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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.
So we supposedly “value” this collaborative idea, but we seemingly take no time to teach people how exactly to collaborate, and what “best practices” might look like. Hmm. OK. I guess the Occam’s Razor answer here would be, “Well, people should know what collaboration looks like! They collaborate with friends, family, neighbors, and spouses, right?” Sure. You can use that argument — although it falls apart a little bit because companies tend to want thick lines around “work behavior” and “personal behavior,” but I digress a bit therein.
Years back, there was this article in Harvard Business Review about “employee engagement” — since then, about 90 million articles have been written on the same topic, and nothing has truly budged statistically on people being more engaged — and this part always popped out to me:
One of our clients was a $1 billion services company with a plan to grow to $5 billion. They had a…
