Is there too much collaboration in business?

Schumpeter is the nom de plume of a regular business writer in The Economist. The current incarnation is a particularly hard-nosed type. He or she rails against fluffy fads as he sees them, like corporate social responsibility. There are even challenges for those promoting diversity. It is always a good thought-provoking read, ready to challenge a lazy consensus.

A few weeks ago he (it is probably a he I think) took at swipe at collaboration in business (http://www.economist.com/news/business/21688872-fashion-making-employees-collaborate-has-gone-too-far-collaboration-curse). Probably based on bitter personal experience, there are complaints against mountains of e-mail and endless rounds of meetings. The age of multi-tasking and ubiquitous communication comes at the expense of real work, especially creative work, which is usually best when it is solitary and undistracted.

As usual, he is well-argued, and as usual a lot of these arguments resonate. We have all worked with the type I call meeting man. I first came across this species thirty years ago. It is often someone intelligent and curious who has plateaued and given a role with little responsibility. Meeting man pounces when he finds people ready to be sociable. The first response to any discussion is to organize a meeting. The result of the meeting is to arrange another meeting. It takes some time to realize that the purpose is at best intellectual and at worst social.

Then there is e-mail, nowadays enhanced even in companies by instant messenger and other such services. Everyone is swamped by e-mail, or at least everyone claims to be swamped by it in case others conclude that they are not important.

Schumpeter concludes by arguing that companies should challenge excessive communication, and be careful to encourage enough solitary work.

I find this advice alluring but dangerous, because it can work against what most employees really crave. I do some work for a firm called Synthetron (www.synthetron.com), where we arrange real-time online anonymous dialogues, scripted to address topics of importance to groups of stakeholders.

True, participants nearly always complain about e-mail and overload and are nostalgic for simpler times. But even more common is a plea for authentic engagement, and a desire for teamwork, listening, and, yes, collaboration. Rarely have I witnessed a session that does not bemoan silos, even recognizing that silos are the epitome of the desired goal of accountability. The cult of the KPI and of outsized rewards for the few seems to have led to gaps opening up between senior leaders and typical staff, and between teams and departments.

If firms follow the advice of Schumpeter, my guess is that they would make these matters worse. Reducing collaboration in order to boost performance is alluring, but ultimately might drive the company into an even bigger hole. The things that would be lost would be exactly those pieces of engagement that people crave, while the curse of e-mail and meetings would remain.

I think a better approach is to seek more effective communication, via better use of e-mail and smarter meetings.

I have long believed in a simple approach to improving e-mail, using budgets and an internal market. The first thing to recognize is that there is a single overwhelming driver to the number of e-mails you receive, which is the number you send. If we send less, we receive less. Consider when you go on vacation and stop, or at least slow down, the e-mails you send. In the first week, your inbox will be nearly as full as usual. But from the second week, your inbox lightens up. You have not been forgotten, though it is interesting to note that the company does actually function without your attention 24/7.

Most of us have been offered good practice about sending e-mails, including minimizing use of reply-to-all and reducing attachments. But there is no enforcement or measurement. Yet technology now would make background measurement simple. Managers could receive a monthly report, just as they do for something like phone usage. Companies use internal charges for staff time and set budgets based on them. Why not set a budget for e-mails?

The budget could be simple or try to be smarter. At its simplest, any e-mail sent counts as one unit per recipient. An alternative would add a rate per word, and then per attachment and even per attachment size. An internal system could calculate these indicators automatically.

Companies could use the results in many ways. A loose approach would be just as an individual coaching aid, so I could track whether I am improving in my practice. At the next level, my boss could receive a comparison report, maybe with everyone seeing the worst offenders month by month. Or the points could be attached to real (internal) costs, with consequences for exceeding budgets.

What gets measured gets done, and this would be so simple to implement. A few jobs might warrant higher budgets, such as people disbursing regular reports, but even there it is worth seeking a downward trend line. The next sophistication would be to allow recipients some input, so, for example, a message ranked by recipients as valuable would gain a budget discount.

Meetings, and teleconferences, are a bit harder, because the measurement is more subjective and less automatic. Would you charge the organizer, or all attendees? And there is a wider variety of quality between meetings, or at least no opportunity to delete one quickly like with an e-mail.

