Work chaos is real, creating a drag on work efficiency at the individual employee level that prevents companies from scalable growth.  And it’s simple to get why; we work with too many apps, are in too many Slack or Teams’ channels, have too many emails and meetings, tons of data to absorb spread out in siloes, and getting answers to questions has become a sport in itself. And as we jump from app to app, dashboard to dashboard, this chaos only grows as more slack channels, systems and apps are added, users and information flowing increases. 

Bottom line. Working with many systems of record creates work chaos that results in half of our day being spent on the wrong things; finding and gathering information, getting answers, babysitting dashboards, searching for files, generating reports, prepping for meetings and more - not to mention information and app overload.

Let that register a moment. Half of our day.

Not only do we lose half of our day on menial information tasks, the chaos and overload causes more mistakes to be made, opportunities missed and avoidable escalations of issues - all of which prevents revenue generating teams from focusing on the core of their job. When Go-To Market teams aren’t bogged down, they are able to meet more clients and prospects, be better prepared, and focus on core areas that generate revenue. 

The Ripple Effect: How work chaos at the employee level influences overall company health

The impact of working with disorganized and siloed systems of record extends to the team, department and company as a whole.

As shown above, when companies grow in terms of revenue, their employee costs increase linearly, so the average company with $50m ARR (annual recurring revenue) is estimated to have $50m in total employee cost. When employees are wasting half their day, this work chaos is essentially a ball & chain dragging the company down, preventing meaningful or scalable growth.

The Classic Band-Aid Approaches to Work Chaos

The most common approaches pursued until now have largely been one of three options; create more dashboards (that most likely won’t be used), add another app or system or create additional work or data flow automations. All of which, at least add more work and disintegration and at best offer a temporary bandaid solution - kicking the can down the road. Let’s dive into each of these.

Dashboarding. The New Company Sport.

The first one has become somewhat of a company sport - dashboarding. But there’s no glory in dashboarding, only frustration and holes. When there are missing data pieces or KPIs to track, the go to approach is to just create another dashboard for that data set or data query. In the end, companies can end up having 100s of dashboards created, with many not even being used. Additionally, they take time to configure or become irrelevant after a few weeks within the dynamic company environment. This scenario results in dashboard fatigue, where both data teams are drained from continuously building them and business oriented teams are so from constantly staring and babysitting them. 

More Automations

With 60% or more of companies using automation tools and software for their workflows, people sure do love automating certain tasks and aspects of their work, thinking its their saviour while not taking into account the full costs. Not only does each automation take time to plan and build out, but having to maintain and make constant updates isn’t exactly the highlight of the job for those doing it 😉, nor do they fully help in the end since the needs of various teams constantly change which means constantly creating more automations and updating them. In the end, those responsible for ensuring go-to market operational efficiency become the bottleneck in a stream of requests for more automations.   

Integrate Another Application or Software

With the average employee using up to 11 different work apps, it’s no wonder why teams are crying out - ‘Not another app!’. For years, companies have been trying to solve work and data chaos by slapping on more apps or systems to their tech stack to create more efficiency or empower their teams more. In the end, it becomes just another app to babysit, another system of record holding important data, not to mention is time consuming to integrate, configure and train on.

So how do we fix it?!

To get to an effective, lasting solution, one needs to understand the core problem; there is no single system of record to retrieve information. Each app, communication channel, system and knowledge base are their own systems of record or hard-coded walled in gardens - holding critical information. 

Let’s say you're in Customer Success and you want to understand something key like the status of your client.  But to get an understanding you’ll need to enter multiple apps and systems, and piece it together. First, you scour through emails and Slack or Teams’ channels. Then, you check your Salesforce or Hubspot (or both 😯) for information and any updates. But not all the data is there because you also have Jira, Zendesk, Snowflake, oh and Mixpanel for added dashboards. And with so many systems of records, there’s a high chance you're not getting a full and clear picture of the status - a picture that defines how you will then approach the client to generate revenue. 

The recent rise of new technologies like AI allows for a new way of approaching work and data chaos and achieving operational efficiency that frees up our teams responsible for generating revenue. Introducing an augmented system of record. Not a hard concept to realize - have one enhanced, flexible system of record powered by AI to rule them all, with all information streamlined to one place and easily accessible.

Now, as a customer success manager you simply ask ‘What is that client’s status’ and you’ll get a concise yet robust summary pulled from all your apps, systems and communications - not only saving you hours but also allowing you to make better decisions, faster for that client.

Let’s say you’re in sales and want to review your pipeline. Instead of scouring through Salesforce dashboards and communications, simply ask the augmented system of record, ‘Show me all prospects in the proposal stage whom I haven’t reached out to in 2 weeks’ or ‘Send me a list of closed-lost due to missing product feature’.

The Classic vs Augmented Approaches

As discussed earlier, typical, or Classic, approaches to work and data chaos such as adding new dashboards, automations to work and data chaos can be more challenging, resource intensive, time consuming, create more bottlenecks and quite simply, only exacerbate the core problem. 

An augmented system of record, however, requires low effort for set up, streamlines all information queries to one place and saves people hours each day so they can focus on their core work that moves the needle.

Don’t apply the same failed logic again - schedule a demo to learn more about Jigso. With software integrations to dozens of apps and systems such as Google Suite, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Zendesk, Jira, Monday.com, Snowflake, Tableau, Confluence, Jigso acts as that augmented system of record, allowing teams to research, find, ask about or monitor anything across their work apps and files.