The new now in office culture is a team-based reality. Teamwork has taken hold in today’s corporations, accounting for more than 50% of all time spent on the job. While this has a promising future, the downsides are bombastic. Performance can suffer while employees spend overt amounts of time communicating with others and creating strategies to collaborate.
What this creates is a very real risk of a high-stress, low productivity environment. Turnover balloons and staff burnout becomes the norm. This is what is known as collaborative overload.
Fortunately, there are tactics to prevent
and protect your staff from communal fatigue.
Spread The Wealth
One way to avoid this catastrophe is to focus on equal distribution of tasks. Delegation then takes a front row seat as management must work to avoid overloading the most capable and efficient workers they have. The Harvard Business Review reports ‘People who are both in demand by their colleagues and are seen as important sources of information at work have the lowest engagement and career satisfaction scores’.
Trusting all team members to do their job and actively rewarding those who perform well can heartily decrease collaborative overload.
Supply and Demand
Paying close attention to consumption of resources is another way to decrease collective staff enervation.
Often times, an employee will ask for help from another staff member because they find it easier than researching information for themselves. Creating an easily digestible resource contingency can divert personal resources to somewhere better served. If staff feels they have reports, company history and guidelines at their fingertips, the company’s assets will be better utilized. It may take some encouragement on the part of management to institute this, but it can be done.
In today’s market, many companies are optimizing processes by creating a network of teams. Collaborative overload can often be a shadow waiting in the wings of this change. At it’s worst, it can hinder performance and heavily increase voluntary turnover.
However, by streamlining responsibilities and by rewarding effective contributions, any company can secede to a profitable and dynamic team-based strategy.
