Media

Harvard Business Review

Collaborative overload is not just a problem of volume. It has an invisible but equally sinister counterpart in cognitive switching costs created by the diversity of demands. Connected Commons research over the past decade on collaborative overload shows that more efficient collaborators — those who have the greatest impact in networks and take the least amount of time from people — are distinguished in part by how they put structure into their work to reduce the insidious cost of being “always on.” Employees at all levels are feeling the strain of collaborative overload, and there is no end in sight as we transition into a post-pandemic world of work. When they’re appropriately applied, analytics can help identify significant efficiencies in this hyper-connected world of work.

INC.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, chances are you’re collaborating too much. Excessive collaboration – created when the pace, volume and diversity of meetings, phone calls, email, IM and other collaborative platforms erodes performance and well-being — was already high before the pandemic, and it’s continued to expand over the last year. Connected Commons research shows that collaboration consumes 85 percent or more of most peoples’ work week–and our work interactions are drifting earlier into the morning and later into the evening. Dysfunctional collaboration invisibly undermines performance and effectiveness of entrepreneurial teams and has become a primary source of burnout, attrition, and poor decision-making as well.

TED Ideas

We are collaborating too much. That’s what Rob Cross has realized after studying high (and low) performers at effective organizations for more than 20 years. “We’re too eager to jump into, or be dragged into, active collaborations that might run better without us and that burn up our valuable time and energy,” he writes in his new book Beyond Collaboration Overload. And collaboration overload isn’t just about the meetings that fill up our calendars — it’s also the endless emails, Slacks, reports and work that every new project generates. To reduce the overload, one essential step to take is to recognize the desires, needs, feelings and expectations that lead us to taking on too much. Here, Cross looks at the most common and how we can counter them.

MIT Sloan Management Review

Collaboration is essential in today’s work world, but it can also consume more time and energy than well-intended leaders expect or recognize. What precisely do we need in collaborative interactions, what are we trying to get out of them, and how can we optimize our time together? Robert Cross’ research shows that by applying network analysis across all organizations, regardless of company size, you could consistently see that both the number of collaborative demands and the diversity of them were overwhelming people. A task may look easy on the project plan, but if it requires you to coordinate across three time zones with two leaders who dislike one another to secure resources from somebody with misaligned incentives — that’s huge in terms of time. And that’s what’s been invisible. People are overwhelmed — and it’s not going to get better, given this perpetual move toward greater collaboration and enterprise connectivity. We can track expense receipts down to two decimal places because of the sophistication of our systems, but organizations have to become more sophisticated at seeing the actual collaborative footprint of work. And people must be better equipped to manage collaboration in this hyper-connected world.

CNBC

Can you identify a time when you were energized at work? In other words, you gave more effort than you would’ve expected to, doing something that you wouldn’t have thought was particularly exciting — because someone infused the task with energy and spurred your enthusiasm. Why did you feel that way? Chances are it was less about the work and more about the people you collaborated with. Perhaps the client visit became inspiring because your counterpart was so passionate and engaged. Or your boss gave you a boost of motivation because they showed genuine excitement about your ideas, interests and aspirations for the project. People who create this experience for others at work frequently are called energizers. They thrive on collaboration and personal connections with teammates.

Financial Times

Collaboration has become a constant of global business. Today, practically everything we do at work is based on cooperation. Much of the unhappiness among executives, managers and employees, however, comes from dysfunctional forms of collaboration that most of us fall into. In Beyond Collaboration Overload, Rob Cross shows how to rethink beliefs, structures and behaviors to help us adopt new patterns of interacting more efficiently. Networking plays a large part in this, especially non-insular networks– those that encompass a diversity of perspectives, values and expertise—which offer rich opportunities to get help with projects, tap into ideas, gain a broad perspective and enable us to see problems and opportunities in novel ways.

The Wall Street Journal

We are deep in the age of the never-ending check-in. Meetings have gotten shorter during the pandemic, but they are also multiplying. There’s the 25-minute client touch-base, the general life catch-up with your manager, the bite-size performance feedback session, the meeting to prep for the meeting. Toggling between more, shorter meetings is hugely taxing on our brains and has created work that we don’t always realize or take account for. Once we acknowledge this, there are steps to be taken to eliminate this impact.