Collaboration & Teamwork: A Real Problem or Marketing Hype?

Collaboration is a hot, business buzzword today—very hot. It seems everyone is talking about better ways to speed team work and decision making.

But is this hype from consultants and companies selling solutions? Or is there real fire behind the smoke of all the collaboration talk.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest the latter. Yes, people have always “collaborated.” We have always had “teams.” These are not new ideas. What has changed is the environment in which collaboration and teamwork take place. And that makes all the difference. Here’s why:

Mobility: The workforce today is incredibly mobile. As much as 40 percent of U.S. workers now have jobs that could be done from outside the office at least part of the time. Not being face to face on a regular basis changes the nature of collaboration: visual cues, informal interactions—things which have always speeded collaboration and have always been take for granted—are now problematic.

Multitasking: Multitasking has always been a challenge as in the oft-quoted aspersion of someone not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. But again, the reality today is different: many people work on a task while monitoring a feed of information, participating in a conference call, responding to IM and e-mails, etc. Yes—at a certain point all of this multitasking becomes a joke and unproductive, but the reality is that some variation on the above is today’s reality. In fact some people might not even consider what was just described as “multitasking.” All of this has huge implications for how information gets presented, how we get someone’s attention, how decisions are arrived at, etc.—all key elements of collaboration.

Context: How we view and respond to something depends in large part on the context in which it is presented. A physical office is a context. A face-to-face collaboration over a conference table is a context. A detailed report—with an introduction, background, supporting points, a conclusion—is a context. But in a mobile, multitasking world dependent on e-mails, IMs, tweets and more, we find ourselves constantly moving quickly in and out of different situations in which we often have very little context. As the title of a humorous book once put it, “We are in the context of no context.”

Racing from place to place, juggling multiple tasks and starved for context—that’s a big part of today’s work environment. That’s why collaboration is not just a buzzword and why supporting effective workforce collaboration is a critical part of any business strategy today.