Is your team suffering from collaborative overload?

I hope this finds you in the finest of spirits.

Last week, I attended one of the shortest meetings of my life. It was a virtual meeting; we both turned up at the appointed time. After some brief small talk, it became clear that each of us thought the other person had set the meeting up. Neither of us had a particular objective in mind, so we decided to end the meeting after 3 minutes. Phew. 

You might argue this meeting should never have even happened, and I'd agree. But the real reason I’m sharing this example with you is because I reckon it’s representative of what’s going on in organisations all the time. 

Many workplaces are riddled with people engaging in collaborative activity because they feel they 'have to' - people contributing to draft documents, attending meetings, filling in questionnaires and participating in workshops because… someone asked them to!

While a good chunk of that collaboration will be important and fruitful, large swathes of it will be causing what’s been termed "collaborative overload" - a well-researched phenomenon in the modern organisation, and a big reason so many people feel they can’t get on top of their workloads (hello, burnout!).

I’ve been working with several teams to help them develop a culture where it’s the norm for people to get super explicit about the collaborative endeavours they do or don’t get involved in - or in which they involve others. That’s not just about "setting boundaries" (a term people get excited about - in itself a sign of how much they’re feeling the overload). It starts with a much more important question about how you articulate the value of collaboration in the first place. 

If you are going to pull a bunch of busy people together into a room, for example, you need to be super clear about the anticipated value of doing so, and how each and every person might contribute to that. And why, for that matter, it needs to be done simultaneously in a room, as opposed to via an ‘asynchronous’ mode. You also need to make it okay for people to ask about those things if it's not clear to them.  

So here’s a great set of questions to get the conversation started with your team: 

• How are we feeling about the amount of collaboration happening? 
• When does it feel like over-collaboration? When does it feel like under collaboration? And when is it ‘just right’?
• How much permission do you feel you have to be really explicit about when and how we collaborate on things? What could we do to improve that?  

I’d love to hear from you if you find this helpful.

(And may you also get to have some less-than-3-minute meetings this week!) 

Cheers,
Simon