Beyond Collaboration Overload
Organize collaborative work so as to reduce work overload and the burnout risks
Author(s): Rob Cross
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Date of publication: 2021
Manageris opinion
The development of digital working tools and teleworking have allowed for anyone to be almost permanently available. In companies with a strong culture of performance, it is customary for managers to be available for their teams, to accept meetings they are invited to and to rapidly read messages, whichever the channel used to reach them. Collaboration, in particular, is branded as a pre-requisite to performance in the agile world that is now ours. But, as Rob Cross underlines, we probably went too far.
Indeed, collaboration does not automatically induce performance. We must also cooperate on topics for which exchanging perspectives and thoughts brings added value. In reality, far too much coordination time with little added value fills our schedules.
The author invites us to take a step back on this automatic reaction that now consists in calling onto collaboration to solve all our challenges. A more strategic approach to collaborative work would on the contrary allow us to win back time in our schedules and to reduce the number of topics that we have in mind simultaneously.
An approach to explore to reduce work overload and the burnout risks.
