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.