Collaboration isn’t often real

Ted Bauer
5 min readJul 11, 2022

The screenshot above is from this article. I wrote something back in March about how people don’t really want to collaborate that much, which I’ve long thought to be true. In fact, if you go into the first linked article (where the screenshot is from), you have these contrasting views:

We asked respondents what proportion of their job entails collaborating with others to advance shared goals. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of the sample reported collaborating at least 41% of their work time. This means that in a 40-hour, five-day workweek, people spend an average of 3.2 hours per workday collaborating with others.

OK. So it seems like people are doing a lot of collaboration. That’s nice, right?

But:

When asked how much professional development they had received on this front in total, 31% of the respondents said “none.” Six percent said “a few minutes,” which is roughly the length of a TikTok video or the time it would take to read a Dilbert cartoon. An additional 14% said “about an hour,” 23% said “a couple of hours,” and only 26% said they had received substantial development — “more than a couple of hours” — in this critical workplace skill. Yet professional development in how to build collaborative relationships correlates positively with a host of desirable mindsets that benefit both organizations and individuals.

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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