Fragmentation in your organization's technology stack is no longer a motivational issue but a strategic HR problem, inhibiting innovation, eroding employee loyalty from day one, and demanding a unified, human-centric solution.
Maria Valero
Editorial Strategist, HR
Workday
According to research from Quickbase, 90% of survey respondents feel overwhelmed by the number of software solutions they use daily.
Those same employees who feel overwhelmed are diverted for 11+ hours weekly just to chase basic information. Every week, organizations lose real value in their work day due to a fragmented tech stack.
In a fast-moving and largely digital world, lost productivity is lost innovation potential. Employees are spending too much time mining for information and access across platforms, and while scrappiness is a good thing, it takes away from their core responsibilities.
This digital disconnect is expensive and directly impacts your workforce and your business. Let’s explore the implications, and opportunities, posed by this challenge.
Report
Companies often acquire new technology in an effort to streamline processes and achieve efficiencies. But when that well-intentioned work turns into a fragmented digital environment, it creates a host of problems that ultimately hurt your people and your bottom line.
Most notably, you’ll face:
Lost loyalty: Onboarding processes typically are the first look at an organization’s digital environment. If they’re not set up properly, new employees get a poor first impression, which can lead to regret and premature retention.
Lost employee productivity: When employees have to log in to multiple systems to access critical job-related information b, it creates unnecessary friction and wastes valuable time in their work day.
Lack of real-time insights: It's nearly impossible to get a holistic view of your workforce, making strategic planning, talent development, and succession planning a manual, time-consuming effort.
In a fast-moving and largely digital world, lost productivity is lost innovation potential.
Employees are an HR teams’ stakeholder. If your workforce isn’t set up to do their jobs effectively, it impacts their experience, which directly impacts their loyalty—and HR’s performance. Ensuring that your organization has a strong technology infrastructure also ensures you have a workforce of high performers, HR included.
A strong onboarding experience, which is often a key victim of tech fragmentation, can improve employee retention and productivity by 52% and 60%, respectively.
With that in mind, imagine this: You land a job at a new company. The excitement carries you into your first day and starts you off on a great note. Your first day is a success.
The next day comes and you need to access a system to log your PTO for an upcoming vacation you’ve already booked. You’re trying hard to remember, “What was that platform again?” and search through multiple links that you bookmarked before realizing it was the one platform you forgot to bookmark that you actually need.
You reach out to the onboarding team to help you and they reply the next day with the right link. But you’re distracted, it slips your mind, your PTO comes up a few months later, and your heart sinks when you realize you never logged it and have to break the news to your manager.
Not only is this a less-than-stellar start to your employment, but it’s a pretty realistic example of the negative impression technology can make during onboarding. Employee experiences at work are largely made up of digital tools and interfaces, so tech stacks inevitably become a very important variable.
HR teams work incredibly hard to craft onboarding experiences that set employees up for success. Don’t let a fragmented tech stack take away from that.
A strong onboarding experience can improve employee retention and productivity by 52% and 60%, respectively.
Beyond onboarding, a Gartner survey uncovered that 47% of digital workers struggle to find information or data they need to effectively perform their jobs.
It’s such a sticking point for employees that 96% of those digital workers indicated they would be willing to accept monitoring in return for assistance in at least one of the options provided.
Of the top three options:
34% of digital workers surveyed indicated they would accept monitoring in exchange for awareness of training classes and/or career development opportunities.
33% would accept monitoring for support in finding information to do their job.
30% would accept monitoring in exchange for proactive outreach from IT support when facing problems with their computer or applications.
That’s right. Employees would prefer heightened monitoring in exchange for additional layers of support if given the choice. When employees are willing to sacrifice their privacy in an effort to increase productivity, the problem isn’t motivation—it’s a disconnected digital infrastructure.
HR leaders are at an inflection point. Workforces are operating with outdated frameworks that are becoming more and more obsolete as AI rewrites the book on effective workforce management. For many, the transformation has either already begun or is imminent.
When employees are willing to sacrifice their privacy in an effort to increase productivity, the problem isn’t motivation—it’s a disconnected digital infrastructure.
Gartner recently predicted that by 2028, more than 20% of digital workplace applications will use AI-driven personalization algorithms to generate adaptive experiences for the worker.
At the helm of this new technology is the hope that one day, our workforce management environments will meet the unique needs, expectations, and desires of every employee. This personalizes employee experiences in a way that supports employees in their flow of work rather than pushing against the current.
Your fragmented tech stack is currently writing the employee experience narrative—dictating how much time employees waste, how many insights they miss, and how quickly your organization can adapt. To secure your organization's future competitiveness, HR must usher in transformation to unify the digital world of work.
The question for every HR leader isn't whether your organization can benefit from a unified platform, but rather: Are you prepared to be the change agent that brings clarity, intelligence, and a truly human-centric experience to every one of your workers?
Employee support for organizational change is in huge decline. Empower your managers to take decisive action and lead transformation at every level of your business with the findings from this Workday report.
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