When new apps lead to lower worker productivity

Recent years have brought hundreds of new applications, including modern videoconferencing, task trackers, and AI assistants, but some IT leaders haven’t seen the employee productivity gains they expected.

Many apps and platforms have promised productivity gains, and some have delivered, but a new productivity paradox — in which employee productivity doesn’t match the rapid advancement of IT services available — is threatening to become a new norm.

One factor contributing to this paradox may be the rise of return-to-office mandates.

Faisal Masud, president of HP Digital Services, sees stagnant worker productivity in recent years being tied to the COVID pandemic and the tension between employee preferences to continue working from home and some employer pushes to return to the office.

Some studies have found that employees are more productive when working from home — other studies have come to the opposite conclusion — and the home-office scenario has some disadvantages, including a loss of connection with coworkers and bell-to-bell video calls each day, he says.

Home workers face “conferencing creep, where you’ve just got call after call after call,” he says. “You can only do that many Zooms and actually be connected,” Masud says. “I used to know [product managers] who had straight 12 meetings a day. When do you work?”

Apps as white noise

But where employees work is only one pressure point in the unfolding paradox around productivity. Employees also face app overload, says Masud, who formerly held executive roles at Alphabet, Amazon, and Staples. There’s one clunky app to track tasks, another to file an expense report, a third for chatting with coworkers, and maybe three separate videoconferencing apps, each with their own quirks.

“You typically end up using only five or six apps,” he says. “The rest of it is just noise.”

Masud, who has a longtime interest in worker productivity, referenced a Gartner chart on the impact of application sprawl in a February LinkedIn post. About 40% of the desk workers Gartner surveyed in 2023 were required to use more than 11 apps to do their jobs, and over a third said they missed important workplace updates because of the number of apps they use or the volume of information they receive.

“The complexity of this growing digital ecosystem leaves employees navigating a broken path to productivity, resulting in lost work time,” Masud wrote. “Organizations must grapple with delivering an effective digital experience to employees.”

Lagging US productivity

Masud’s observations about lagging worker productivity are backed up by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The government organization found labor productivity, or output per hour, declining in six of 10 quarters between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2023, with a flat number in a seventh quarter. Worker productivity jumped by nearly 20% in the second quarter of 2020, when many employees began working from home, but those gains quickly leveled off.

Over the longer term, US labor productivity grew just 0.8% from 2010 to 2018, according to BLS. More recently, the US has seen five straight quarters of labor productivity growth since early 2023, with labor productivity growth often tied to investments in infrastructure, employee training, and technological advances.

It’s worth noting that this latest period of US labor productivity gains has coincided with the rollout of modern AI assistants. While correlation between those two events can’t be confirmed, some providers of AI assistants have claimed their products have led to major productivity increases. For example, eight months after it rolled out its Copilot assistant, Microsoft says 70% of users noticed productivity gains.

Even with the advent of AI assistants, however, some IT leaders still have productivity concerns, with many not entirely sold on copilots and others questioning the ROI of AI. Like HP’s Masud, Steve Taplin believes a big part of the problem is app and platform overload.

“Employees are bombarded with multiple platforms, each claiming to boost efficiency, but the reality is they can create more complexity and cognitive load,” says Taplin, CEO of software development firm Sonatafy Technology. “The sheer number of tools IT employees have to manage can be overwhelming.”

In addition, many employees are expected to be always available through email, instant messaging, or videoconferencing apps, he says, leading to worker burnout.

“While these tools can be beneficial, over-reliance and the expectation of constant engagement can lead to stress and burnout,” he says. “To combat this, it’s crucial to set boundaries, use tools mindfully, and streamline the number of platforms in use.”

Taplin also recommends that CIOs and other managers regularly check in with team members to gauge well-being and workloads. They should also promote what he calls a “culture of focus.”

“Encourage a work environment where employees can focus on one task at a time,” he suggests. “Implement policies that minimize unnecessary meetings and interruptions, giving IT staff the time they need to tackle projects thoughtfully and thoroughly.”

This productivity dip can be temporary as organizations roll out new IT tools, counters Professor Timothy Bates, with the College of Innovation and Technology at the University of Michigan.

Employees need time to learn and adapt to new apps, leading to a “cognitive overload factor,” says Bates, former CTO at Lenovo and General Motors. “Employees might find themselves overwhelmed by the constant learning curve and the multiplicity of tools, which can lead to a temporary dip in productivity.”

Worker burnout is still a problem, however, especially among IT employees, with the rapid pace of technological change and an often “always-on” work culture, Bates says.

“There’s also a misalignment in expectations,” he adds. “Companies implement these powerful tools expecting immediate returns, which puts pressure on IT teams to deliver results quickly, often without the necessary support or resources.”

Productivity problems aren’t everywhere

The productivity problem isn’t universal, says Jamie Smith, CIO at the University of Phoenix. Some organizations appear to be finding productivity gains with AI tools, he says.

But the online university hasn’t seen the productivity boost it has expected with AI-based coding assistants, Smith adds.

“Our software engineers, especially the most seasoned, have been slow to embrace the potential of [AI] GPTs due to trust issues and in some cases actual limitations of the tools,” he says.

He expects to see more adoption of AI coding assistants as the tools evolve. Developers are likely to embrace coding assistants for mind-numbing tasks like the maintenance of legacy code, he says.

Elsewhere at the University of Phoenix, AI appears to be boosting productivity and adding to student support, Smith says. The university is using AI-based tools to assist academic counselors by generating summaries of conversations with students and by sending personalized texts, he notes.

“Our academic counselors are able to handle 400 concurrent students versus 300 because the conversations are that much more efficient when you have things like summaries of the last 10 conversations,” he says.

Over the long term, HP’s Masud believes worker productivity will increase as a new breed of AI and other IT tools will lead to leaner organizations, by replacing the employee hand-holding jobs that midlevel managers have traditionally done.

“The middle management layer is going to start disappearing quickly,” he says. “I do think that we’re at this strange inflection point of things about to change dramatically in a direction with the expectation that there’s going to be more productivity.”