Editorial
Teams spend a lot of time collaborating: it’s estimated we spend anywhere from 25% to up to 80% of our days working together on projects. It’s no surprise that collaboration stands at the core of creating a healthy employee experience.
For instance, researchers Rob Cross, Amy Edmonson, and Wendy Murphy found that the type and quality of collaboration in an organization actually has the greatest impact on employee engagement.
Their research goes on to show that creating a culture of collaboration is a tiered process. It begins with trust and psychological safety, before instilling a sense of purpose. But even that is not enough: you must also generate enthusiasm and excitement, which they call energy. Only then do you get to the next stage — a truly collaborative organization.
However, collaboration experiences marked by overzealous egos, politics and general negativity can have a devastating effect on culture. For instance, in one study, 72% of respondents said they have been involved in at least one workplace collaboration that was “absolutely horrendous.” The impacts on business results were direct: operational drag, busted timelines and budgets, managerial headaches and overloaded HR staff with complaints.
The bottom line? If you want to improve the employee experience, you have to pay attention to how teams are collaborating.
Yet, despite recent attention on designing a great employee experience, little thought is given to designing the collaboration experience. All too often, the default strategy is to throw people together and hope for the best. But hoping for serendipitous “water cooler moments” and hallway collisions doesn’t cut it in today’s distributed workplace.
Being intentional about collaboration and designing teamwork requires a new approach, one that’s broader than just improving meetings. To help make teamwork more intentional, it’s helpful to design teamwork with the overall collaboration experience in mind.
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A Model for Collaboration Experiences
As collaboration becomes a core focus with strategic implications, and teamwork stands at the heart of strategy execution, our notion of the collaboration experience needs to expand as well.
Before understanding the bigger picture, let’s first zoom in. At the core of a collaboration experience is problem-solving, the team's ultimate goal. The team starts with a challenge and eventually ends with a resolution (even if to continue working on the challenge).
Borrowing from design thinking, team interaction at this stage is characterized by divergent, exploratory collaboration — flaring out together after opening, followed by convergent decision-making, then finding a closing as a team. This more or less represents those “together time” moments of teamwork or synchronous interactions.
At the same time, for groups to function as a team there must be some development of relationships and connections amongst the members. We summarize the relational layer considerations as taking time to “connect” and “reflect” together. Check-ins, warm-ups and team-building exercises fall into this category, as do retrospectives and reviews.
Adding to the core of the collaboration experience, a representation might look like this.
While spending time together, whether in-person or remote, is important, there’s a growing recognition that collaboration also happens when teams are apart from one another. Called asynchronous collaboration, this alone time lets people work towards a common goal but at their own pace.
We can think of asynchronous collaboration as happening before and after real-time interactions, represented by “prepare” and “follow-up” in the extended model below.
Now the model starts to become more complete. Zooming out even further, we can look at the collaboration experience over time as a series of interlocking synchronous and asynchronous moments, as well as both problem-solving and team-building activities.
In an ideal world, the beginning of one episode connects to the next, with teams moving in and out of different modes of interaction. But of course, from the individual’s perspective, teamwork isn’t this neat and regular. There are loops back and forth, as well as breaks in the flow. And sometimes there are large synchronous episodes with very little alone time and vice-versa.
Still, by expanding our understanding of the overall collaboration in this way, teams can better think about not only improving teamwork but also how collaboration affects the employee experience. We can start to see how teamwork is woven into the fabric of the employee experience over time.
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Think Global, Act Local
Don’t be daunted. The intention of presenting a broader picture of collaboration doesn’t suggest the whole thing must be orchestrated from the top-down. Rather, an awareness of different modes of collaboration — sync and async — as well as the relational aspects of teamwork can help show how to improve teamwork at the local level. In fact, it’s much better to take small chunks and improve team collaboration one step at a time than try to boil the ocean.
For instance, taking time to connect and to reflect, even if done sporadically, can have a huge impact on team health. Just asking “How are you doing?” can go a long way in building team connections. The collaboration experience model above reminds us that just addressing one aspect of it -- like fixing bad meetings -- may not be enough.
Still, you can start anywhere at any time. Over time, relationships build and teams improve their ability to problem solve. Here are some things to consider to get started:
- Introduce rituals to connect and reflect. More than offsites and team retreats, small rituals that become habitualized can have a big impact. Try starting each meeting or team interaction with a short exercise to build relationships. For instance, a quick two-minute warm-up to get a sense of the group’s overall mood or hear about everyone’s favorite dessert is all it takes to strengthen relationships over time, and you can get started with your next team interaction.
- Increase asynchronous collaboration. The balance of collaboration modes is generally skewed towards synchronous interactions. Increasing async collaboration doesn’t have to be hard and starts one step at a time. For one, everyone should come prepared for meetings having done the requisite background reading or preparations. But also try shifting purely information meetings to recorded messages or a daily stand-up to a virtual stand-up on group chat.
- Keep the momentum going. The point of the above collaboration experience model is to show how interactions are connected over time. The trick is keeping momentum going, particularly with distributed teams. Plan a strong follow-up to synchronous interactions. Teams are prone to suffer from “meeting amnesia,” or the tendency to forget decisions and commitments made during meetings. Tie team interactions together so the end of one sets up the beginning of the next. Also be sure to capture action items directly in task management software or project management motions to prevent loss of momentum.
The best time to start being more intentional about collaboration is right now. Take the next meeting you have coming up. Introduce a new practice, such as a brief check-in or warm-up. See how it goes, and iterate from there.
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Then start introducing more and more collaboration methods. You’ll soon see that there’s no shortage of these practices — and ways to combine them. As you so, consider the overall flow of teamwork and seek points of intervention to improve it.
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