Business is a constant give and take, an exchange of thoughts, ideas, products, services, dollars, and time. In fact, we often talk about time in the same way we talk about money – I need to spend more time on that project, how can I save time in my work day, I wish I could make more time.
And since time is one of our most precious resources, it is vital to consider how the actions of individuals may inadvertently impact teams and organizations. A simple act of sending an email or a meeting request to a wide distribution list means asking for, in exchange, other people’s time to review it, think about it or attend. Given this, how can people be mindful about this hidden value exchange to prevent collaboration overload, saving employees’ time and reducing time waste in organizations?
Many understand the importance of building their networks of professional relationships but the time this takes is anything but trivial. Establishing key relationships is an important part of achieving success in business and in life – how many times have you heard the saying, It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. While this saying is trite, it is also pretty true.
I’d argue that it’s quite definitely a combination of what you know and who you know since people tend to stay in contact with individuals who provide a value to them in some way, either through new ideas and intellectual stimulation, relevant experiences and mentorship, emotional and physical compatibility or variety of thought. Having fun is also important in professional relationships. People create strong connections based on what they inherently value, and this changes from person to person and situation to situation.
In fact, with regards to professional relationships, research at Microsoft has found that for clients, top-performers tend to have larger internal networks than their colleagues – a behavioral characteristic that corporations value because when people connect with others, this often leads to sparking new innovations, unlocking creativity, and moving projects and initiatives forward.
But how many people is too many and what about Dunbar’s number? In the office, how can we optimize our workplace interactions to help keep everyone’s ratio of focus time to meetings in check?
Within dense, hierarchical organizations it’s imperative that product teams are in lock-step with marketing, sales and engineering, but having an overabundance of meetings takes time away from real work being completed and this can greatly reduce organizational agility, speed, and increase time to market. As an example, a Fortune 500 data storage company studied how its employee teams use time and found that some work groups were dedicating more than 20 hours per week in meetings alone. Ask any manager within a large company and you’ll soon discover this figure is actually on the low-end of the spectrum.
Organization time waste is often due to a lack of executive visibility into time usage, but this means executives can take the initiative to drive change by examining their own individual meeting behaviors and coaching others to think about collaboration overload. In terms of meeting efficiency, It’s also important to note that meeting productivity is often negatively correlated with the number of attendees - when more people are in the room, fewer decisions tend to be made. Some studies have identified the optimum number of individuals in a meeting is right around 7 people. More than that and the meeting is skewed towards one-directional knowledge sharing or providing status updates.
The ability for corporations to stay competitive and operate efficiently relies on factors related to both organizational structures and systems (e.g. org hierarchy, processes, distributed workforces, office layouts) and organizational behaviors (e.g. management styles, team dynamics, communications directionality, frequency and velocity). The ability for executives to change how they manage requires them to first understand how they work with colleagues through evaluating baselines and measuring change over time.
The concept of organizational alignment is rapidly changing with the rise of digital communications. Reporting chains are no longer necessarily indicative of network influence as informal relationships determine how information flows within and between companies. These are harder for executives to see with their own eyes – in fact research by Rob Cross of Babson College found that it’s not so much the push but the pull that matters. People reaching out to you carries more weight than simply hitting send and communicating to others.
My question for you is how are you creating pull through your communications, and how can you give back time to your teams and organizations by combating collaboration overload?