Breaking the Cycle of Low-Value Collaboration
Have you ever experienced that nagging sensation at work where you’re constantly hustling, ticking items off your to-do list, attending countless meetings and brainstorming sessions, sending a never-ending stream of emails, and creating documents and strategies — only to feel like your efforts haven’t had the impact you anticipated? If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone!
Today we’re more connected digitally than ever before. With just a few clicks, one can hop on a voice or video call with colleagues from around the globe, or make use of fantastic tools for asynchronous collaboration and communication. But even with these advantages, we often find ourselves spinning our wheels and not making as much progress as we’d like. So, what’s going on?
The answer lies in a pervasive yet subtle issue that undermines productivity, performance, and engagement: low-value collaboration. Although we’re communicating and collaborating more than ever, we’re unwittingly falling victim to this slow and silent productivity killer.
In this article, we’ll delve into the concept of low-value collaboration, explore why it’s so dangerous to team success, and offer practical solutions to help you and your organization break free from its grip.
What is Low-Value Collaboration?
Low-value collaboration is work done with one or more teammates that doesn’t produce the desired value or impact. It’s when our joint efforts fall short of making a meaningful difference. If this concept seems a bit abstract, let’s consider a few examples.
Think back to a meeting you’ve attended where you felt like you didn’t need to be there or where the outcomes and action items were left unclear and unassigned by the end. A lot of time was spent collaborating, but little value was produced.
Or perhaps you’ve experienced frustration when trying to communicate a point to a colleague who just couldn’t seem to grasp it, no matter how clearly you explained it.
If you haven’t encountered either of these situations, congratulations! You might just be living in a workplace utopia.
But for the majority of the workforce these scenarios, and many like them, are all too familiar. The harsh reality is that most people frequently engage in collaboration that falls short of being truly valuable — often on a daily basis.
This isn’t to say that the best intentions are missing when collaborating, but these intentions don’t always translate into the desired high-impact results.
Why is Low-Value Collaboration So Dangerous?
On the surface, low-value collaboration might not seem like such a big deal. After all, we’re still ticking along with daily standups, diligently updating our Gantt charts, and submitting status updates right on schedule. Everything seems to be progressing smoothly, so what’s the harm?
The danger lies in mistaking motion for progress. We can easily fool ourselves into thinking that we’re making strides when, in reality, we’re merely spinning our wheels instead of moving towards our shared goals.
This illusion of progress not only wastes valuable time and resources, but can also have a significant impact on employee well-being and organizational success.
One of the most insidious effects of low-value collaboration is burnout — a pervasive issue in today’s workplaces. When employees are constantly engaged in activities that don’t yield the desired results, they can quickly become overwhelmed and exhausted. This, in turn, can lead to disengagement and decreased job satisfaction.
Disengagement is particularly dangerous because it can spread throughout a team like wildfire. When employees don’t see the fruits of their labor, they may lose faith in their ability to make a difference, question the value of the shared vision, and ultimately, become disenchanted with their work.
These challenges can also result in a lack of innovation and stifled creativity. When employees are bogged down with endless meetings and emails, they have less time and mental bandwidth to think critically and explore new ideas. This can hinder an organization’s ability to adapt, evolve, and stay competitive in an ever-changing business landscape.
Inefficient collaboration can also strain interpersonal relationships within a team. When roles and responsibilities are unclear, or when there’s a disconnect between expectations and outcomes, frustration and resentment can fester. This can lead to a toxic work environment and further hamper productivity.
Finally, low-value collaboration can have a negative impact on an organization’s bottom line. Wasted time and resources, coupled with decreased employee satisfaction and engagement, can contribute to high turnover rates, increased recruitment and training costs, and ultimately, lower overall profitability.
These are massive threats to the health and success of our workplaces. It’s crucial that we recognize these dangers and take proactive steps to improve the quality and efficiency of our collaborative efforts. By doing so, we can create environments where employees thrive, innovation flourishes, and organizations prosper.
What Causes our Collaboration to be so Ineffective?
So, what’s the root of the problem?
There are many factors contributing to the poor quality of our work together — business processes that are outdated, leadership that doesn’t value team members’ well-being, or improperly implemented tools.
Additionally, low-value collaboration can arise from poorly defined roles and responsibilities, bureaucracy, or micromanagement, all of which hinder the decision-making process and stifle creativity.
To make matters worse, constant low-value interactions can leave employees feeling overwhelmed and disengaged, further eroding overall productivity and satisfaction.
