Excessive Collaboration

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Today I'm actually going to turn the podcast over to our Editor in chief, Adi Ignatius, who recently sat down with Rob Cross, a professor at The University of Virginia's McIntyre School of Commerce, to talk about Rob's article, Collaborative Overload. This is an article that we at HBR found almost depressingly popular. Clearly it spoke to a lot of people who just feel like they're being asked to do too much at work with too many people. So without further ado, let's hear their conversation.

Thank you for being here with us.

Thank you so much for the time.

So let's step back first for a second is what apparently we're all feeling true is collaboration really on the rise?

So our work shows that it certainly is in a pretty spectacular way. Overall, we've been at the focus of analyzing collaboration and informal Networks for about 20 years now. Starting initially with the research group at IBM and then through two consortia here at the University of Virginia, we've worked with hundreds of organizations and very systematically you can see in that data that the collaborative demands are rising very significantly across all categories of work. And it's a product of a number of things we have. Almost every large organization is in some form of matrix based structure that forces more collaborations throughout the enterprise, greater usage of email today, greater social media usage, globalization efforts that force interactions across geography and time zones, a greater complexity and interdependence of most forms of work, just a whole number of things is really driving this increased demand of collaboration inside and outside of organizations. So to me, both the volume of it is rising and pressing on us all, and we all intuitively feel that. But then also in maybe even a little bit more troubling ways, the diversity of those demands, it's not typically coming just from one's boss or from one area that it can be controlled and seen, but much more broadly from interactions across an enterprise outside the organization. And so it's both factors that really seem to create the overload on people today.

So can you quantify this? I mean, how much of our time or on average are people spending on what you've defined as collaborative work?

Right. So every time I'm in front of an audience, I will throw that question out as almost the starting question of a presentation or a program I'll say, what percent of your time in a typical week do you spend on the following three activities cumulatively? And then I'll say on the phone, on email, or in meetings, virtual or face to face. And you know, without a doubt there's a groan in the room and a chuckle. And it typically starts at about 90% and goes up to 120% that somebody yells out who's really mad right at all the work going home with them. And that's pretty consistent with what the data is showing now. It's different depending on level, depending on the nature of the role in organizations. So it's hard to put an absolute number on it in terms of time spent, but we've seen anywhere between 60 and 90% increase in, in collaborative demands depending on the nature of the role, the level that we're looking at, especially over the past eight or so years. You know, we can't precisely say a specific number because of the nature of it, but I can't think of another resource out there that if it was consumed to that great an extent over such a short time period, people wouldn't be paying attention to it. You know, in this case, it's employee time, but in almost any other resource you think about, the CFO would be all over it. Yet somehow this is a, you know, an issue that's really left to the individual employees to manage and figure out a lot of times.

So I often feel that all of these meetings, all of the time that I spend answering colleagues email is somehow taking me away from my real work. But then I realized this is most of my day, so this is my real work. Can you remind me, what did we used to do before this? What was real work before 80, 90% of our time was spent doing all of this?

Yeah, I think it's definitely shifted. Like you say, there's an aspect of it that really is focused on getting things done. It's very rare for any of us today to know enough to be able to accomplish something of substance by ourselves. There used to be certainly a point where people could know enough about a given domain to be able to advance things, whether it's a new product, a specific financial transaction, consulting engagement, various kinds of things in R and D. But more and more, the depth of those various bases of knowledge and the interdependence of them require collaboration happens. So fundamentally, the trick for me is to really then say, okay, if it is an important component of work, how do we make that efficient? Just like we focused on efficiencies in all other aspects of work, are there certain things that we can learn from those people that manage collaboration more efficiently and transfer those practices and begin to think about that from an efficiency standpoint and not just a greater connectivity standpoint.

So what is good collaboration and where does it become excessive? How do you define that? Or maybe more importantly, how should companies figure out where to draw that line? It seems hard to figure out where to draw it.

So there are a range of different analytics we can do with the network analyses that we run here to see where is excessive connectivity happening. So our focus on it is not to say how do we get more or less connectivity in the network in general, where and how are there gaps in connectivity that need to be built out for the organization to be successful? But then just as importantly, where do we see excessive connectivity happening that is slowing things down? So as an example of that, one of the more common things for us to see is 3 to 5% of the people in many, many networks will account for 20 to 35% of the value added collaborations. Usually only about half of those people are known in the company in the sense that they're on the top talent list or the leaders would predict them ahead of time. And what we're really interested in, in those sets of people that are enabling others to be effective. You know that companies just often don't track that well. Sports teams have tracked assists forever. So it's a different network question that we're looking at and focusing on. But we find that when people are in the thick of these networks and they have more than 25% of their network saying that, gosh, I need more of that individual's time to be able to execute, then that starts to represent a slowness. It starts to affect the productivity of the individual a lot of times leads to burnout and increasingly turnover in certain places. And then it affects the ability of the whole organization to execute around people like that. And it's not uncommon with one major merger we did recently where 5% of the people at that mid tier were absorbing over 40% of the collaborative demands in a multi thousand person group. So when you see things like that and these pinch points in organizations, that's one of a couple of different ways that we target in on where collaborative overload is affecting both the performance and well being of the individuals, but also the performance of the organization.

