By Angela Ashenden – Despite the promise that technology will help improve productivity in the workplace, in practice it generally doesn’t work that way. The employee experience has become increasingly fragmented, forcing people to work across a multitude of applications every day, constantly switching contexts and often becoming the human integration point in this messy picture.

In CCS Insight’s recent survey of employees, almost 40% were frustrated with the amount of switching between applications and 46% felt there was inadequate integration between the work applications they use. Because of this, automation has become a major trend in the workplace technology market, particularly evidenced by the expansion of the robotic process automation (RPA) market, which has grown by about 60% over the past year.

However, while RPA focuses on organization-level processes, collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook are approaching the problem from an employee or team perspective, bringing automation to where people are working and allowing it to be personalized and customized to meet specific needs. Read On: