Collaborative Overload Harvard Business Review - why collaboration often sucks and what to do about it!

Neat study in Harvard Business Review on the disturbing impact of increased collaboration in the workplace on employees and organisational efficiency. 

I literally gave a sigh of relief when I saw and read this. We’ve all been there – in meetings where we know many should not be there,, Everyone these days wants to schedule a Zoom meeting, when an email would probably suffice. Overlong zoom calls with far too many attendees, some paying little attention. Poorly chaired meetings, everything scheduled for an hour, sometimes longer. Too many presentations and not enough decision making. 

I’ve long had the suspicion that collaboration, especially in meetings but also in learning, is over-egged and often results in poor productivity. That’s what my recent post on ‘quiet learning’ was about.

The study, based on data collected over two decades and research conducted across more than 300 organisations, found that time spent in collaborative activities by managers and employees has increased by 50% or more but here’s the rub, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. These high levels of collaboration consume valuable time and resources, often leading to low performance and stress. The result is actually overburdened employees who become bottlenecks, leading to decreased personal effectiveness and higher turnover rates.

In truth, time and energy are finite, and knowledge can often be shared asynchronously, without over-long meetings. Smaller teams, more focus on goals, moving fast – shared resources – that’s the way to increase productivity

They urge us to:

• Leverage technology to make informational and social resources more accessible & transparent

• Encourage employees to stop, filter & prioritise requests

• Educate employees to Just Say No or allocate ‘limited’ time for requests

• Promote use of informational and social resources over personal resources

• Implement practical rules for email requests and meeting invitations

• Use tools to monitor and report time spent on collaborative activities

• Promote natural F2F collaborations by co-locating interdependent employees

• Include collaborative efficiency in performance reviews, promotions, and pay raises

Neat... but it all goes a bit off beam with the idea of hiring Chief Collaboration Officers to manage and promote effective collaboration within organisations. Davide Graeber’s brilliant book ‘Bullshit Jobs’ comes to mind.

Was done some time back and of anything I feel things have got a lot worse.