How Much Teamwork Do We Really Need, Anyway?

Seems like a silly question.

If you asked any manager, they’d likely tell you more teamwork is always preferable to its counterpart. But how much teamwork is too much? At what point is connectedness detrimental to accomplishment? What’s not getting done when “being kept in the loop” results in context-deficient, project-derailing emails?

According to the Radicati Group, referenced in The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox, the average office worker is projected to spend 41% of their workday reading and responding to email in 2009.

Yes, I referenced old data to recommend a book. For those of you clamoring for current data, consider this report. In 2015, it was expected a total of 126 business emails were received and sent per day. That number is projected to grow to 140 in 2018. (By chance, do you or someone you know humblebrag about how much email they receive in a day?)

Compounding the issue is a whole new class of interruptions in a workday: Google Alerts, forum mentions, badge icons, pop-up windows, desktop notifications and open-office floor plans, to name a few.

You may be thinking I’ve spent a lot of time talking about tools and not teamwork. You may be right. We’ve introduced these tools without much thought, hoping their implementation would lead to clarity, alignment, persistence and results. One could call the combination of those things teamwork.

Many organizations are reining in these tools to enhance teamwork with blackout “focus” times and no-email Fridays to some success.

The One Tool You Really Need

Like any good self-help book, this article will tell you to start where you are.(Thanks for your $14.95!)

The one tool you need is … time tracking. No person or role should be excluded.

If you don’t know where the time goes, you can’t determine how to best work together.

How else would you identify gaps between the priorities (a separate issue of irony) and what people actually spend their time on? If you were feeling overworked, how else would you quantify that feeling?

Time tracking doesn’t need to be complicated. It could be a handwritten note of time entries compiled into Excel at the end of the day. Plenty of tools like Toggl deliver team-focused time tracking across a host of web-based apps, including Trello, Salesforce, and yes, Gmail.

However you track, you need to know where the time goes.

Time track thinking about implementing time tracking.

One of the things time tracking will reveal is team members are generally hesitant to time track thinking. So they do, anything, even if it’s aimless, because it can be done and observed.

A manager will reward employees based on this aimless productivity. A leader will use time tracking data to defend the time of his or her team against fires of the day to achieve long-term goals.

Do not implement time tracking only to “desk bomb” team members in a knee-jerk reaction. If you’ve implemented a time-tracking tool with real-time data, do not use this data to dictate what’s worked on in real time. You want team members who can prioritize their own projects. (You’ll also find no one is willing to pay you to babysit Toggl.)

Your only expectation of time tracking in the first month of doing it is that it gets done.

Once the expectation and habit are formed, then you can start to use the data to identify team members buried under the collaborative requests of others, training opportunities if tasks are taking longer than you expect, roadblocks to execution, benchmarks for future projects and more.

You can also recalibrate before long-term problems appear in the P&L.

Parting thoughts: It is my experience people with client-facing responsibilities escape time-tracking expectations placed on internal employees, if those expectations exist at all.

This presents two problems. One, your organization doesn’t really know from a time-cost perspective what it takes to win and retain clients, making it harder for people in these roles to identify issues and justify staffing. Two, those working on a non-project basis may create unnecessary work for people in specialist roles.

A friend of mine asked, “How do people find time to micromanage others?”

I think we should consult the timesheets for the answer.

This article took three hours and twenty-two minutes to write, edit and publish.