Improving How We Work: How to Collaborate Better to Reduce Exhaustion and Improve Engagement
5 Steps to Reducing Overload and Exhaustion Through Intentional Collaboration
Hello. If you are new here, drop me a line to say hello. This week, I was at LinkedIn Talent Connect in NYC with 1500 other talent leaders. Here’s a summary of my takeaways, but I’ll have a longer one coming later this week.
Improving How We Work
Last year, I started working with a company to fix what they have been calling "cross-functional overload." During our initial research, we found employees, especially those in roles that were either cross-functional in nature, or who worked in roles that involved being very “people-oriented” were struggling with overwhelm, overload and exhaustion given the amount of cross-functional work on their plate. It was difficult to find enough time in the day to manage meetings, getting work done, and individual and team-based projects.
This is not surprising, given the complex nature of how companies operate, different work styles of diverse employees, and the move to more teams-based work that exists within many knowledge work type roles and professions. Some research suggests that an increase in about 50% of cross-functional initiatives has occurred over the past few years.
At the end of the day, an organization is just a collection of people that are working toward shared goals. This is magnified significantly in larger global organizations where most people have to work with other people in order to get their own work done. But even if you don’t work in a large organization, this very much still applies. As a solo entrepreneur, I can very much tell you that even without 70,000 colleagues, I still have to rely on working with others collaboration in order to be effective.
Does Technology Hurt or Help Collaboration and Productivity?
The promise of digital collaboration technologies was supposed to help with this, and in many cases, it has. But in other ways, it has brought on a whole slew of additional challenges. How many of us struggle with the endless flow of pings, e-mails alerts, tasks, messages and other notifications?
Cal Newport often refers to this as the “hyperactive hive mind,” these endless communication and collaboration loops, where you are constantly pinging and connecting with others in ways that take you away from the actual work that you are doing. In my research with the organization I was working with I was struck by this quote from a program manager who said, “it’s not the amount of work that we have to do, but rather the work around the work.”
I’ve worked for long enough and talked to leaders and managers at enough companies in the work that I do to know that this is not an isolated incident. And some of the research I’ve looked at bears this out.
Rob Cross, an author and expert on digital collaboration estimates that collaborative work has increased over 50% over the last decade. In another study on interruptions in the workplace, 20% of respondents reported experiencing more than 10 interruptions a day, with 15% reporting more than 20 interruptions a day. Not to mention, once you’re interrupted, it takes about 23 minutes for you to resume focus. The typical worker checks their email 77 times and receives 121 new emails each day.
This isn’t even taking into account the actual work that you do, so no wonder we all feel like we’re never getting anything done, and it makes sense that many of us have to take on as Microsoft calls it the “triple peak” - while some of this could in fact be for having more flexibility throughout the day, anecdotally I’ve talked to many people who use the third shift to actually get work done. A joke we used to make when I worked in consulting was that normal business hours (8-5) were used for working with clients and then after they left is when we would actually get work done.
The Productivity Paradox
One of my biggest concerns about the productivity debate is that while most people focus on the dialogue around where the best place is to get work done, or “how to do more with less,” less people are actually asking the question of “what is the work that actually needs to be done in the first place?”
Let’s say for example you want to bring people back into the office because you think they will get “more work done” because you can see them, they can see their colleagues, etc. If you’re not examining or evaluating the work that needs to be done in the first place, and drawing a connection between the activities of work and the business outcomes that matter, what difference does it make if they do the work efficiently and effectively? As Peter Drucker said, “there’s nothing as useless as doing something efficiently that shouldn’t be done in the first place.”
But this productivity thought is linked to the collaboration exhaustion conversation because if it’s true that many of us are feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the number of interruptions, messages, meetings, requests for documentation, requests for clarification and follow ups, before we decide where those things should be happening we need to ask ourselves if those things should be even necessary to do in the first place. Is it possible we’re all doing a bunch stuff at work that we shouldn’t even be doing at all? Do we have it as the anthropologist David Graeber once coined it, BS jobs?
In a very charitable world, let’s say that you are exhausted and overwhelmed with all those requests and all the work you have on your plate from collaboration and that all of those things end up being necessary and important to doing your job effectively. The odds of that happening are pretty low, but in the case that it were true, the answer to that would be one of prioritization, and the tactical step would be to work with your manager or leader to determine what is actually most important and to focus on that work first.
But the reality is that is not the case, and if you were to actually document all of those tasks, requests, meetings, communications, many of them would be leading toward things that actually either don’t matter, are not important, or don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. This all leads us back to the Drucker quote, “there’s nothing as useless as doing something efficiently that shouldn’t be done in the first place.”