Okay, so basically what you're saying is that this collaboration is falling unfairly on a fairly small number of people. So these serial collaborators, I guess, are they suckers? They Put their hands up, are they the best employees or is it that they are the only person in finance or between finance and technology and they kind of have to be there at every meeting in this new kind of complex organization.

Right. I think it's a great question. So I think 50% of the time, and of course I say 50%, I'm grossly stereotyping, of course, but roughly half the time, time we look at that and we see that the people that get into these positions, it's a product of poorly designed roles. And so about 50% of the time we're focusing on what are the role drivers of this and how do we shift decision rights to different points, how do we make alternative people go to people on certain kinds of informational requests and other portions of roles that can be allocated in a way that delayers the overloaded and draws in the less connected. And. And there is a ton of that. You can imagine most people resonate with the idea when I just mentioned travel approvals. And many organizations make it to unholy heights because somebody made a mistake 20 years ago and it becomes policy. And then they don't think about the incredible collaborative demands as small decisions, whether it be travel approvals or capital expenditure requests or HR decisions absorb a tremendous amount of time. So one thing we're looking for is where is that happening and where are those role driven interactions consuming more than they should? But then the other is the point you raised. It's incredibly common to see people get in these positions just because they're good and they become good, they become effective in these networks, they become high performers at points in their lives because they're responsive, because they're quick to help, because others are coming to them and bringing opportunities to them. But then without hitting some kind of transition where they as individuals focus on recognizing that they need to build capability around them and build a network underneath and connect people you know by them, do other things that make them more efficient. They are quite often at risk for burning out. As I said earlier, they're increasingly likely to leave organizations. And so that's really a critical point to be seeing where some of your stars potentially falling into this category and you become susceptible to losing your top talent.

And I think you said the burden often falls on women more than men.

There's a little bit of evidence of that. There's a greater tendency for sure for the women to engage in helping oriented behavior. And so we see that. And when I say a little bit of evidence, I mean it's countered inside organizations by the way, formal structure dictates patterns, so some of that is attenuated compared to what you might see outside of organizations.

So what is the cost then of this rise in excessive collaboration? Who is paying the price?

Well, companies pay it for sure. The cost to the companies can be quantified in specific financial dollars. We can go in and say here is the absolute hard cost that you're spending in terms of collaborative activities and here is where those collaborative activities do not support strategic objectives that you have. And so you can quantify the cost to companies in the sense of time spent in activities that are not adding value in an organization or people that are consuming a lot more time than the high performers are in an organization. I'm personally more concerned about the individual costs and what happens to people over time as they persist in this. I watch in particular my undergrads as they leave the classroom here at uva and the demands that they step into is an entirely different world from 10, 15 years ago where they're constantly online, they're feeling under pressure. And so we spend a lot of time here at the university thinking about, well, being ideas. You know, how do you place anchors around your life that don't allow you to get absorbed exclusively by work? Because there is a very real individual performance impact, but also just a flat out physical and mental well being impact that can happen if people are not thinking about that.

So why don't we talk about solutions then for a second? So for individuals, keep on that. Are there some basic approaches that individuals can take to kind of fight back?