Ideally, participants could score a meeting at its conclusion. Did it start and end on time? Was there an agenda? Were there outcomes beyond simply agreeing to another meeting? The problem with this is that the leaders of most meetings are the most senior person in the room, and subordinates are not going to easily mark down their boss.

There are good practices to help. I like the college idea of starting all meetings at five past the hour and ending at five to, so there is some contingency and chance for people to be on time to their next meetings. I also like the practice of designating agenda, notes and timekeeping to specific participants who aren’t the boss. I also believe that meetings with more than eight participants usually achieve nothing. Some combination of budgeting, good practice and enforcement might help, but it is not so simple as the solution to improving e-mail.

The stakes for this challenge are high. Traditionalists like Schumpeter already believe that touchy feely collaboration has become too widespread, while participants in Synthetron sessions tell a different story. They often use desperate language, talking of drowning in overload while lacking any sense of engagement.

So any company that can be more effective at collaborative practices can secure a strong competitive advantage. My e-mail charging system would be so simple to implement and so revealing in its results that I am astonished that something like it has not already been widely adopted. Meetings are harder, at least until hierarchies become looser and meeting men are retired off, which is bad news for those people suffering hours of teleconference torture like I used to.

Is corporate performance management a relic?

I joined the workforce in 1982, just as Mrs Thatcher was starting the revolution that would destroy unions and corporatism in the UK and Reagan was putting in place the so-called supply side reforms that would do the same in US and sow the seeds of the inequality we now have.

I can accept the good side of these changes. Unions had become the ultimate example of the disastrous approach of “prevent defence”. Ironically, the revolution may not have done a lot for typical families in the west, but it has transformed lives in much of the developing world.

Personally, I gained from the revolution. Blessed with an education, a brain, some commercial nous and plenty of luck, I saw my pay check expand so quickly that I was able to jump off the bus at fifty, a ridiculous indulgence really. The outsize rewards did not make me work harder or be more productive, if anything the opposite. I recall one quote from the time that still rings true: why do we accept that in order to motivate the elite we must pay them more, but to motivate everyone else we must pay them less?

Driven more by technology then ideology, most things about how we work have changed since those days in the eighties. Rewards have stagnated, but most of the other changes have been beneficial.

People are much less wedded to their companies. When I started it almost felt like colonial rule, now ties are much looser. People are much more able to develop their skills than before, and to enlarge their specialisms. We work more in teams and less as vassals of our bosses, and everything is much more informal. Work is more flexible in many ways, tailored to our individual preferences. We are much more self-sufficient, thanks to computers. Best of all, everything is much more diverse and open.

But one thing has hardly changed at all. From the start, my boss sat me down in a formal meeting two or three times a year. I was allocated a set of tasks and targets. There was a cursory discussion about my personal development, usually leading to a marginally relevant training course. My boss tried to tell me what I did well and less well, and what might be a reasonable ultimate ambition. Based loosely on how I succeeded compared with aforementioned tasks and targets and my peers, I was rewarded with a pay rise, a bonus and sometimes a promotion. All of this was surrounded by acronyms, templates, and fixed timetables.

If this all seemed quaint in 1982, it seems completely anachronistic now, because of all the changes in how work gets done. Tasks and targets used to be out of date within six months, but nowadays it is often true after only six weeks. Many of us have several bosses and change boss or even company during the year, and the processes fail to accommodate this. We also work on multiple teams and have learned to offer and feedback more frequently and not just up and down the line. Just think about how you choose a restaurant these days, instant feedback and peer review are everywhere – that is everywhere except corporate performance management.

Like many corporate warriors, I can recount many stories from my own experience of performance management, both as victim and perpetrator. I learned how to game a staff appraisal meeting. I have observed the full spectrum of bosses, from the arrogant to the tongue-tied, the cynical to the naïve, but I don’t think I ever had a boss who had been trained to be a boss or particularly revelled in it, so most of them weren’t much good at performance management. I believe that my best ever year of work resulted in my worst ever ranking, and that the very next year was probably my worst year of work and resulted in one of my best rankings. Many meetings started by looking at the goals laid down a year before, with both me and my boss struggling to remember where they came from and how they could ever have been relevant. I received some great feedback and some terrible feedback, and no doubt dished out the same. Many of the strongest emotional moments I recall have been in these meetings, with tears, hope, denial, guilt, anger, gratitude, shame and redemption all present at various times. I was told at 22 exactly where my ultimate job grade would be, in all seriousness, and somehow they got it exactly right.

