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How today's rapidly evolving world of unified communications and collaboration is impacting IT teams in the workplace.
Executive summary
The short version: the pressure on IT teams isn't easing — it's compounding.
Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) has changed shape fast. Hybrid work, cloud migration, and a wave of new collaboration tools have reshaped how organizations connect their people — and reshaped the IT teams responsible for keeping it all running.
To understand what that's actually doing to the people managing it, IR surveyed more than 200 IT practitioners across the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore for The IT Time Crunch report. The findings are clear: in today's UC&C environment, the pressure on IT teams to keep things running smoothly isn't easing.
This piece walks through the report's key findings — what's driving the complexity, what it's costing IT teams in hours and headcount, and what practitioners expect to change next.
Here's what the survey found:
- More than 50% of respondents reported an increase in day-to-day workload due to the pace and complexity of UC&C change.
- The top frustration working across multiple UC&C tools: wasting time troubleshooting, most of it reactive — issues aren't caught until someone reports them.
- Managing user experience is just as hard: respondents struggle most to identify how many users are actually using the hardware they've been given, and which platforms aren't being used at all.
- 95% of respondents lose between 2 and more than 10 hours a week to these frustrations. 25% lose more than 8 hours — a full workday.
- 45.5% said their manager's biggest concern is rising operational costs.
- Many respondents changed roles or left their jobs entirely over a 3-year period, citing better quality of life, higher salary, and better working conditions.
Interested to hear what else your peers have experienced?
The shape-shifting world of unified communications and collaboration
Every layer of the UC&C stack is changing at once — and IT is absorbing all of it.
The last few years have reshaped how organizations operate — and put more pressure on the IT teams who keep it running. That pressure isn't limited to daily operations. New technology is arriving faster than most teams can absorb it, and every wave brings more to learn, more to reconfigure, and more budget to find.
Here's what's driving that shift for enterprise organizations.
- The Internet of Things (IoT) keeps adding new devices and tools into the UC&C environment, opening new pathways and making business agility possible — but also more to monitor.
- Hybrid and remote work, in all its configurations, is now a baseline expectation — something employees and employers negotiate over, not a perk.
- Cloud adoption keeps accelerating. Organizations of every size are moving critical processes and tools into environments built for rapid scaling and provisioning.
- AI-driven tools are already reshaping UC&C. AI bots and platforms are simplifying workflows and improving internal communication by collecting, analyzing, and acting on data.
The intent behind all of this is straightforward: empower workers, improve efficiency, and reduce operational costs. But moving away from legacy systems and familiar ways of working also brings risk, complexity, and cost.
Here's what our survey found, finding by finding.
Key finding 1: IT practitioners and their ever-increasing workload
IT teams rate the impact of UC&C change at 6 out of 10 — and it shows in their workload.
Every IT department looks different, shaped by the organization's needs, its systems, and the skills of the team running them.
From technical support to hardware and software configuration, from monitoring and performance management to managing cloud infrastructure, IT teams keep the wheels of the enterprise turning.
Asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much their role has been impacted by changes in UC&C, respondents landed at 6 out of 10 on average.
Day to day, more than 50% of respondents said their workload has increased because of the pace and complexity of UC&C change.
Addressing the issue
Without a monitoring system in place, IT teams have no visibility into an increasingly complex UC environment — and no way to get ahead of problems before they escalate.
With the right monitoring solution, teams see every communication platform from a single window. That makes it possible to spot what's going wrong and where, and to fix it before it reaches the user.
Key finding 2: The frustration of juggling multiple UC tools
The tools built to help are often the biggest source of friction.
IT teams need to support flexible work — but doing that well, across a growing set of platforms and devices, is harder than it sounds.
IT departments are under constant pressure to make onboarding, training, and support work for a location-agnostic workforce, many of whom bring their own UC devices and applications. That adds real complexity.
We asked respondents what frustrated them most about working across multiple UC&C tools. The top answers: wasting time troubleshooting issues, and reactive troubleshooting — not knowing about a problem until someone reports it.
Other frustrations: fixing the same recurring issues repeatedly, and a lack of visibility across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
Addressing the issue
Multiple platforms aren't the only source of friction — multiple devices add to it. More devices mean more chances for dropped calls, poor call quality, and longer troubleshooting.
A monitoring and performance management solution can pinpoint exactly which device is causing the problem, without hours of manual digging.
Key finding 3: Managing user experience
Knowing who's using what — and who isn't — is one of the hardest parts of the job.
IT teams are on the front line when something goes wrong for the end user. They're responsible for device performance even when BYOD is in play and multiple communications platforms are in use.
On managing user experience, respondents said their toughest challenges are identifying how many users are actually using the hardware they've been given, and identifying which platforms users aren't using at all.
