Is Nudgetech the Future of Digital Collaboration?

While we already have SaaS platforms with built-in notifications, nudges will likely leverage AI and personalization to take digital productivity, communication and collaboration to the next level.

Even as the physical distance between ourselves and our teammates grows, digital collaboration tools and teams have made it possible to stay in sync with one another. And it’s one of the reasons why remote and hybrid work is here to stay.

But just as our other technologies continue to evolve, so too will our productivity and collaboration tools. Specifically, in the form of AI-powered nudges.

Although most digital workforce tools aren’t there yet, many of us have been exposed to nudgetech at some point. In this post, we’re going to look at the current state of digital collaboration, the benefits of having a strong, collaborative culture and the role that nudgetech will play in the years to come.

The Benefits of Digital Collaboration

In a field like web design and development, it would be very difficult to do what you do without collaboration.

Unless you’re a Jack-of-all-trades who can market and sell yourself, manage client accounts, coordinate projects, design, code, write, optimize and so on, you’re going to need help. This is just as applicable to the freelance designer as it is for the designer working within an agency environment.

In this line of work, being a lone wolf or unwilling to collaborate with colleagues can be costly. And not just to you, but to your clients as well.

There are so many reasons to embrace good digital collaboration practices:

• Work more efficiently and get better results when you stay in your wheelhouse.
• Collaborators feel more like a team or family, not competitors or obstacles to get past.
• Enjoy your work more when everyone contributes to the shared goal.
• Have more space and freedom for creativity and innovation.
• Effectively solve problems and deal with complex tasks when you work together.
• Get better project outcomes and greater client satisfaction on each job.
• Scale your company’s roster of clients and profits.

The most effective kind of digital collaboration creates a symbiotic relationship between everyone working within the team. Rather than racing to get one’s part done and not caring what happens next, a strong collaborative culture encourages everyone to be invested in the end result.

We have so many digital tools that make this possible, too. Remote collaboration tools connect team members to one another and ensure that everyone understands the role they have to play in the grander scheme of things. While useful in shared physical workspaces, these tools are essential for organizations that have embraced remote work.

So, Why Does Anything Need to Change?

While collaboration apps are super helpful in bridging the physical gaps between remote employees, they can’t do it all for us.

The reason why nudgetech is being talked about so much right now is because of a 2024 Gartner survey. The point of the survey was to find out how employees felt about collaboration within their workplaces.

Back in 2021 when Gartner asked this question, 36% indicated that they were satisfied.

In 2024, only 29% now say they’re satisfied with collaboration.

As Russ McCall of Gartner explained:

“Employees today have more connections but less valuable collaboration due to uncertain connection norms following the pandemic, broader social tensions and new technology that can isolate employees and depersonalize work.”

What struck me while reading that was this idea that value and personalization matter in collaboration.

These are concepts we’ve been talking about a lot in marketing recently. Specifically, in how consumers feel frustrated when brands don’t provide personalized experiences or offers. Or when they don’t use the data that we willingly shared with them to create extra value.

In a recent post connecting personalized marketing and customer retention, I mentioned a 2021 McKinsey report. The survey found that 72% of consumers expect their interactions with brands to be influenced by their preferences.

In other words, they were happy to share data about themselves so long as it resulted in the right kinds of personalized experiences and outcomes. For instance, these consumers wanted the following from brands they entrusted their data to:

• Get help navigating the experience
• Receive relevant recommendations
• Get customized messaging based on what’s most important to them
• Celebrate their milestones
• Receive timely communications

This got me thinking, is this what we consumers also want at work? After all, our employers likely have tons of data on us—not just demographics either. Plenty of these workforce management tools like time trackers and task management software come with built-in analytics.

Couldn’t they use the data collected in these apps to put together individual profiles for us on how we prefer to work, communicate and collaborate? And then use those profiles to create more enjoyable circumstances for us to work in?

Nudgetech has a long way to go before it can start transforming our workplaces and workflows. But if it works, it could be the solution to the modern digital collaboration problem.

What Is Nudgetech?

The term “nudge” was popularized in a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

The overall concept of the book is that people make lots and lots of choices every day. However, not everyone makes the best choices in every situation.

Using behavioral science research, the authors propose the idea of implementing nudges. Essentially, a nudge is an alert or message that pushes people toward making better choices while still leaving the decision up to them.

It’s not as though we’re incapable of making the right decisions on our own. Like to focus on building the wireframe that’s due at 5 p.m. instead of scrolling through Instagram. It’s just that we’re not always in the right frame of mind to make those decisions. Whether we’re experiencing burnout, we’re distracted by circumstances at home or we’re bombarded with competing tasks, sometimes it’s just too much.

That’s where nudgetech is going to come into play.

This AI-powered technology will take the history of our behaviors and habits as well as our hand-selected preferences to come up with a profile of who we are—not unlike the profiling that’s done on us as consumers. It will then create nudges that help us be more productive while also improving the way in which we collaborate with our teammates.