Not before time, there is a growing body of literature arguing for change to the whole edifice of corporate performance management. One school uses the fashionable label of “agile” (http://www.cognology.com.au/learning_center/agile-performance-management/), and has some laudable ideas and goals. No one could argue against more plentiful and wide and frequent feedback, and this can easily be grafted onto an existing system and given some status in appraisal. A greater focus on development is already a feature of more progressive systems, though often undermined by less competent or disinterested bosses.

The challenge comes in going beyond integrating all this with enough weight into the established process of set piece meetings. While such meetings are so central and consequential, anything else faces the risk of being drowned out. One key mismatch is with goal setting. I am a great believer in goals, but I am convinced that they should be contextual, both in time horizon and style. In many situations, three different sets of goals make sense, one for the next few weeks with immediate actions, one for two or three months with expected milestones and one with something more visionary for a year or two hence. Each of these time horizons can be shortened or lengthened, and each set of goals should be updated once about half the relevant time horizon has passed.

The contextual method of goal setting does not sit easily with organisational cascades, business planning and annual rises linked to performance, though they are not impossible to reconcile. What is wrong is the emphasis: in most corporations the official machine takes precedence, and contextual goals are often overlooked. A smart organisation has a full range of contextual goals working in parallel, somehow fed into the company-wide process.

Why does the corporate process dominate? Partly it is because business leaders have always been central control types, almost communistic despite their professed belief in markets and capitalism. But in my opinion a bigger reason comes back to the Thatcher/Reagan revolution. Individualistic, shareholder-style capitalism quickly drove performance related pay of monumental greed. To give this a veneer of justification, goals became KPI’s and more rigid and cascaded down organisations. Dogma came to dominate common sense more than ever. This has held back any moves towards more agile performance management, at least in its goal setting and appraisal/reward components.

An overemphasis on faux-rigorous KPI’s damages organisations more widely. Space for discretion is squeezed, and silos trump collaboration. Everything is more rigid, and the company moves more slowly as a result, while motivation also suffers. While greed remains dominant, even internet-economy companies succumb to this inertia eventually, once they are big enough to require management levels.

Despite the obstacles, there are probably ways that companies can make their performance more suitable for the needs of their staff, and also ways that we as individuals can follow better performance management practice. A small company I am involved with called Synthetron offers anonymous, online, real-time dialogues. Occasionally we run open sessions on topics of general interest, and one of these will look at fixing performance management on Wednesday March 2^nd, at 5pm CET or 11am EST. Join us – Synthetron sessions are always an interesting experience. You can register at http://www7.synthetron.com/start/?sessie=thinktank-fpm      

Happy money

Apart from sport, pretty much the only TV we watch in the US is on the public channels. They have a strange funding model, in which they cannot (or choose not to) advertise, but have little or no public funding. This means they have to constantly beg for donations, and in the end the schedule is interrupted just as often with begging as other stations are interrupted by advertisements. Sometimes I wish they would just take ads.

The funding model may be outdated, but the remainder of the charter offers quality not otherwise available on US TV. A good example is news, which has become a desert elsewhere but remains worth watching on PBS. On most channels, news is a mixture of local scandal, weather, gossip and some trite political point scoring, and is truly excruciating. PBS has a nightly one hour broadcast with a balanced summary followed by interesting features. It is excellent.

Typical of the features is a weekly series about making sense of economics, put together by a guy called Paul Solman. He is typical PBS, getting on a bit and lacking in charisma, but with a knack for an interesting informative angle. His reports are topical and balanced, and always inform me of something new. Just like all the Newshour, in fact.

A few weeks ago, Solman ran a feature about the link between money and happiness, centred around a book by Liz Dunn and Michael Norton called “Happy Money”, and involving an extensive interview with Dunn. I was sufficiently aroused to actually buy the book, though upon reading it I wish I hadn’t, since it adds little to the headlines and is in a rather annoying style. At least the book supports the headline claims by showing that most conclusions are based on thorough research.

Like many business books, this one follows the tried and tested and rather superficial approach of coming up with a limited number of key headlines. In this case, there are supposedly five megatips for finding happiness from our money. There is no claim that money makes you happy, though an acknowledgement that a lack of it often makes you unhappy. Instead, the starting point is that many of us blessed with some money do not always act in ways that help towards happiness.

