Mitel: Organizations Lose $10,000 per Employee per Year From Communications Inefficiencies
Employees reportedly waste more than an hour per day due to communications inefficiencies, resulting in organizations losing $10,000 per employee per year in lost productivity – so says Mitel’s new white paper on workplace productivity and communications technology, which surveyed 2,500 business professionals in five countries across North America, Western Europe, and Australia.
Other key findings from this report included:
- Inefficient communication resulted in friction between employees and/or departments (47% of respondents) and has also had a negative impact on customer satisfaction (24% of respondents).
- 75% of respondents believed that better communications and collaboration tools would improve personal productivity.
- Phone and email still dominate the top five most-used communication methods.
- Poor training (32% of respondents) and resistance to change (25%) are the biggest reasons cited for obstacles to tool socialization.
Source: SoftwareReviews Mitel Unified Communications Scorecard. Accessed December 2, 2019.
Our Take
Mitel’s study is a welcome corroboration of what those working in the communications and collaborative space have seen for a while: that without a communications and collaboration strategy, organizations lose money through wasted productivity.
Moreover, such a strategy is not merely about picking the best tool on the market: it is about picking the best-fit tool for your employees’ workflow processes. Mitel is right to say that by aligning tools, processes, and culture, productivity can be improved. Implementing a tool successfully requires effective training and socialization, which can take up to six to nine months.
However, Mitel’s white paper does not detail what adoption strategies are industry best practices. Info-Tech’s research points to various adoption methods for successful tool implementation. Some key methods include having a communication plan, a launch day/week, training middle management and promoting champions, and having frequent but short training clips on key features well past launch day.
Source: Info-Tech, Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools, Accessed December 2, 2019.