Is Your Team Collaborating Too Much?

If your employees are drowning in excessive or misaligned goals set by too many external stakeholders with competing demands, they’re at risk of losing sight of their highest priorities. As a leader, how can you help your team overcome collaboration overload?

• Invest in tools and platforms that protect employees’ time and energy. Emphasize the importance of “focus time” functions embedded in many workplace technologies, which will enable employees to protect their focus instead of fragmenting it. Additionally, take steps to integrate all your team’s disparate information systems to reduce unnecessary bottlenecks and communications.
• Equip employees with information about how they’re collaborating. You might set up a dashboard, for instance, where employees can monitor data about work behaviours that they never had access to before. For example, data about the number of times an employee initiated a collaboration with someone else might show them that they need more focus time to dedicate to project work.
• Establish team-wide collaboration norms. For example, set guidelines for when and how to escalate communication (for example, email → Slack → phone call as urgency increases) and where to store important data and documentation.