But underneath all of these is a deeper challenge: in our quest for efficiency and scalability, we have lost something crucial. We have imagined that repeatable and scalable processes are at irreconcilable odds with elevating the unique strengths, skills, preferences, and needs of the individual humans involved.
But what if we could have both of these essential ingredients?
What Can We Do?
Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom. While the dangers of low-value collaboration are significant, there are strategies to turn the tide. The first step is to recognize the enormity of the challenge and accept that it won’t be an easy fix.
Making your organization or team more effective is a bit like digging a hole in the bottom of a river. The constant stream of new priorities, people, and processes make lasting change incredibly difficult. No one solution, product, consultant, or strategy can solve this. However, this journey is one we must embark on in order to see our teams and our mission truly thrive.
To begin, we must rethink and rebuild our working rhythms and business processes. And we need to start with the assumption that embracing the diverse perspectives and preferences of each team member is not the enemy of efficiency.
It’s no surprise that meetings often take center stage in discussions about low-value collaboration. They are, indeed, one of the primary culprits. To improve the value of our collaboration we should be ruthless in evaluating which meetings truly serve our goals, vision, and the needs of our team members.
And while I believe it’s important not to fixate solely on the boardroom while ignoring many other potential sources of inefficiency, to help drive home the point I’ll use the meeting as an example.
A People-centric Approach
A meeting is a scheduled moment to accomplish a shared goal. Let’s give this hypothetical meeting the benefit of the doubt and suggest that this goal has not only been established but also communicated well (not true of most meetings, but let’s be generous).
Our quest for repeatability and scalability means that this meeting will likely follow a formula. This is good; formulas can remove unnecessary guesswork and redundant effort! If we have a formula, we can repeat this meeting many times by many different groups (like a daily scrum, for example). But unfortunately, it’s almost certain that this formula does not accept as inputs some of the most crucial variables.
What if we could run a meeting in a way that accommodated the people rather than the precedent?
Here are a few examples of traditional process-driven questions we might ask as we are planning a meeting, vs some possible more people-centric alternatives:
I want to suggest a few, perhaps radical, things. One is that there is a much larger possible list than this of people-centric approaches to running a single meeting. If we assume that elevating the unique opportunity presented by the diversity of the people involved is not mutually exclusive with efficiency, our imaginations can be unlocked.
There are endless possibilities for running a meeting in a way that celebrates rather than smooths over the differences that we each bring. And none of them need to mean that every other empowered group of team members can’t also make their own decisions about how to plan and run their meetings without incurring an overhead cost.
The second radical idea is that this exercise above, centered around the meeting (not even nearly my favorite workplace artifact to talk about) can be applied to every business process.
Turning every one of our low-value workplace interactions into one that leads to greater impact starts with designing them around people rather than precedent.
And finally, perhaps the most radical idea of all: it’s this type of human-driven approach that can transform low-value collaboration into deeply impactful and valuable teamwork. As it turns out, when our business processes are designed for us we enjoy them more. They work better for us. And we get better work out of them.
Instead of beating our heads against the wall, when we step into shared work in ways that meet our mutual needs, accommodate our circumstances, embrace our strengths, and give space for our shortcomings, we experience both a much deeper sense of engagement, but we also create much more value.
Granted, this can be easier said than done. It can be hard to distinguish between process-driven moments that exist because that’s just how things have always been done, and similar moments that work in a certain way because that’s simply the best way to do it.
And we currently don’t have nearly enough safety and transparency in our workplaces to allow us to share and benefit from the human-centered data that will power many of these people-centric processes. Without an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas, needs, preferences, and stories without fear of retribution we can’t truly design well around these factors.
Unlocking the Power of High-Value Collaboration
This topic is a complex one. One short article can’t answer a question that has been asked for as long as work has existed, and about which hundreds of thousands of books have been written.
But I do hope that you’ll leave with a greater awareness of how much low-value collaboration is impacting our business outcomes and team engagement, as well as a greater hope for a more human-centric future.
Rather than viewing individual differences as obstacles, we must recognize them as our teams’ superpower. It’s this diversity that allows us to generate new ideas, solve complex problems, and adapt to an ever-changing business landscape.
By embracing and celebrating the unique stories, strengths, skills, perspectives, and preferences of each team member, we can transform our work environments into thriving spaces, rife with innovative ideas, productive teamwork, and flourishing teams.
At Crewjoy, one of the two pain points we are solving is low-value collaboration. To find out how our suite of digital products and facilitated services can help your team inject value back into your teamwork, visit crewjoy.com