A New Way to Work: 4 Steps to Improving Collaboration to Improve How You Work
If this is you, here are some recommendations for how you can find ways to feel less overwhelmed, work on the right things, and get back time in your day in order to be more effective in your job. Here’s how I helped that one organization I mentioned in the beginning solve their own collaboration challenges:
1)Do an Audit of Your Activities
Going back to the client I worked with who was struggling with this, one of the activities we went through to figure out how to move forward was to have people document their weeks and to identify the activities and tasks that they were doing that they thought were most critical to driving a positive outcome, and the ones that were not helpful in doing so. We also identified the projects and tasks that had interdependency (meaning they required collaboration of some kind) and the ones that were more solo. What we found was that everyone had some level of projects and tasks that they were doing that did not in fact lead to some sort of outcome, and that while many of the tasks required working with others, there were plenty that required them working alone.
2)Find Opportunities to Do “Deep Work
We also introduced the concept of Deep Work, coined by Newport, which outlines the importance of using your focus and attention on something for a period of time without interruption to let your brain think and creative juices flow. We focused on helping each person identify the projects and tasks that required more deep and creative work, and then helped them come up with opportunities to find those moments throughout the course of the week.
Finally, we also spent time focusing on collaboration itself. Knowing that collaboration was important (as was deep work) we focused on first understanding what collaboration looked like, and specifically understanding why in certain projects, collaboration was needed and who did what, and then we looked for opportunities to improve on that.
3)Understand and Implement Intentional Collaboration
Collaboration is important, but only when it’s done in an intentional and thoughtful way. Gartner found that teams that are more intentional about how and where they collaborate are 2.2 times more productive in their work.
Drawing on some of the research from Michael Arena around adaptive teaming, they identified four kinds of collaboration types that, depending on the goal of the project and what needs to get done, can be used for a specific part of the project. Those four types of collaboration were:
Discovery Collaboration - In the discovery phase, teams are focused on identifying new opportunities and exploring potential solutions. This is all about bringing together disparate and diverse teams, in order to get the best possible ideas
Development Collaboration - This is about going further than ideation, and actually bringing an idea of a project, solution or product to life. In the development collaboration mode, small teams engage in local bonding interactions to facilitate idea elaboration and refinement.
Diffusion Collaboration - Research shows that ideas that are found on localized teams have 43% less chance of being accepted. Diffusion collaboration is all about “shopping” your idea or project, getting feedback and getting stakeholder buy in.
Delivery Collaboration - This is all about allowing people to focus and have the deep work in order to execute tasks and get work done.
With these four modes in mind, we then focused on for each employees set of projects and tasks, what collaboration modes seemed appropriate at which times, this way, employees could identify A) when it made sense to collaborate and when it didn’t and B) The collaboration was structured, so that people were aware and aligned around how the work was going to get done. Instead of collaboration for the sake of collaboration, it was intentional, strategic, and focused.
#4)Create Time in Your Work to Focus on Relationship Building
With more free time created, people had a chance to breathe again and to redistribute that work toward other activities. One activity we encouraged all employees to think about was finding time to build relationships with key colleagues, stakeholders, and leaders and to find activities they could do to focus on that each week. This had two main benefits. First, to increase social connection between an employee and their peers, which often leads to overall well-being and employee satisfaction. Second, it made actually collaborating with employees better and more effective. When you are going to work with someone and you’ve already build up trust and connection, the collaboration tends to go much better.
Other Tips and Tactics
If you are looking to be more intentional about your collaboration efforts to be more productive and engaged in your work, here are a few more things you can try on your team
Do a Meeting/Collaboration “Holiday” - In an experiment that was run in Asana’s Collaboration Lab, they had one group of their participants identify a collaboration technology they use frequently, and then to stop using it for 2 straight weeks, and they asked another group to choose which tools they wanted to eliminate for two straight weeks. Forty-one percent reported (without prompting) that they became more mindful of the impact of using too many collaboration tools on their focus and productivity. More than half (53%) of participants told us they would use at least one tool less frequently as a result of their cleanse. They expected this conscious culling of their tech stack to free up their time and cognitive bandwidth for more focused work. This intervention relies on “subtraction” and can get you in the mindset of being more thoughtful about how and when you choose to collaborate
Consider Team Collaboration Norms - Another practice you can do at the team level is to develop some team working agreements or team norms. (Example here) There’s a broad umbrella of what these can be used from, but think about using them from anything from how you use a collaboration tool, how you structure meetings, or how to decide when and if you can call a meeting. Getting alignment around these with your team can also be a helpful exercise before you start a collaboration project.
I hope this helps you improve how you work, eliminate meetings and feel more engaged in your work!
Additional Reading
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development or professional development for this year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: influence without authority, navigating change, hybrid working, and others.
Consulting & Advisory Work - Are you looking to improve the ways of working of your team or organization or looking for guidance on remote/hybrid work? Let’s chat about how we can work together
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al