Yeah, and that's a great way of saying it, I think, because in some ways it's kind of an onslaught. But I do think there are things, and this is a core part of what we're doing this year is interviewing across a lot of organizations, more efficient collaborators and seeing what's unique about them. And what we're finding early stage right now is that there tend to be differences in terms of cognitively how they think about their work. So as an example, they're more likely to build in buffers during their day to either do all their emails at a certain point in time. There are estimates that say you lose up to 64 seconds every time you're distracted and try to come back if, if you've answered a text or other things like that. So we're finding that people that do better tend to block time for work. They need to get done for certain kinds of interactions. They tend not to derive identity from needing to be in the thick of Things and so driving requests back to them over time. Behaviorally, they tend to be much more efficient in how they manage meetings and how they delegate. There's just a whole suite of things that are not. Nothing's big, right? It's more the death of a thousand cuts, I think that happens with this idea, but a whole suite of smaller behaviors and activities that they undertake that tend to push some of the demands off. So I'll give you one idea that I hear from an awful lot of people has produced great results and that is if busy executives look back over their calendar for about a four month period and just quickly go through the calendar and some select emails to define three ideas. One, what are the routine informational requests that I'm getting drawn into that I don't need to be a part of anymore? And they find a lot of times that there are certain kinds of requests that they've just been responding to because they were good at it five years ago. They felt like they need to, to support a buddy, whatever it may be. But by defining those informational requests and creating other go to people, it shifts the demands off of them. Number two, what are the routine decisions I'm getting pulled into that I'm not adding value on or I'm responding because I feel like I need to. And again, can you cluster those, create a go to person change process, whatever it may be. Number three, other portions of role. And again, we find that people can isolate out and are often very, very surprised when they look back about four months at the amount of their time that's getting absorbed in those activities. You can't do it looking back last week or the last two weeks because then everything makes sense. It's this kind of flow of activity. But if you step back and create space and look back, that's a pretty effective way to buy time back in different ways.

I mean, it's hard because if the boss is asking you to be part of a new collaborative team, it is flattering. It feels like access to something important that the company is doing. Power, responsibility. You know, it seems that the burden is maybe more on managers to avoid doing this to their people than necessarily coming up with ways for people to buffer themselves or to say no. So maybe that's the next question. What can managers do? Fairly simple rules, let's say, other than tracking data over years and trying to figure out something. I mean, what are some basic approaches to avoiding this kind of excessive collaboration from a managerial standpoint?

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I mean, number one, is just to be aware of it, you know, and the degree to which it exists. Because a lot of times leaders themselves live in a bubble of activity. They move from meeting to meeting. They feel like a lot is getting done. They're not aware of the things that are not getting to them or that are two layers out in the network or the way in which certain interactions they have create a whipping effect through the network and create excessive demands. So just being aware of it and recognizing the amount of cost that gets incurred, I think is one really important thing. If you are asking for more information before making a decision at a point where you really could make that decision, is that really valuable how you handle bad news? When something comes to you, is that that going to dictate whether people keep coming back to you and checking earlier and earlier because they feel that they're going to be in trouble if they don't? When you choose to send that email, right, is it really important to get something off your desk at 10 o' clock at night that then creates stress and a whole swath of activity with those three or four layers out that could wait until the morning, you know, in a face to face conversation. So again, these are specific things that we're pulling out of the interviews right now. But I do think there are, you know, a whole slew of opportunities for leaders to be thinking about this. Perhaps the most common that we see and that you alluded to is who you pick for that next assignment. And the most common thing we see is that leaders, they sit around a room and they just think about, okay, who do we want to lead this next big initiative? And they are going to statistically always pick the most connected people. And so the people that are already overloaded and they should really check that assumption and say, okay, is there somebody maybe a little further out in the network? Maybe we don't do the analytics, but just intuitively we know that this little further out that we're trying to develop, maybe they're a better decision. Or if we do stick with our first choice, are there things we take off of that person's plate systematically and not just assume that they can manage it? Like all these are just important things for people to be thinking about in the context of how they're leading today.

So the basic unit of collaboration is the meeting. And we all probably feel like we have too many meetings. I've tried to institute Fridays. There can be no meetings. There can be no meetings that don't have a set agenda. They should be only 30 minutes long. People should only stand. You know, you introduce these things, they last for about a week and then all the old patterns reemerge. So what has happened with this meeting culture? You know, are there too many people in meetings? Are there wrong people in meetings? Are we holding meetings for the wrong reasons? What's happening here?

Yeah, I think it's a lot of that in different ways, but I think there are good examples. And I don't feel comfortable naming the names of these organizations until I got permission. But one I'm thinking of in particular is a global, very well known aerospace organization that actually invested a tremendous amount in focusing on the time that meetings take. And they instituted a range of practices just like what you're talking about. The who's invited, don't let people get comfortable, God forbid, don't serve food, you know, ranges of things like that to try and streamline them. And they've actually shown tremendous results. But it is a discipline, you know what I mean? It has to be something that people hold themselves accountable for in terms of the agendas they manage, the people that are invited, the people that are uninvited in a way that makes it okay not to attend. But I do think it's a cultural norm. It has to be something that gets built in and reinforced over time and not just, let's try this, let's meet in the stairwell this week or let's do things, you know, just on an ad hoc basis.

Once again, that was Adi Ignatius and Rob Cross. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael and this has been the HBR IdeaCast. You can find more from Rob, including this article on hbr.org if you like the show, please do consider leaving a review for us on itunes as it helps new listeners find us. Thanks.