Collaborative Workplace — Is there any negative side to it?
Sharing my two cents thoughts :)
Over the years in my work, it is common to hear people discussing about “ I want to have a working environment that promotes collaboration among the peers” or “I want to be able to better utilise the skill-set that my employees have to contribute to each other”.
From there, they set off to create the collaboration workplace concept from by either having more meetings, brain storming discussion or using technology to store and farm data about individuals.
Then as time goes by, people start to realise that it might not be producing the right result but rather huge burnout rate appear on employee and the costs that are involve at times become unrecognisable. Often will hear people say “Oh no, not meeting again because it is taking up my time.” or “What’s the point of me contributing to them, it doesn’t help in my own work.”
Why did this happen unknowingly? Isn’t collaborative environment to be useful to the organisation?
Lets look into it and try to find out more.
From AIIM definition of collaboration, it says
“ Collaboration is a working practice whereby individuals work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefit. Collaboration enables individuals to work together to achieve a defined and common business purpose.”
From this statement we can see that it involves individuals then what is contributed from this group of individuals?
From Harvard Business Review, the study shows that below are 3 resources that is being contributed:
- Informational
- Social
- Personal
Informational — being define as resources which are knowledge and skills that can be documented then pass on within the company
Social — being define as resources which involve’s a person awareness, access and position in a company that can be useful to help colleagues
Personal— being define as resource of a person time and energy.
From above, it is clear that Personal resource looks the one that make the person having less available for own work yet it is the default demand of every collaboration environment.
Every call of demand will take away at least 30 minutes of the person time because instead of searching through Enterprise Content Management or Document Management people will tend to ask for hands-on assistance.
This not only impact on the contributor but it also create impact on the person requesting from the contributor.
Next time, if we get to hear about collaboration in workplace then do think about the strategy to be use in order to fully maximise the reward yet at same time balance off the cons side of it.