Are We Victims of Collaboration Abuse in the Workplace?

As a workplace design professional for the past two decades, a driving principle during most of my career was about creating more and more spaces for collaboration. It was a defining mantra for many organizations that more collaboration = more ideas = more innovation = more revenue. It was seen as the best thing since the open office plan!

But if we are all collaborating all the time, who is getting any real work done? What is the actual effect on employee productivity, effectiveness, or happiness? Does this truly lead to massive innovation?

Or, have we gone too far with this concept?

What is Collaboration Abuse?

A focus on ultra-collaborative workplaces is not a new phenomenon. In fact, this trend began to take off in the late 1990s when technology advanced to downsizing computers and laptops that allowed workers to move into areas that served as collaboration hubs and project teams could sit together for their work.

By the 2000s, mobility became a standard, adopting the term “hot-desking”, and by the 2010s, collaboration hubs complete trendy colorful decor, digital or moveable whiteboards, and cool relaxed furniture became all the rage for the modern workplace. The paradigm of young people chatting up ideas, huddled around a small table at the local cafe was a potent influence.

More recently, the amount of collaboration has gone beyond productive limits, causing stress and burnout at work. Have we applied too much of a good thing, and negatively affecting our work? This can be caused by:

Too many unproductive meetings
Excessive Emails
Too many people included in meetings, conversations, or chat groups.

The Time Suck

Before the pandemic, people were already spending about 85% of their time on phone calls, meetings, and email. That number has gone up by 1/2 through the pandemic. People began working 5 to 8 hours more per week, which led to earlier mornings, later nights, and a blurring between work time versus personal time.

In a conversation between Rob Cross, author of Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore your Well-Being (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), and consulting firm, McKinsey, claims “one of the crazy things during the COVID-19 pandemic is that many of us have had this great idea to try to jam more meetings in the same day, right? So you move from eight 1-hour meetings pre-pandemic to 16 30-minute meetings, and it’s exhausting.”

Excessive demands on collaboration are overloading people, hurting performance and productivity. This includes the many interruptions of in-person casual meetings and the scheduled online group calls.

A result of the pandemic, managers that desired visibility of their staff were inviting them to join more Zoom calls, giving the perception of a fully engaged team. With the ease of online meeting platforms, we end up inviting more people than necessary to join. Conversations that include 20+ people, where most people contributing to the meeting is typically only 3-4 persons. This is something that wouldn’t happen as often in in-person meetings.

What is the Cost to Business

According to cognitive science studies, it takes 20 to 30 minutes to refocus at full concentration on a previous task after being interrupted, albeit a phone call, text message, email, or ad-hoc meeting. As this is quite common at work, it suggests most of us are likely not operating at our most effective or productive capability throughout the day. There are three key costs to consider for organizations:

Lost Engagement

Through the pandemic, people’s connectivity patterns have focused more internally. With a higher strain to attend online meetings, many try multitasking by dividing their attention to other focused tasks at the same time — reducing their full engagement in either. This can lead to a feeling of mental overload.

Attrition

Organizations are losing overwhelmed people. Many that felt overwhelmed prior to working from home during the pandemic, won’t subscribe back to a conventional work model, which includes exhaustive meetings. Losing an employee, on average, will make five other people’s lives 5 to 10% harder for the next few months. This can snowball to more people feeling overloaded, and a domino effect of attrition.

Mental Health

Workplace wellbeing is not only about clean, filtered air, sanitized spaces, yoga rooms, and more plants. Over-collaboration can be a serious strain on mental wellbeing, thus having a critical impact on physical wellness.

What can we do to address Collaboration Abuse?

We’ve found that high performers that collaborate effectively, are enabled to be 20 to 25% more efficient while improving their wellbeing. How do they do it? By strategically structuring energizing activities with de-energizing ones. In the popular business handbook, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey describes the seventh and ultimate habit as “sharpening the saw” by continuously exploring possibilities for improvement. This vital exercise of organizational health is a temperature check on company work methods and employee effects.

This may be easier said than done for individual employees to structure their time better with organizational pressures in place. Company management can help this by becoming conscious of the bigger picture, and ease unnecessary requests on time, allowing flexibility for people to schedule and prioritize their time.

