Why it’s critical for your business to get your tech stack right

As businesses navigate economic uncertainty, leaders need their teams to spend more time on work that matters. This means ensuring their time is spent on the most strategic and impactful initiatives that quickly address business pressures and deliver value to customers.

But today, teams spend a significant portion of the workweek not on the work that matters, but on the coordination costs of work: searching for information, switching between apps, dealing with shifting priorities, and chasing work status. This impacts not only productivity, but the employee experience as more employees find their ability to make a meaningful impact hampered by duplication and wasted time.

Remote work is the culprit

The cause can be traced back to the shift to remote working during the pandemic, which was a huge democratization of workplace technology choices that were previously unnecessary for most companies. Employees adopted apps that suited their personal work style, but to meet the sudden needs of distributed working, they often did so quickly with little strategy.

Today, this means a workspace cluttered with multiple apps and screens, reducing employee focus and leaving them clueless as to who needs to work on what, or when. Most importantly, they are unclear about how their work affects the company’s goals and objectives.

What can help solve this? Getting business leaders to rethink how they design an updated and intentional tech stack – one that focuses on employee experience and business outcomes For a long time, companies have thought that “more is better” in terms of technology. But leaders need to challenge that assumption and be more strategic in selecting the tools that will have the most impact. Technology should reduce, not add to, coordination costs of work.

So, since the problem started with a glut of technology, how can companies make sure they’re building the right tech stack?

Disrupt the meeting norm

Without eliminating coordination costs, companies risk a less productive — and less satisfied — workforce. A tech stack suited to today’s workplace can change that, not only by streamlining workflows and improving processes, but also by eliminating time-consuming meetings and phone calls to check the status of tasks.

Often, breaking old work habits requires teams to take the plunge to see the benefits. For example, The Work Innovation Lab in Asana asked a group of participants in a “Meeting Reset” study to cancel the small (less than five people) recurring meetings in their calendar for 48 hours and then redesign what the meetings looked like from the nothing .

This led participants to question their core assumptions about meeting design, while bringing hours back into their day. This tells us that not only the meetings themselves need to change, but also how we think about them. We’re so adept at meetings and going into agendas and there’s little doubt that you could even say, at worst, that we’re complacent in how we value time.

Companies need to change their business mindset to show that clarity is the end goal – and when achieved with fewer meetings, even better. This means taking a step back and deciding what the purpose of a meeting or phone call is before you have it.

We assume teams know what a good meeting looks like, but leaders need to ask themselves what they want to get out of it and, crucially, whether their tech stack can do better. Because in this way we remove some coordination and communication activities from meetings and create asynchronous forms of collaboration that are often more inclusive and purposeful.

Clarity gets the job done

A key feature of the modern workplace is allowing people to work the way they work best, while ensuring clarity is not lost in the process. Silos can get in the way of this, as can limited ways of working, meaning workplaces risk their teams not having the visibility, headroom or time to properly communicate, absorb and update.

Missing this information can be bad news for a team’s productivity, as more time is spent on duplicate or even unnecessary work. At a time when most generations are not engaged in the workplace, more needs to be done to ensure that meaningful activities replace unnecessary work.

Organizations can do this by moving goals away from meetings and email and giving teams the strategic platform they need to see things clearly. Businesses need to try to detach clarity from the synchronic structure we’ve long imposed on it, and support the move to more intuitive and natural.

This gives the green light for productive and creative contributions. Empowering teams to work how they want to achieve their goals will in turn boost their confidence and engagement.

Provide good change management

A better connection of the technology strategy to the overarching business strategy will ultimately move a company forward. But the key word here is ‘strategy’. By regularly switching contexts and having unnecessary meetings, a lot of brain power is lost during the working day.

Simply throwing more technology at the problem won’t help, and without a roadmap that provides a game plan, the more coordination costs of the work you’ll have to create. Tools designed to relieve pressure on employees risk increasing the number of pings that interrupt their day, leading to increased feelings of pressure and anxiety. At a time when workplace burnout remains high, more needs to be done to help employees reset their burnout levels.

Tool fatigue not only puts a damper on your employees’ work-life balance, but also on their productivity. Therefore, when building a tech stack for the modern age, companies should strive to reduce the number of tools in the process. This means fewer context changes are expected from your team, making it easier to stay focused and collaborate, freeing them from digital whiplash.

It can be a difficult balance to strike. Teams become attached to their technology. But that’s why change management is so crucial. In an uncertain macroeconomic environment, leaders need to confidently share: “I value your time and talent; we do this to be more effective.” And then show their teams, through first-hand experience, how enjoyable and productive the change can be.

The workplace has undergone a technological revolution that has changed the way and where we all work. But the hard work doesn’t stop here.

The workplace evolves every day and so does technology. Business leaders must continue to monitor this evolution and match it with the tools employees need to stay productive – similar to a constant temperature check. The pressure comes from the fact that not only productivity is at stake, but also the future of the workplace.

Anne Raimondi is COO and Head of Business at Asana.