As IT professionals have seen time and time again over the years, some applications are just so easy to use and meet team needs so perfectly that widespread adoption of freemium or free versions happens before they even know it. We’ve seen this for team collaboration, video conferencing, and, as I’ll focus in on here, connected workspaces for collaborative work management.
The initial pandemic-driven work-from-home days propelled many teams to adopt connected workspace apps, such as Asana, Notion, or Wrike. With them, they could get their work done as individuals from within one landing place, but also coordinate work as a team. From a connected workspace, they could search and find information needed for their work while also supporting the ability to communicate and collaborate on this work in real-time or asynchronously (often via integration with third-party apps) and allowing them the ability to automate work tasks and processes. These connected workspace apps, by providing capabilities such as task and project management, knowledge management, and content collaboration, went well beyond the communications and collaboration orientation of Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Zoom Meetings, which saw their own skyrocketing adoption during this period (and more recently have been layering in capabilities akin to those offered by connected workspace apps). Metrigy’s “Connected Workspace & Collaborative Work Management: 2024-25” research study with 157 companies headquartered in North America, shows connected workspace tools in use at 58.0% of companies today, with the majority of those (69.2%) having adopted in 2020 if they hadn’t already.
In many cases, teams had the OK from higher-ups to pick up and test out freebie tools, potentially those already virally adopted by other teams, that would help them to keep working collaboratively even though not in the office together. This afforded employees to bring Asana, Notion, or other work management tools they used to organize their home-life tasks into the workplace for use among their teams. (Today, around 20% of knowledge workers studied separately say they use a work management tool for their personal lives, with the majority of them having the same tool in use professionally.)
As Metrigy found in its study, use of connected workspace apps began at the team or departmental level for nearly 53% of companies, with IT, product management/design, marketing/creative services, software development, operations, and engineering/product/design the departments most common starting points. From one team or department, the use of a connected workspace tool often jumped from one team to another—and another and another—as different projects exposed additional employees to its value in achieving and managing work. . Metrigy’s study shows:
Problematically, however, nearly 60% of companies report supporting more than one connected workspace app. This can be troublesome for employees, who might find themselves needing to use one tool for team-related tasks, projects, and other work and another at a departmental or company level—thus defeating the very purpose of having a single app for accomplishing, communicating about, and managing work.
Having multiple connected workspace products leads to other challenges, as well. Getting a handle on spending is one example. In the Metrigy study, 43.7% of companies weren’t sure how much they were spending on these tools on a monthly basis. At many companies, the uncertainty can be attributed in large part to ad-hoc spending at the team or departmental level—41.2% rely on ad-hoc spending, either exclusively or in combination with some dedicated budget.
In the face of such challenges, we can expect to see a reversal of the “use your tool of choice” mentality that brought many connected workspace apps into use within the enterprise. In fact, Metrigy’s data shows that many companies intend to winnow the number of connected workspace apps down to one: Nearly 70% of companies have either already standardized or plan to standardize on a single app. In addition to getting a handle on the connected workspace spend, other top drivers include IT’s desire for centralized management and control and the need to provide visibility into and management of cross-functional workflows.
Connected workspaces are here to stay, but employees beware: Some tools may fall out of favor—and support—within the enterprise.
