Don’t conflate collaboration with productivity

It seems there is a current trend to conflate collaboration with productivity; it’s a mistake to think that the two are equivalent. When people are being productive, they may not collaborate. We may be working as a team, but that isn’t quite the same thing as collaboration. Collaboration is most useful when you are trying to decide what to do. Effectively you’re talking about what you’re going to do but you aren’t yet doing it. There will be output from the collaboration which can be used later. Put simply, use collaboration to choose what to do; productivity to get the actual work done. After all, at some point you’re going to have to do the work.

In lots of ways, having a collaborative space means that you’re stopping people from working effectively. Places setup to be collaborative aren’t always conducive to productivity. You are constantly bothered by interruptions; by people moving past your eye-line; you hear questions asked of other people where you are the subject matter expert so you can’t help but butt-in, disturbing your own flow. What we end up with is people having headphones on trying to concentrate; this is completely at odds with what’s intended in a “collaborative” space. We aren’t collaborating and we’re not as productive as we should be.

Make the office space fit the team purpose; not some idealised vision of what an office should be. While it might look quite cool in pictures, having bean bags in the office is never a good idea. With fully distributed teams you all just work where you need to work, sometimes that’s in the office, most of the time it’s from home and everyone communicates over IM and VOIP. My current team has an office that is quite plain; just a a couple of whiteboards on the wall. When the team chooses to come to the office, we have made a habit to collaborate on future development strategies and targets. Our primary focus is on being productive, because that is what gets the work done.

@QuotdianEnnui