Are organisations getting into ‘Collaboration Overload’ trap?

Collaboration is key to deliver better business outcomes, but Collaboration overload can be counterintuitive. Moot question is what is the optimal balance and ways to differentiate between an environment where unilateral decisions are made and people are told what to do (vs) a collaborative environment (vs) an environment where there is collaboration overload.

1. Having an unilateral way of working is about telling people what to do. This may shift to the realms of autocratic working style, defensiveness, insecurity and giving a false sense of control. This type of behaviour is becoming less common & less acceptable.
2. It is better to have teams’ realize the answer on their own than telling them to do something. Leaders inspire people to aspire for and accomplish higher goals and operate at higher levels. Hence collaborative style of working is key to a transparent, productive and highly engaged workplace. This tends to deliver improved business outcomes.
3. At times, collaborative style of working may tend to extend to ‘excess collaboration’. This? slows down organisational agility, creates a grid-lock on decision-making, hampers progress, leading to people burnout and impedes creativity. Collaborative overload invariably places an enormous cost on organizations and their people, impacting EX and in turn CX.
4. Collaboration drives more integrated approach, encourages knowledge sharing across functions, groups, locations, and brings in an unified voice. On the other hand ‘collaboration overload’ results in complexity in decision-making, loss of autonomy, more time required to deliver the outcomes, lower productivity & people burn-out. The outcomes do not justify the time and resources invested.

Let us look at the root cause for ‘collaboration overload’:

The root cause for collaboration overload includes a combination of organisation complexity, FOMO, collaboration for collaboration sake, insufficient empowerment and fear of failure resulting in inordinate increase in number of meetings to arrive at the key decisions.

1. Some of the Leaders are less confident, insecure, and not having the required knowledge & expertise to make informed decisions.
2. Low levels of trust amongst peers & teams resulting in increase in number of meetings & interactions to arrive at the key decisions.
3. Rigid & inflexible culture vs being agile, with the intent to reach to a perfect answer or solution in this world where the pace of change is 10X.
4. As organisations grow, the complexity of operations increases as new functions, geographies and nodes are added. Each of the addition requires more interactions, more meetings, increased emails between stakeholders in order to make & execute critical decisions.
5. Meetings tend to become de-facto mode of effective communication resulting in employees believing that they need to attend every meeting or risk missing out (FOMO). Hence a battery of people tend to get invited, with lower active participation.
6. Fear of failure or of making mistakes. The premise of ‘two heads are better than one and more heads are better than two for making decisions’ drives this behaviour on the ground.

One or more of the above causes results in encouraging being a ‘Busy Manager’, who moves from one meeting to another and one packed day to another. The hidden cost is lower level of productivity and people burn-out with less time expended to pause, to think, and make informed decisions.

What are the mitigation actions to address these root causes:

1. Simplify the operating model: Reduce the nodes to make and execute key decisions.
2. Simplify accountability: Define the key roles for decision making (preferably in single digits), reduce the # of interactions required to get the work done.
3. Work towards self-policing: Define criteria for self approvals & decision making in small group. Refine this criteria based on the outcomes.
4. Establish usage of collaboration media, knowledge exchange (KX) & reduce meetings, emails flurry: Reduce the number of meetings, calls, attendees per meeting, duration of meetings, sending emails to a broader group. Instead upload & update pertinent information on KX, Workplace.
5. Encourage open communication & continuous feedback: Use the continuous feedback from diverse teams to refine the process & assess if these steps are helping to simplify the decision making process. Share examples of success and learnings from failures to enable others.
6. Refine the process through the lens of the end customer: Assess periodically if the process, tools are helping the team on the ground to be nimble, agile and be more responsive to the customers’ asks.
7. Bias for Action vs Dive Deep: This mantra employed by Amazon is an effective way to not deliberate till one achieves the perfect solution. Take actions faster, iterate, refine and balance with deep dive assessments to assess the effectiveness of the solution and actions.

In a nutshell:

Collaboration is key to deliver better business outcomes, but ‘Collaboration overload’ can be counterintuitive, impacting productivity, causing people burn-out, takes more efforts and impedes progress. Hence it is important to capitalise on the benefits of collaboration and reduce the downside of excess collaboration. This is less of a collaboration tool issue and will need a culture, structure & leadership assessment and fix.

Collaborative overload indeed places an enormous & invisible cost on organizations and people. Hence today’s multi-cultural, diverse and distributed world, requires secure and confident leaders to inspire people and to be their ‘coach'. This will enable the people, the functions, units and the organisation? to achieve higher levels of performance, success and reduce bureaucracy.

References:

https://hbr.org/2002/02/beware-the-busy-manager (by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal)