Report: Collaboration, Creativity Suffer in Today's Dispersed Workforces

SOUTH JORDAN, Utah, Oct. 6, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The work-from-home trend caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is causing creativity to suffer due to challenges in collaborating. In fact, 43% of the C-suite reported their company was forced to delay major launches, campaigns, or initiatives as a result of employees working from home and collaborating virtually. This insight comes from a recent survey by Lucid, which looks at the attitudes and concerns of knowledge workers and their managers towards working from home.

The survey also revealed an interesting divide between employees and managers when it comes to productivity vs. creativity, and that creativity overall is suffering because of poor collaboration, with more than a third of managers ranking employee productivity as their biggest concern with employees working from home, while employees report collaboration with their teams has suffered the most. In addition:

• 90% of C-suite management rated employee productivity one of their top 3 concerns with employees working from home, compared to 78% among lower level management.
• 1 in four remote managers say that remote work has made their teams less creative overall.
• 37% of remote workers say that constant notifications from collaboration tools actually disrupts their ability to be creative.

Creativity suffers further because knowledge workers are distracted when using current collaboration solutions.

• 62% of remote workers admit to bad behavior while participating in virtual brainstorm meetings from home (1 in 10 have used the bathroom while on a call).
• One in four (25%) remote workers admits to spending at least half of a typical virtual brainstorm meeting distracted.

When asked what would be most exciting about returning to the office, 37% of employees ranked in-person team collaboration as number one, twice as many as the next option (a dedicated workspace without at-home distractions). Nearly 1 in 4 remote workers says that working from home has hurt their creativity, and almost half of that group (46%) identified less facetime with their team as the number one cause.

The lack of ability to collaborate is also leading employees to break company pandemic protocols regarding working remotely during the pandemic. Nearly 1 in four remote workers (23%) who met with colleagues in person say a virtual meeting wasn't good enough because they needed a shared visual collaboration space.

One component that's clearly missing for many remote workers is a visual collaboration platform to take the role the whiteboard and in-person brainstorming played in conventional office meetings. In the survey, 59% of managers and 52% of employees selected "a combination of words and visuals" as one of their top three preferred methods for expressing ideas. Of those who had access to a virtual whiteboard, 93% said it was effective helping them communicate with their dispersed team. Virtual whiteboards can also serve as a focus for meetings to prevent ideas from getting lost because there's no centralized place to record ideas, a complaint expressed by 24% of C-suite respondents.

To help alleviate the issues this research reveals, Lucid is launching Lucidspark, a cloud-based virtual whiteboard where teams can work together creatively in real time, regardless of location. With Lucidspark, teams can ideate and share ideas, create and collaborate seamlessly, and build shared consensus to actually put ideas into action. Some key features include an infinite canvas, labeled collaborator cursors, quick sticky notes, revision history, live chat and comments, voting and the ability to tag others. The full Lucidspark press release can be found here.

The Lucid study was conducted in September 2020. The results are based on 1,000 respondents, 300 at the management level and 700 non-management employees. Respondents came from enterprise and mid-sized businesses nationwide in all major industry segments. The sample was equally divided between male and female, and included Boomers, Millennials and Gen X participants.

You can view the full survey report here.

About Lucid
Lucid is the only visual collaboration suite that helps teams see and build the future from idea to reality. Its products, Lucidchart and Lucidspark, provide users with an end-to-end experience that helps teams truly see and build the future, by enabling collaboration and clear communication. Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard application for freeform ideation, group brainstorming and real-time collaboration across teams. Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming application for understanding the people, processes and systems that drive business forward. Lucid products are utilized in over 180 countries by more than 30 million users, including customers like Google, GE, NBC Universal and Johnson & Johnson and ninety-nine percent of the Fortune 500. Lucid's partners include industry leaders such as Google, Atlassian, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and Microsoft. Since the Utah-based company's founding in 2010, it has received numerous awards for its product, business and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucid.co.

SOURCE Lucidspark

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