Ultimately, the choice is ours when it comes to nudges. But the hope with implementing this kind of technology is that it will foster more positive decision-making and collaboration habits that benefit everyone.

Examples of Collaboration Nudgetech

We’re already in the habit of configuring and receiving notifications and reminders for just about everything in our lives.

• A calendar alert for your best friend’s birthday dinner this Friday night
• A reminder about your new client meeting at 2 p.m. shows up in your inbox a half-hour before the call
• An overdue task in Asana sends an alert to your dashboard and connected email address
• The unanswered DM from your mom on Instagram glows like a beacon from your notification icon in the app
• And so on

This isn’t quite nudgetech though. Nudgetech works similarly to the way personalization does in marketing. It delivers timely and relevant recommendations tailor-made for you.

Think of it like a flashing billboard on the highway. A notification would alert you to a closed exit ahead and direct you to take Exit 43 to go to the Meriden Mall. A nudge would display the current speed you’re driving and compare it to the speed limit sign beside it. The first tells you what you can or cannot do. The second subtly suggests you might need to take a different course of action, if you want.

Here are some examples of how this AI-powered nudge technology might work when it comes to enhancing productivity, communication and collaboration:

Navigation Tip

You open up your project management app for the first time today. As your dashboard loads, a small pop-up appears at the top that reads:

“You have a new message from John that mentions the word ‘urgent.’ Want to go there first?”

Collaboration Insight

You need to ask the senior developer at your agency an urgent question about an app that was delivered the evening before. You begin to type a message to her on your messaging app. However, you see a note in red that says:

“Jess has silenced notifications until 6 p.m. If this is urgent, you may want to email or call.”

Milestone Celebration

Your CRM sends you an email today to let you know that Client X has been using your website maintenance services for almost a year. The message explains the importance of client retention and also reminds you of the monetary value that’s come with working with Client X.

At the bottom of the message, there are tips for celebrating the first year anniversary of a client.

Productivity Hack

You open your list of to-dos for the week and select a moodboard task for Client Y. A pop-up appears before you that says:

“You tend to finish your analytical tasks more quickly before noon. Why not finish the GA4 review for Manuel first?”

Time Management Assistant

You have a complex user flow to flesh out for a new fintech app you’re developing. Your time tracking app estimates this task typically takes 2 hours to do. However, you’ve just hit the 3.5-hour mark. As a result, you receive the following alert:

“The budget for this contract allotted 3 hours for ‘user flows.’ Why don’t you give Magda a status update before proceeding?”

Break Reminder

You’ve been working non-stop all afternoon on prototyping a website for Client B. You were so immersed in the task and lost track of time until a bell rings out from your Pomodoro timer app. You switch over to the browser and see a notice that says:

“The weather in Jacksonville right now is 78 and sunny. It might be time for a 15-minute break.”

Meeting Minification

You’re the newly appointed design team manager and you’re trying to schedule regular team and one-on-one meetings with everyone. As you start to add meeting blocks to the scheduler, you receive the following tip:

“Cami has 4 meetings scheduled the week of April 7. She prefers to have no more than 2 a week. Can any of these be rescheduled?”

Handoff Reminder

You’re just beginning to work on the mockups for the website for Client M. You’ve been pushing the task out all week as more urgent tasks have been added to your schedule. The mockups are due to Danny the developer tomorrow. However, 12 hours have been set aside on your schedule to work on them. You have this evening blocked off for an anniversary dinner with your spouse, which means you likely won’t have them done on time.

An alert appears at the top of the screen when you start the task timer:

“Missed deadline most likely. Do you want to contact Danny?”

Will Nudgetech Really Be Able to Transform the Way We Work?

Nudgetech is promising.

In a way, it promises to take us back to a time and physical place where we actually knew the people we worked with. We were familiar with their individual schedules and we got to know their preferred means of communication. Plus, because we knew them on a more personal level, we felt more compelled to collaborate and communicate, and to make everyone’s lives easier in the process.

One of the reasons why nudgetech is even being proposed is because of the higher levels of disengagement at work as well as a lack of accountability. But here’s the thing:

Nudgetech can certainly help improve collaboration and communication for workers who are already invested in what they do and the teams they work on. However, no amount of technology will help the people who already feel disengaged or who don’t care how their slacking off or lack of responsibility affects everyone else.

What’s more, nudgetech could make things worse for organizations as a whole. It’s like marketing personalization. If you go overboard with the data you use, nudges could feel invasive and manipulative to workers. If you go overboard with using nudges, in general, the whole thing could feel patronizing as well as controlling.

So, is nudgetech worth it?

It could be, so long as you don’t lose sight of the people who will engage with it the most. With such high levels of stress in our lives these days, anything we can do at work to make things more efficient and to feel supportive is a good thing. Allowing workers to personalize what data they share and what kinds of nudges they receive, and to customize how frequently they receive them would be a good way to go about this.

Of course, the technology isn’t quite there for us yet. But when it is, these are all things to think about to ensure your organization and the people you collaborate with stand to reap the benefits from nudgetech.