In Daniel Pink’s book, When. The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, he discusses how people may do their best work at different times of the day, depending on the type of task. Our effectiveness comes in peaks and troughs throughout the day and not all times of the day are equal for certain tasks. He claims there is a golden ratio of 52 minutes of focused work, then 17 minutes of break before the next focused task. It may be important to consider breaks and lulls between collaborative and focused tasks to become more efficient at both.

Here are a few ways organizations and managers can begin to retool workplace collaboration methods:

Asynchronous Collaboration

This is incorporating a collaboration climate that doesn’t require immediate action. For example, instead of sending an email or text message requesting an immediate response, questions can be listed out and let the receiver know they can be answered when they have time. It considers the needs, schedules, and preferences of the team members. They are working together towards the same goal, but without being present in real-time.

A great tool for this (a favorite of mine) is a virtual whiteboarding tool, such as MIRO. This allows team members to contribute on their own time while seeing the work added by others and provide feedback.

Focus Hours

Employees can set their own focused work time in their schedules, and become unavailable for other assignments, calls, or meetings during this time. This would be deemed as equally important as an external meeting request to be considered and worked around. As much as work-life balance is discussed, we also need collective-individual work balance.

Choose the Right Tools

Often companies use legacy tools for the wrong collaboration purposes. Especially with team or group communication, the wrong tools can cause inefficiency and overload. Conversely, the right tools can greatly improve team productivity and reduce distraction.

Collaboration Apps vs. Email. There is a plethora of new apps popping up, and can be confusing which ones to use, or costly for companies to change the software. Many are designed to streamline team communication threads, and file sharing, and seamlessly connect between different apps. This can help avoid switching between context or platforms to improve collaboration.

Email — The RIGHT tool for official documentation of formal correspondence that can be used as a business paper trail. The WRONG tool for casual conversation involving a string of back-and-forth communication or large file sharing.

Teams / Slack (or other business group chat apps) — The RIGHT tool for more casual group conversation, mentioning (@) certain team members that you’d like to respond, and file sharing links to cloud-based folders. The WRONG tool for creating a formal paper trail or documenting key decisions or correspondence.

Zoom (or other group video call apps) — The RIGHT tool for webinars, group video discussions or presentations, where two-way communication is important. The WRONG tool for one-way delivery of information (i.e. a lecture), or activities that benefit from the a higher degree of energy or engagement, like moving around the room, or active workshopping.

Asana (or Monday, other task management apps) — The RIGHT tool for asynchronous collaboration and project management, and team task tracking. Reduces the need for team operations meetings simply to discuss project status.

Miro (or other online white-boarding apps) — The RIGHT tool for idea creation and sharing for global teams (across multiple time zones), flowcharting, or storyboarding. Can also be great as a client presentation tool for draft process work. The WRONG tool for digital or printed final presentation decks.

MS Powerpoint / Google Slides (or other presentation apps) — The RIGHT tool for team collaboration on a digital presentation deck. The WRONG tool for a printed book or brochure editing or formatting. [Use this Rule: Adobe InDesign (or similar) for printed publications only. Powerpoint/Slides (or similar) for digital presentations.]

Meetings as a Last Resort

Most meetings or calls are information delivered in one direction, and often can be summed up in an email or group message. Unless active participation from all participants is needed to reach a goal, then a meeting would be an inefficient use of time and mental focus. Managers can set a weekly limit to meetings, and reduce the number of people that need to be involved. Less is more in this case.

Treat the Disease, Not the Symptoms

Collaboration abuse may be a sign of deeper, more complex organizational issues. The firehose flow of emails, group messages, and back-to-back team calls each day is simply a means to an end. The goal of great leadership would be to discover more effective ways to achieve the larger business goal.

To quote author Simon Sinek from his book, The Infinite Game, “leaders are not responsible for the results, they are responsible for their people.” This includes creating a healthy work environment of trust, where people don’t feel managed but feel supported. Recognizing the signs of collaboration abuse, and taking steps toward addressing them would be a good start.

Don’t get me wrong, collaboration is a wonderful working model for creating a safe space for ideation and engagement. But like anything, the key is balance. Just as keeping our heads down at our desks and task-focused for 9 hours/day, 5 days/week would be draining (and possibly depressing) for many people, we need to structure our days with a good equilibrium between working together and independently.