Workplace teams are like members of a relay race—each person is responsible for completing their own leg and then passing the baton to push the project towards the finish line. For both fast-paced sprints and long-term, marathon-style initiatives, teams are only as strong as the weakest members. A single disengaged employee can derail momentum for all.
Whether projects gain ground or lose steam depends on how invested individuals are in the company’s success. By creating a productive digital employee experience, organizations can keep employees engaged, increase talent retention and combat the growing phenomenon of quiet quitting. Let’s explore how.
What is quiet quitting?
Deadlines are slipping, individuals are no longer speaking up in meetings or there’s little to no initiative shown. If you have employees who’ve faded into the background, doing just the bare minimum to stay employed, they’ve likely slipped into a mode of quiet quitting.
Employees who are checked out make up as much as 50 percent of the workforce, according to Gallup, with the ratio of engaged to disengaged employees now 1.8 to 1—the lowest in nearly a decade.[1]
Driven by a growing disconnect between employees and employers, quiet quitting is taking its toll, dragging down company-wide productivity at midsize organizations. Contributing to a sense of frustration among employees is a lack of user-friendly, modern tools, which leads to common technology and productivity problems:
Too many apps: The average number of apps employees use to do their work has increased to 11, with 36 percent of employees using anywhere from 11 to 25 apps.[2]
Too much effort required: 78 percent of employees feel IT-provided technologies are hard to use.[3]
Too hard to find information: Employees are spending valuable time searching for information, with only 26 percent of content and records systems connected to other core applications and lines of business (LOB) systems.[4]
The cost of disengaged employees
Attracting and retaining technology talent is a top concern for midsize enterprise CIOs, with 84 percent reporting more competition for qualified IT talent and 73 percent worried about increased attrition rates among IT workers.[5] And rightfully so.
When quiet quitting spreads throughout an organization and disengaged workers essentially drop the baton on projects, top talent tries to pick up the slack. But that’s a heavy burden to bear, often leading to dips in morale, company service and product delivery—driving motivated employees to take their skills elsewhere.
To protect top talent and combat the upswing in quiet quitting, you need to give employees the best tools and processes to help them work better as a team and individually, delivering an employee experience that reduces technology and content chaos.
Many companies are on the right track, with 66 percent of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) planning to increase investments in automation and digital tools to offset the skill labor shortage, increased labor costs, support remote work and reduce manual processes.[6]
A great place to start is with content integration, bringing together the information employees need within the applications they already use to remove digital friction, enhance collaboration and drive productivity.
How to improve the digital employee experience
A SaaS content management solution allows companies to empower teams with smarter, more accessible information, combatting the uptick in quiet quitting, while also supporting top talent. With seamless content integration, employees can work within familiar business applications, such as Microsoft® 365, SAP®, Salesforce® and Google Workspace, eliminating application switching by providing a 360-degree view of both content and related processes in a single interface.
With agile content management and a single source of truth, companies can automate manual tasks and improve the employee experience in three important ways:
- Better support hybrid and remote employees: Enable employees to access the content needed to do their jobs, whenever and wherever they choose to work. With cloud-based workplace collaboration tools, teams gain an intuitive way to securely share information and connect on projects.
- Create energy and space for innovation: Automate tedious and time-consuming tasks to allow employees to focus on more strategic, higher value activities that fulfill and empower them.
- Help each employee run their best race every time: Take advantage of information management innovations to create intelligent and unified employee experiences to help employees operate at their highest levels of engagement and productivity.
Think outside the box and discover how to power superhuman teams with smarter information.
[1] “Is Quiet Quitting Real?”, Jim Harter, Gallup, May 17, 2023
[2] Gartner® Press Release, Gartner Survey Reveals 47% of Digital Workers Struggle to Find the Information Needed to Effectively Perform Their Jobs, May 10, 2023
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
[3] Gartner® 3 Steps to Deliver Peak Digital Employee Experience, Tori Paulman, August 18, 2022
[4] AIIM 2023 State of the Intelligent Information Management Industry report, April 2023
[5] Gartner® 2023 Talent Outlook for Midsized Enterprises, CIO Research Team, 6 March 2023
[6] Ibid.
