The rise of collaboration @ work (& what you can do about it)

Sure, collaboration feels productive, but what are the costs to being too collaborative?

In the last decade, the amount that the average knowledge worker is expected to collaborate with people who are not part of their immediate team has increased a lot. Maybe an incalculable amount. With the advent of open-plan offices, 24-hour connectivity to Slack, Facebook Workplaces, and more, there’s basically no limit to how much of your day can get sucked into collaboration instead of carving out alone time to accomplish things. With studies suggesting that 70% — 85% of the average knowledge worker’s time is spent attending, prepping for, or following up on meetings, it’s clear that for all of the advantages of workplace collaboration, the costs are mounting, too. So what are the signs that there’s too much collaboration happening at your workplace, and what can you do to help ease it?

The signs that collaboration has gone overboard

1. Many different projects are bottlenecked by one decision maker.
   Harvard Business Review estimates that 20% — 30% of all of the productive collaboration in an over-connected company flows through 3% — 5% of the people. If a whole lot of decisions are all piled up on one overwhelmed collaborator, it’s a pretty clear sign that there are too many cross-connections taking place through that one person.
2. Communication anxiety
   Nearly a quarter of knowledge workers have expressed anxiety at managing their workplace communications. A little anxiety is relatively common, then. If it gets to be a constant dread, though, you may have a problem. If the idea of waking up with 170 Slack notifications or 80 emails to work through makes you want to chuck your phone out a window, you may be too connected for your own good. Since even short interruptions in a task cause 3–5 minutes of disruption before you’re back in the groove, being overloaded with collaborative needs can make it almost impossible to finish working on anything.
3. Too many generals and not enough soldiers
   This happens a lot at bigger companies, where the number of people who sign off or give feedback on a project can outnumber the headcount of people who are actually working on the project. As part of a culture that either wants to avoid risk or mitigate blame, this kind of collaboration can slow down projects to very little avail.

https://soundcloud.com/hbrideacast/542-excessive-collaboration

What to do about over-collaboration

1. Automate and decentralize communications
   If many decisions are driving through one person who is slowing them down, there are two solutions which Harvard Business Review recommends: one is to find ways to reward the influential collaborators in a team so that they’re recognized for their contribution; the flip side of that is to route communications and decision-making that doesn’t need to be as collaborative around bottlenecks. Rather than say, “Hey, can you approve this?” try saying, “unless there’s a problem, here’s what we’re doing.” Share communications broadly, certainly, because the more feedback an idea gets the better it tends to be, but don’t set up bottlenecks in the process. A tool like Unito.io can help with this, of course, by letting teams communicate more effectively across silos in the tools that they know. Regardless of how you do it, though, pushing authority and responsibility down the chain will only help improve the collaborative environment.
2. Get rid of status meetings
   There are dozens of tools that you can use to share information asynchronously about the status of a project. Whether it’s a daily standup in Slack, a weekly status email or a dashboard that pulls data from a spreadsheet and shows status of every team member’s deliverables, the dreaded status meeting needs to go the way of the dodo. Calculating the cost of meetings where everyone talks about what it is that they have done or are going to do, you can pretty easily get up to a few hundred thousand dollars of wasted time in meetings in even a small organization, so do your part and move the status checkup online.
3. Be a courteous collaborator
   Everyone has their own tool that they use. Slack, Asana, Wrike, JIRA, GitHub, YouTrack or wherever they prefer to live, do your part to meet them halfway. This may mean that, rather than swinging by someone’s cubicle to check and see if they got your email and are going to respond to it, that you ping them with a comment on a task in Wrike to see if they have had time to respond. Because your coworkers are usually juggling just as many things as you are, it’s kinder (and more efficient!) of you to figure out how they like to work and use that tool to work with them, rather than try to disrupt their work flow enough that you become the big issue that they have to solve now.
4. Default to the 30 minute meeting
   Meetings, like most work, will expand to fill the time that you have allotted to them. The average adult’s attention span is about 20 minutes, so meetings which run longer than that are likely going to start to wander off topic anyway. A 30 minute meeting where someone is keeping the ball rolling with constant prompts for feedback and gently redirecting the conversation when it goes astray will be as productive (if not more!) than a 60 (or 90…) minute meeting where everyone leaves the room feeling as if all of their energy was sucked away.

For a number of knowledge workers, the “c” word (collaboration) is kind of a dirty word, because they associate it with meetings, emails, and communication that kicks up a lot of noise and doesn’t help accomplish what they want to achieve. With a little effort on your part, you can help your organization work together better.

What are your favorite ways to streamline collaboration? Do you have a meeting hack that you can’t wait to share? Tell me about it below!