Yahoo Finance This app is used by 50 million people. COVID means it’s being overhauled
When's the last time you felt overwhelmed at work? If you're working from home, during a pandemic, there's a fair chance it was recently.
Today, the average large business uses a staggering 175 apps, thelatest workplace survey from IT company Okta found, while some use as many as 199 or more.
That’s up from an average of 88 apps the year before, and it’s causing productivity bottlenecks.
While each app has a specific service - whether it’s for marketing, design, editorial, sales, information technology or engineering - the problem is that it means workers spend an increasing amount of time simply trying to connect their work with others or add in details from other platforms, Trello founder and executive at Atlassian Michael Pryor told Yahoo Finance.
The average office worker will spend two and a half hours a day looking for information, or about one third of their time at work, the 2001 IDC briefing paper, The High Cost of Not Finding Information, found.
Then, around 44 per cent of the time, they wind up being unable to find it.
It’s called information, or data sprawl, and it’s a challenge for workers now, more than ever.
“People are coming in and using all of these tools, and it’s a lurch forward for a lot of people to discover this new way of working, but it made a lot of the problems we had experienced in the past a lot more present,” he said.
“People are doing this, and they’re saying, ‘How do we figure out what’s going on? How do we keep the team organised across all of these things?’”
Trello, which has been working remotely for the last 10 years, looked at its roadmap and began to plan the future of the app.
On Wednesday, it will begin rolling out its new Trello, which Pryor hopes will revolutionise work for its 50 million users.
New Trello
The new platform will feature five new board views allowing users to adjust their workflow or project management into a timeline view, a calendar view, a map view, dashboard view and team table view.
In the next stage of the roll-out, cards will also have a “mirror” capability allowing them to be shared across multiple Trello boards, mirroring the information within.
However, one of the key features is the ability to link 30 external tools natively within the board, like jira, Figma, Dropbox, YouTube and Google - something Pryor hopes will massively reduce the amount of time workers spend searching for files and projects.
It also means workers will be able to interact with the work, without exiting Trello and losing the broader context of the plan or project.
The goal? Become a “must-have solution” for modern work.
Big changes in the new paradigm
Trello’s overhaul comes as businesses around the globe attempt to reckon with the new normal.
More than four in five C-suite executives surveyed by software company Oracle said they had issues working outside of the office, with difficulties learning new technology and problems with collaborating virtually common complaints.
However, three in four workers want to work from home beyond the pandemic, a study from the University of Sydney found.
And there are hopes that once the productivity challenges are ironed out, the shift to remote work will even promote diversity.
As the LinkedIn talent blog noted, remote work makes it easier to hire underrepresented talent who may have previously been unable to work in a particular office.
The number of people who feel like the transition to remote work has also increased. While a PwC report found that only 73 per cent thought it was successful in June 2020, that number had increased to 83 per cent by December.
Either way, remote work looks like it’s here to stay.
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