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IT Strategy

Collaboration
FEATURE

How to avoid collaboration overload

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Collaboration can do wonders for your organization's

productivity, but there's a dark side. With an increase in
collaboration comes an increase in burnout and attrition.
The good news: Technology can help.

By Sharon Florentine
Follow
CIO | Mar 9, 2016 5:01 AM PT
RELATED TOPICS

Collaboration

Skills and Training

IT Strategy

Leadership and Management

COMMENTS
Are you feeling the effects of collaboration overload?
If you are, youre not alone. As collaboration becomes a strategic
initiative for businesses looking to increase productivity and
cross-functional capability within the workforce, there's a much
greater risk that your best employees are going to burn out.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review report that

gauged responses from more than 300 organizations, many
times the proportion of time workers spend in meetings,
responding to requests for help and working in various
collaboration and team-focused applications hovers around 80
percent. That leaves little time for all the critical work employees
must complete on their own. In fact, according to the report,
"performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of
requests for input or advice, access to resources or attendance at
a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to
a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become
real risks," according to the research.
[ Related Stories: How IT can help users help themselves ]
HBR's report shows that, in most cases, the distribution of
collaborative work is often lopsided, with 20 percent to 35 percent
of value-added collaboration coming from only 3 percent to 5
percent of your employees. "As people become known for being
both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and
roles of growing importance. Their giving mindset and desire to
help others quickly enhances their performance and reputation,"
but it can also degrade their individual performance, increase
stress and lead to disengagement, frustration, burnout and,
finally, turnover, according to the report.

Willing and able

"The more willing the employee, the more they are asked to add
to their plate. This used to be high-value for employers, but it's
leading to major dissatisfaction for employees long-term. From
our own data, too, we see that women are even more prone to be
supporting and taking part in these cross-functional collaboration
roles, while data shows men are less so. It's fascinating and
sobering to see the data here, and the trend of workers
overextended and burning themselves out," says Kris Duggan,
CEO of enterprise goal-setting and collaboration software
solutions company BetterWorks.

How your business take advantage of collaboration without

pushing your most valuable employees straight into a burn-andchurn cycle? The answer is data, says Duggan. Being able to
track projects, collaborative efforts and interpersonal
dependencies is key to making sure no one is taking on too
much, and that workloads are distributed evenly so that
bottlenecks don't occur, he says.
Duggan says that the number-1 barrier to operational efficiency is
accurate tracking of interdepartmental dependencies. In the past,
CIOs and managers would direct their teams to focus solely on
their own projects and the result was a very siloed organization;
over the past decade collaboration has become the norm and so
the emphasis must change to understand the rewards versus the
risks in that new mindset, Duggan says.
"Due to the cross-functional nature of knowledge work, if you
don't make those dependencies explicit, you have a lot of risk. If
you have an employee, let's call her Janet, who gets burned out
and then she leaves, that's one risk. If Janet has 18 things to
accomplish, but she only gets 14 of those done, then there's a
risk to the business, too. We know there will be certain people
who will become bottlenecks if they're overburdened, so we need
to identify them and give them support."
[ Related Stories: How UCaaS will help enterprise workers
collaborate ]
Using a data-driven approach to collaboration doesn't just help
businesses meet their goals and strategic initiatives, it has a real
impact on individual employee engagement and job satisfaction,
says Deidre Paknad, CEO of goal-achievement and collaboration
software company Workboard.
Being able to track and monitor your individual goals is great in
and of itself, but being able to look at the big picture view of how
your work impacts larger goals and initiatives is very powerful,
Paknad says.

[ Related Stories: 16 Employee engagement trends that will

shake up IT in 2016 ]

Look at the big picture

"Cultures that are super-collaborative are great, but sometimes
what happens is that you end up over-collaborating and doing
other people's jobs. You then have no idea what your individual
contributions are, or a sense of what your impact has
been," Paknad says.
That capability empowers individuals not just to see how their
piece of the puzzle fits into the big picture, but also allows them
greater freedom to focus on what's truly important, instead of
getting sucked into projects that aren't necessarily within their
purview, Paknad says.
"This view gives them permission to focus on their own priorities,
and vocabulary to say 'no' -- so they're not getting pulled into
meetings they don't really need to attend, or they aren't pulled
into a project they really don't have time for. They can point to the
data within the system and say, 'I'm working on this, that and the
other thing right now, and here's why those are important to the
company and to me. I don't have bandwidth for anything else,'"
she says.
That freedom to say no has been a huge boon to Herv Coureil,
executive vice president of global supply chain and his team
at Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric uses BetterWorks to
ensure the IT strategy is aligned with larger business goals, and
to make sure "we're putting a priority on the right things, using the
right people doing the right work at the right time, and also how
each individual is contributing to their own departments as well
as to the larger strategy," Coureil says.
BetterWorks allows Coureil and his team to clarify the overall
strategy, and then find a good balance between necessary
projects in adherence with organizational goals and opportunities

for his IT teams to work on projects they're personally interested

in, which also improves engagement and productivity, he says.

Freedom to experiment
"We leave quite a large degree of freedom for people to work on
what they want to work on, because now we easily can see they
are going to support and contribute to all the overarching
strategies. The impact has been incredibly positive, and the
biggest benefit is transparency and engagement. Everyone's
much more bought-in now that they see what the strategy is, how
they are contributing, and how they fit into larger initiatives and
the objectives," Coureil says.
Being able to derive insights from collaboration data can also
help weed out underperformers and determine where obstacles
and roadblocks are occurring, says BetterWorks' Duggan. It's the
flipside of the coin you can determine who's taking on too much
and also who's taking on too little and manage accordingly.
"If someone isn't doing enough cross-functional work, that's also
a problem. Say you've got a guy named Bob who's only doing his
own work, he isn't working cross-functionally, he's not actively
contributing to other people's projects. Everyone can see that,
too. That can create some social pressure to encourage folks like
Bob to step up, or it can alert managers to areas where perhaps
Bob needs additional training or coaching or it could be that Bob
needs to find another position either inside or outside of your
company," Duggan says.
It's really all about using data to discover how and where
collaboration is working and where it's not, and delivering
adequate feedback and support to your employees when, where
and how they need it, says Duggan.
"The standard today is that workers are not getting a lot of
feedback on what they're working on, and they don't know if what
they're doing matters. We hope that we can help people
understand that what they're working on is important, it matters

and that they're making an open, transparent and clear

contribution," he says.

Sharon Florentine Senior Writer, CIO.com

Sharon Florentine covers IT careers, women in technology and diversity, as well as
software, Agile, cloud tech, data center and security topics. She has written for CRN,
eWEEK, Channel Insider and CIOInsight, among others. You can reach her
at sflorentine@cio.com or on Twitter @MyShar0na.

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