The five themes are to buy experiences, buy time, make things a treat, pay in advance, and buy for others. All of these are fairly self-explanatory. In the book, there are long-winded explanations, lots of support from studies and experiments, and a few stories.

The only one that I had to read more about to understand was about paying in advance. Seemingly, the joy is in consuming, and paying at the same time can remove some of the joy. Paying afterwards also affects the joy, because there is a lingering anxiety or awareness of the future obligation. Paying in advance leaves space for untrammeled joy. I guess it makes some sense.

The one about making things a treat could perhaps be better expressed as its converse, to avoid good things becoming routine. It is not easy to always remember to count our blessings, and the more regular the blessing the easier it is to forget to count it. So either make a point of celebrating each time, or otherwise mix things up so that good things feel like a treat.

Rather than reading the book, I suggest thinking about each of the five in terms of our own life. Try to avoid feeling smug, or locked in to unhappiness, but instead look for ways to do a little better in each dimension.

Initially I fell into the smugness trap. What can buy more time than retirement? Where offers richer experiences than New York? I do have routine joys, but try to find ways to celebrate, such as associating my slow morning latte with reading, thus enhancing both blessings. I avoid debt and often pay in advance. And finally, wonderful people in my life have gradually and falteringly taught me to be generous, and, the book is true at least for, the joy from generosity is boundless.

Slightly less pointless than smugness comes a bit of understanding why some things work. A corollary of making good things a treat is to make chores a routine. So it is smart to always do the washing on Mondays and to swim on Tuesdays and Thursdays and to shop at 10AM. Routines minimize misery from chores, and I can think of other chores I can make a routine.

In between smugness, denial and understanding comes my personal folly, the Portugal villa. If this seems to break all the five rules, why does it still make me so happy? Maybe because I associate it with experiences and anticipation and an abundance of time. 

Paying in advance is partly about savouring anticipation. I guess a tiny bit comes from my Starbucks card, but more typically comes from planned holidays, usually paid in advance. It is true that the anticipation of a trip is a source of happiness, often more than the trip itself.

I now have a family that comes from a culture of gift giving. It is something that annoys me, and I have tried to understand it in terms of the five principles. Giving gifts is helping others and providing treats, so should give pleasure. But somehow it doesn’t often give me pleasure on either the giving or receiving end. Partly that is just my ungenerous nature, I wonder if a gift culture can become so strong that it starts to work against the principles. If it is so routine as to be expected, it is less of a treat. And a gift creates an obligation, so it might go against paying in advance. Finally, such gifts are usually material items, so not time or experiences.

So one takeaway could be to use the rules to give better gifts. Can we choose experiences that people can then anticipate, such as holidays or shows? Or can we give people time, for example by doing their chores for them? Best of all, maybe we can give ourselves as part of an experience, using our talent or just companionship. I know the best gifts that I have recently given are of this type, and I also know that these new giving experiences have made me very happy: I hope and believe the same is true for the recipients. I also know I can do a lot more, and resolve to do so.

So try to move beyond smugness or hopelessness, and then try to move beyond diagnosis. The true gift of the book is in how it can help us change our actions, not just our understanding of our current actions. There are no doubt possibilities for all of us in all five dimensions.

The book makes a timid attempt at the end to link its findings towards public policy. One obvious way that most people can buy time is to prioritise a shorter commute over a bigger house. There is already a trend towards this, with more and more people with money choosing to live in cities rather than suburbs. The state might be able to encourage this further by improving public transport, taxing fuel and reducing subsidies on mortgages. This sort of policy might be able to nudge us into decisions that have a by-product of happiness.

This is tough for politicians, but then I wonder how interested most politicians really are in the happiness of their citizens anyway, except for the week before polling day. Even more productive might be public policy that helps to wean us away from debt as a means to pay for more and more things. Currently, many policies positively encourage debt, for example by subsidizing mortgages or allowing many expenses against tax. The problem is the whole edifice of modern economies relies on debt. Remember when David Cameron first came to power, and promoted people paying down their credit card debt? He soon changed his tune, not just because all his donors preyed on our debt, but also because the whole economy would collapse without it.

So, I find this a useful topic. It is one more reminder that the modern stereotype of a commuting workaholic who acquires stuff on credit to match the neighbours’ stuff and doesn’t look beyond family is not a role model for happiness. It helps to explain why people like priests and nuns are usually happy. And hopefully it can generate a couple of useful actions in all of us.