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While many employers rely on frequent check-ins to track employees’ progress and empower productivity, employees say their productivity would benefit more from having clear priorities (42%) and set deadlines (30%).

Many professionals work without deadlines and are unsure of which tasks or projects to prioritize, according to new data. In part two of a digital work trends report by work management platform Slingshot, a majority of just over 300 full-time U.S.-based professionals said a lack of guidance from leaders impeded their time management skills.

Leaders frequently believe close supervision is necessary when work quality declines or deadlines are missed, yet employees often perceive excessive check-ins (45%) or redundant status meetings (43%) as micromanagement.

Despite the common practice of frequent check-ins by employers to monitor progress and enhance productivity, employees disclose that having clear priorities (42%) and established deadlines (30%) would contribute more significantly to their productivity.

Note from employee to employer: “It’s Not Me, It’s You.” This could be the cliff notes to Part 2 of the 2023 Digital Work Trends report by Slingshot in which 34% of employees say they have to guess their priorities at work. 

The 2023 Digital Work Trends Report by Slingshot found that 72% of workers primarily utilise data to enhance performance, and over half (54%) employ data to organise their goals. It was revealed that all Gen Z workers use data in their work at least on a weekly basis, with a staggering 61% using it daily.

Slingshot’s Digital Work Trends Report shines a light on how data–or anything that individuals, teams and organizations use to track performance, process, people, platforms and profitability–is now not only accessible to employees, but a critical and necessary part to their productivity.

The inaugural report explores the relationship between productivity and workers’ access to data–or any metric within an organization that illustrates performance and progress. While many businesses have been prioritizing autonomy and workplace flexibility to improve worker productivity, 65% of workers say that a lack of data is what most negatively impacts their ability to do their jobs.

Slingshot users can now access a library of pre-built processes and data dashboards that bring together everything teams need to manage projects and analyze their real-time performance in one place.