reliance on too many apps harm productivity, efficiency, and agility in the workplace. This is still true as well: Glances is the best solution to save time and refocus on the talent-based work your employees were hired to do.

Glances functions as the central hub that unifies your company’s favorite workplace apps (CRMs, email platforms, marketing platforms, payment platforms…the list goes on), providing a single view of the data you need. Even better, that data comes through in real time without any coding needed. Glances works within any app or webpage so you can securely view your customer insights and personal tasks anywhere online.

The complexity of the modern workplace isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and companies will have to contend with it one way or another. Make all those popular business apps like Asana, HubSpot, Zendesk, Stripe, Zoho CRM, and others work better and harder for your team by consolidating them with Glances.

Ready to simplify your work? Try Glances free for 14 days!

Start your free trial to connect your favorite business apps and access your data in one easy click, from any app or webpage.

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Asana Anatomy of Work Global Index 2022