According to new research conducted by Wrike, an intelligent and versatile collaborative work management platform – now part of Citrix – employee engagement (56 percent), burnout (53 percent), and reduced productivity (52 percent) are top concerns for IT leaders in 2021 and beyond, as they continue to enable remote workers and plan for new, hybrid workplace environments.
Last year’s shift to remote work compounded a complex and distributed work environment, one cluttered with an array of heterogeneous applications and communication channels. The negative impact of this digital workplace chaos on employee efficiency and productivity is set to increase further, as the world enters the new era of hybrid work.
As a result, nearly 60 percent of IT executives surveyed are prioritizing investments in solutions and strategies that power collaboration across the enterprise. They’ll focus on providing greater visibility into ownership across the organization (45 percent), enabling more secure collaboration (51 percent), and powering seamless external collaboration (46 percent).
“The pandemic put CIOs in the hot seat last year, forcing IT departments to accelerate digital strategies that would quickly support remote work and keep organizations running,” said Andrew Filev, Senior Vice President and Wrike General Manager, Citrix. “This first ‘COVID-19 wave’ of tech investment had 55 percent of respondents focused on basic, secure communications between remote teams.
“While those tools are important, they don’t alleviate the complexities of collaborating in a work-from-home model, which leads to burnout and major inefficiencies,” Filey continued. “That’s why we’re now seeing 58 percent of IT leaders — up from 17 percent one year ago — prioritizing powerful collaborative work management solutions in 2021 to help dispersed teams share and drive work in a systematic and cohesive manner.”
Going deeper into the report findings, data collected from Pulse’s executive knowledge community shows that IT leaders believe there are three key planning, process, and execution use cases that would benefit most from cohesive/enterprise-wide collaborative work management solutions:
- Objectives and key results and company objectives
- Requests and approvals
- Agile planning and execution
Fifty-eight percent of IT leaders confirmed that project management solutions tied with internal communications capabilities will be the number one tool they invest in this year to enable high-performing teams to execute with speed, precision and agility.
