Highlights:

  • Most knowledge workers (79%) said that teams in their organizations are separated, and 68% said that they couldn’t do their jobs as well because they couldn’t see how cross-functional projects were going.
  • Knowledge workers said they spend about 29% of their week (11.6 hours) looking for the key information they need to do their jobs.

Forrester Consulting’s new study for Airtable shows that large organizations’ business operations are more fractured than they think. This leads to bad decisions, more mistakes, weaker team morale, and less revenue.

In a world that is becoming increasingly digital, the number of enterprise software apps and tools is overwhelming employees. The Crisis of a Fractured Organization survey by Airtable and Forrester shows that large organizations use an average of 367 software apps and systems to handle their different workflows.

These different tools create data silos that hide important information, encourage more than one source of truth, and make it more difficult for teams to find the required information.

Teams don’t feel like they’re in sync with each other because there are so many moving workstreams.

Most knowledge workers (79%) said that teams in their organizations are separated, and 68% said that they couldn’t do their jobs as well because they couldn’t see how cross-functional projects were going.

Key Insights Hidden

Teams make bad or slow decisions because they only have limited information and don’t know that essential insights are hiding in other tools.

Nearly half of the people who answered (46%) said that bad business processes make decisions take longer and make it more likely that the wrong ones will be made.

These fractures negatively impact sales and make employees frustrated and unmotivated.

The survey found that the divisions within organizations hurt their employees’ work. Knowledge workers said they spend about 29% of their week (11.6 hours) looking for the key information they need for doing their job.

Employees say they feel disengaged in their jobs because it’s hard to find the right information.

But organizations know how important it is to have a plan and work to make data and teams work better together.

Most people who answered the survey (93%) said that making their organization’s processes more efficient is a top priority. Similarly, 90% said that improving collaboration is a top priority. Respondents expect to save nearly 12 hours weekly using connected tools to improve cross-functional collaboration and organizational alignment. They can use this time to focus on their core work.

Forrester surveyed 1,022 contributors and C-suite decision-makers from the United States and the United Kingdom, for Airtable. The study started in August 2022 and ended in September of the same year.