AFP – The saying, “If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together”, rings especially true in the workplace, where effective teamwork is vital for any organisation’s success.
However, employees are finding it increasingly challenging to collaborate, according to a recent Atlassian survey of 5,000 office workers across the United States (US), Australia, India, Germany, and France, along with 100 Fortune 500 executives.
The COVID-19 pandemic, with its lockdowns and shift to remote work, put a strain on collective efficiency.
Even as things return to normal, employees continue to struggle with collaboration, not just because they are geographically spread out but also due to cognitive disconnection.
Indeed, employees often feel overwhelmed at work.
Increasingly, they are required to work on a whole range of projects, many of them very different.
Two-thirds of working people surveyed for Atlassian’s The State of Teams 2024 report complain that their team is constantly being pulled in too many directions.
But constantly juggling multiple tasks is very cognitively taxing, as science has demonstrated time and again that our brains are not designed to multitask.
To maintain the illusion of productivity, employees tend to concentrate on small, quick tasks that don’t require much concentration (dealing with emails, etc), rather than on more challenging missions, which are often the most strategic for the company.
SOLUTIONS TO HELP TEAMS WORK TOGETHER
This phenomenon of dispersion is not lost on workers’ superiors. Executives estimate that only 24 per cent of their staff carry out tasks that contribute to the company’s performance.
So how can workers be encouraged to focus more on higher value-added activities? Guiding them is one solution.
Managers can organise regular meetings with their teams to discuss individual objectives and check the status of current projects, for example.
But they should be careful not to overdo it. Scheduling meetings all the time can be extremely time-consuming.
Office workers spend an average of 14.8 hours a week in meetings, according to Reclaim.ai, a considerable amount of time that is rarely put to productive use.
The workers surveyed by Atlassian estimate that they spend more time in meetings than at their desks, making progress on the issues raised during those meetings.
Companies therefore need to clearly define the objectives of team meetings, so that staff who take part no longer feel they are wasting their time.
At the same time, they need to facilitate internal knowledge sharing.
Because, unlike rumours and gossip, information can have a hard time circulating within a company.
Some 55 per cent of employees surveyed by Atlassian say they have difficulty finding the information they need to be effective.
The proliferation of corporate communication channels has a lot to do with this. Artificial intelligence could help remedy this problem, provided workers learn how to use it properly.