A poor meeting experience is a real risk to avoid — and between constant new technology, unapproved devices, and the security issues they introduce, keeping track of it all is genuinely hard.
Addressing the issue
Tracking devices and platforms is only half the job. IT also needs to monitor usage and satisfaction to judge whether a system is actually working for the business.
Performance management tools show whether employees are adopting the tools they've been given, and how often — data that shapes future decisions on what to buy and roll out.
Key finding 4: A quarter of IT teams are losing a full workday every week
Time lost to troubleshooting is time IT can't spend on anything else.
Most respondents said time lost to the issues above has a real impact on productivity — time that could go toward more important work.
25% of respondents lose more than 8 hours a week to these frustrations; 5.5% lose more than 10. In total, 69% lose between 4 and more than 10 hours a week. In effect, IT teams become the organization's fire department — and reactive problem-solving like this comes at a real cost, one that shows up in lost productivity and lost revenue, not just lost hours.
The unexpected will always come up. But when the focus shifts from putting out fires to reducing how often they start, the results follow.
Addressing the issue
Deploying new technology is rarely risk-free. Without testing, IT teams have little way of knowing whether a new tool will add value — or work reliably — before it's live.
Testing and quality assurance catches issues before deployment, checking usability, performance, security, and compatibility, and avoiding disaster management down the line.
Done well, the result is better employee productivity, a better user experience, less downtime, and lower cost.
Key finding 5: What IT managers are most worried about
It's not just uptime anymore — it's the bill.
IT's job has moved well past installing hardware and fixing tickets. As digital transformation accelerates, most organizations expect IT teams to help shape business strategy, not just support it.
Every business wants a competitive edge — and that shift in perspective has added real weight to the IT manager's role.
45.5% of respondents said their manager's top concern was controlling operational costs, in line with company goals and the CIO's strategy.
The other leading concern was regulation and compliance. Every organization has its own security policies, and those policies increasingly need to line up with multiple regulatory frameworks at once.
Addressing the issue
A monitoring solution does more than track performance — it also supports compliance, reducing liability and the risk of penalties. That takes real pressure off IT teams trying to keep operational costs under control.
It also flags non-compliance early, whether the source is an internal process or an external requirement.
Key finding 6: Retention risk hits IT teams too
The reasons people leave IT roles are the same reasons they'd stay.
Job mobility has become a lasting shift in how people think about work, not a temporary one.
Our survey found many respondents had changed roles or left their jobs entirely over a 3-year period. The reasons: better quality of life, higher salary, promotion, and better working conditions.
In a work-from-anywhere model, technology plays a real role in employee experience — it drives productivity, helps attract talent, and shapes workplace culture, for better or worse.
The drawbacks show up fast: interoperability gaps, network and connectivity issues, cybersecurity risk, and the sheer number of devices and platforms in play.
All of that adds more pressure to IT teams already stretched thin — and gives them their own reasons to consider a change.
What IT teams expect next
IT practitioners have a clear view of what's coming — and what they need to manage it.
UC&C has moved fast over the past few years, and this report shows just how much that's affected IT professionals. So what do they expect next?
We asked respondents for their predictions on the next major shift in unified communications and collaboration. Here's what they said:
Managing the complexity of today's UC environments
These predictions point to the same conclusion: monitoring and performance management, user satisfaction, and streamlined operations are directly connected.
As remote work scales and cloud collaboration platforms multiply, IT teams are left managing increasingly complex UC&C environments — with less room for error.
What they're asking for is straightforward: fewer hours lost to recurring issues, systems that can handle distributed networks and mismatched tools, and the ability to do more without doing more manually.
Organizations without the right systems in place won't just fall behind competitors — they risk losing the people who keep everything running.
How IR Collaborate can help
Powered by Prognosis, built for exactly this problem.
Every finding in this report points to the same root issue: IT teams can't see enough of their UC&C environment to get ahead of problems, so they end up reacting to them instead.
IR Collaborate, powered by Prognosis, gives teams a single view of voice, video, and collaboration performance across vendors, locations, and users — instead of switching between platform-specific tools to find where a problem started. That means:
- Quickly identifying the source of an issue across a multi-vendor environment, cutting the time spent troubleshooting.
- Continuously tracking call and meeting quality, so degradation is caught before users report it.
- Monitoring usage across UC platforms from one place, without relying on siloed, vendor-specific tools.
- Turning performance data into clear reporting that supports resourcing, budget, and platform decisions — the exact issues IT managers in this survey flagged as their biggest concerns.
Conclusion
UC&C isn't getting simpler, and the IT teams managing it aren't getting more headcount. The organizations that stay ahead are the ones giving their IT teams the visibility to work proactively, not just react faster.
See how IR Collaborate can help your team get there — request a demo.
