Our recent report,
'The human cost of digital transformation,' showed that our systems of communication, work, and engagement are fueling hidden drivers of 'quiet cracking'. That's when people experience a persistent feeling of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, poor performance, and an increased desire to quit.
Technostress is a significant driver. It's the strain employees feel from the constant demands of adapting to new digital tools and systems. And it's become part of everyday work. Over the last 12 months, nearly two-thirds of knowledge workers (64%) reported that technology has had a negative impact on their work lives.
When your tools are scattered, and your teams work in silos, you'll encounter issues that slow delivery, dilute accountability, and frustrate your employees. These issues typically worsen as teams scale or work becomes more cross-functional.
Lack of shared visibility and alignmentWhen teams use different tools, no one has a complete view of priorities or progress. For example, executive leaders may track strategic goals in slide decks, while delivery teams manage work in Jira and marketing plans their campaigns in spreadsheets or in other tools. The result is misalignment: teams deliver outputs that don't clearly support business outcomes, and leaders struggle to make informed decisions.
Inefficient handoffs and rework
Siloed tools hinder collaboration, making it slow and prone to errors. Your product team might document requirements in Confluence, while your developers work from outdated tickets. At the same time, customer support lacks visibility into upcoming changes. All this can lead to rework, errors, and poor customer experiences.
Information loss and duplicated effort
With information siloed, your collective organisational knowledge is trapped in people's inboxes, their chat tools, and personal documents. For example, HR might run change initiatives without access to IT's delivery times. Important information can be overlooked, resulting in people being forced to recreate documents that already exist.
Reduced speed and morale
We know that context switching between tools increases cognitive load and burnout and has a negative impact on productivity. The less integrated your tools are, the more time teams spend finding information and coordinating work than actually doing it. Slow progress can also be disheartening. When it takes a long time to accomplish simple tasks, team morale can suffer.
Meeting overwhelm
What all disjointed working practices have in common is a lack of alignment – people don't know what they should be doing (or why) and need information from others to progress. And this means lots of meetings. In some organisations, meeting overload is extreme. Our study revealed that one in 10 workers loses a full day each week (roughly 50 a year) to meetings.
