The Cost of Disconnection

Remember when your workplace was an actual “place,” and everybody and everything you needed was right there, within easy reach? Probably not—unless you worked for a very small business, or in another century. These days, you’re more likely to be working with colleagues scattered across dozens of locations, and with information and processes similarly scattered across dozens of systems and apps. You’re probably feeling a little scattered yourself, spending more and more of your time just trying to connect the dots and stay on top of it all.

That sort of fragmentation—of people, information and systems—is the common plight of modern businesses. It’s especially severe in bigger enterprises, in companies with diversified or geographically dispersed operations, and in businesses stitched together through mergers and acquisitions. But it affects almost every organization.

Things were simpler when "workplace" meant physical proximity to all your colleagues, tools and information, but those days are gone forever.

Divided We Fall

Fractured organizations have a rough road ahead.

The pain is being felt everywhere: By HR execs trying to instill a feeling of togetherness in employees who are never physically together. By corporate communications professionals trying to get the undivided attention of dispersed, distracted workforces. By IT leaders struggling to cobble together an efficient employee collaboration experience from a messy patchwork of separate tools. By everyone who’s experienced the frustrations of disjointed processes, misaligned teams and non-integrated systems.

That kind of fragmentation comes at a high price. It saps productivity. It begets costly duplication, delays and missed market opportunities. It stymies innovation and agility, and makes it hard to be responsive and customer-centric. Disconnection breeds disaffection, dragging down employee morale and driving up turnover.

It's Time to Confront the Problem Head On

On the other hand, the companies who solve the fragmentation puzzle have decisive advantages in nearly every facet of their business. They’re much more efficient, focused and nimble. They attract and retain more talent, and are better able to tap that talent through knowledge sharing and collective ideation. Their employees are happier, and so are their customers.

And rest assured: fragmentation is a curable condition. New-generation “interactive intranets” can bridge the divides that separate employees from the colleagues they work with, the information they need and the tools they depend on. Rather than creating yet another technological silo, interactive intranets serve as a digital hub for open, frictionless collaboration across job functions, locations, systems and devices.

An interactive intranet unites your people, information and systems in a single digital hub for seamless collaboration and communication

Are you ready to defragment your organization? Learn how in Jive’s new e-book: “From Fragmentation to Connection.” The e-book takes an in-depth look at the fragmentation problem and the issues it poses for IT, corp comms and HR. And it describes how each of those departments can use interactive intranets to solve key challenges like digital transformation, strategic alignment and employee engagement.