Hybrid work promised freedom and productivity. Instead, many organizations are drowning in apps. The average mid-market firm now uses 150+ SaaS tools. Employees toggle between Slack, Teams, Zoom, Asana, Jira, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox — and the list keeps growing. Yet 81% of employees say they still face tool sprawl and communication gaps.
The irony? We’ve never had more technology, yet we’ve never been more disconnected.
Every extra app creates friction. Employees waste time searching for files, duplicating efforts, or logging into yet another system. Communication breaks down, compliance risks rise, and frustration grows.
Research shows 86% of workplace failures trace back to poor communication. That’s not because employees don’t care — it’s because the tools meant to help them are overwhelming them.
Customer experience doesn’t just happen in the contact center. It happens every time an internal team communicates (or fails to). When marketing, sales, and service use different systems, hand-offs get dropped. When customer data lives in five places, service agents deliver inconsistent answers. The result is a fractured experience customers can feel instantly.
“Collaboration fails not because teams lack tools, but because they’re buried under too many.”
Fixing tool sprawl doesn’t mean buying the “next big app.” It means designing smarter ecosystems:
The goal isn’t fewer tools for the sake of it — it’s communication that feels seamless, so employees spend less time navigating apps and more time creating value.
Large enterprises often have dedicated IT teams to manage sprawl. Mid-market firms don’t. With fewer resources, the sprawl hurts deeper: wasted budget, duplicated licenses, and security blind spots. But mid-market firms also have an edge: they can pivot faster, rationalize tools more quickly, and build agile frameworks that larger players struggle to implement.
The companies that win collaboration aren’t the ones with the most software — they’re the ones who make work feel simple again. The test is easy: can an employee find what they need, talk to who they need, and move work forward without frustration? If the answer is no, it’s time to rethink.
Calder & Lane offers a Collaboration Health Check to help organizations cut through the noise, rationalize tools, and rebuild communication frameworks that work. Less chaos. More clarity.
