101: Collaboration overload

Collaboration at work is great, until it isn’t. Too many cooks in the kitchen, also known as collaborative overload, is when communication and decision-making gridlock slow an organization’s flexibility, impacting employee engagement. It can result in decreased employee creativity and wellbeing, according to research by Babson College in Wellesley. Redistribute work. This can involve structural changes, where companies give lower-level managers necessary authority to manage their units, according to Ted.com. Freeing up these managers from the bottlenecks that can result from having to wait for decisions from higher-ups – and all the unnecessary emails and exchanges going along with them – cuts down on headaches. Behavioral change should be encouraged. “Collaborative-minded employees should also learn to seek out activities and projects that energize them, not exhaust them. The help seekers should also learn new habits, for example by reconsidering whether all of their meetings are truly required,” the site says. Use data. Data can be used to discern which of your employees is taking on too much. At CIO.com, experts say technology can show whether your most valuable employees are in a cycle of burnout before it’s too late. “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,” says software solutions expert Kris Duggan, something easier to manage when work was more siloed. Know small changes add up. Addressing this overload, according to Entrepreneurship.Babson.edu, takes subtle shifts in behavior, such as running meetings in a more structured fashion, using email less and more carefully, and realizing that “saying yes to something means automatically saying no to something else – work, professional goals, personal aspirations, family.” That is where the overload creeps in.