UK companies losing money due to inadequate communication and collaboration tools

Inefficient communications and poor collaboration costs UK companies £8,000 per employee, every year, according to a new report by enterprise communications company Mitel. That means that a business with 500 employees or more could be losing more than £4 million every year.

Looking into productivity within the workplace, Mitel’s new report also says that employees lose nearly a day every week due to inadequate communications capabilities.

On average, a fifth of the working day is lost to emails. That costs businesses roughly £2,000 per employee, per year.

The report falls in line with recent ONS figures, which claim that people usually work 43 hours a week. Two thirds of that time is spent communicating and collaborating, with just nine percent using chat and collaboration tools that can speed up the entire process.

"Email overload is certainly something our customers consistently reference as a productivity killer," says Nick Beardsley at Olive Communications. “Too often people default to email for conversational collaboration. Simply by taking this sort of communication out of email and into a unified application it enables teams to realize the productivity benefits of real-time collaboration."

"This study underscores the impact of inadequate communications and collaboration. Ironically, businesses are being held back by the very tools originally developed to improve productivity," says Simon Skellon, VP UK, Mitel. "Despite operating in the world’s largest digital economy, it appears many UK companies have yet to adopt new ways of working. Mitel can help businesses reverse that trend with new technologies that make communicating and collaborating simple and seamless."

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