The Importance of Collaboration in the Workplace

Discuss about the Importance of Collaborative overload.

The organizations now a days are extremely diverse. Starting from the low level employees to the top level authorities, the workspace has uplifted to be an another society altogether. The people of the organizations are completely focused on the productivity. For which they need adequate supply of resources which manty organizations may not arrange for their workers. Due to globalization, the work places have become complicated where it is mandatory to maintain a smooth flow of knowledge. This is the reason why the managers are encouraging the employees to engage more in the collaborative tasks. Through this the knowledge of the employees will increase as well as the variety of the resources will increase.

In this particular context, the article ‘Collaborative overload’ by Cross, Rebele and Grant can be named. Through this particular article the authors have discussed the importance of collaborative task and its resulted outcome. In order to achieve the organizational goals, the firms need full support from their employees. This include creativity, knowledge, expertise and unique ideas which contribute in the innovation process of the companies. As the return of which the firms support the employees and keeps on changing rules and policies for guiding them all inclusively. According to the demand of the task as well as the organization, the management encourage the employees to work as a group or team. This will help them to share knowledge with one another and gain professional strength and confidence. The concept of team work however is related with collaborative work.

Different companies have different cultures and different structures also. This is the reason why the leaders along with managers encourage the employees to work as teams. There are many benefits to work in teams. First the employees can share their acquired knowledge with others which increase the amount of resources in the firms. Secondly, teamwork reduces the firm’s effort to provide trainings to the employees but there are various drawbacks of this perspective. The firms do not feel importance to understand the criteria or need of the employees hence cannot supply the needed resources. This is because there builds a knowledge gap and the employees who possess better knowledge becomes bottle neck of the organization.

According to the authors of the article, collaboration is the primary part of team work and in doing so, the employees gain knowledge from three types of resources. These are social, informational and personal resources. These resources have various facets in which they work efficiently. Some works better in the marketing section and some in IT. Possessing these resources create difference among the employees of the organization (Cross, Rebele and Grant 2016). The social resources are related with the position, awareness and the access to the networks. The informational resources on the other hand, are associated with the skills of the employees and their acquired knowledge. These resources can be shared by the employees and acquired easily therefore, the top collaborators help with these types of resources easily. The sharing of these resources does not hamper the supply of resources hence easily gained from others. On the contrary the personal resources are much complicated. The individual employees acquire them with harder efforts. Hence these are time consuming. This is the reason the personal resources are much more valuable for the collaborates. More ore these personal resources are quite difficult to replenish. Here is the factor which differentiate the empowered employees of the organization from the commoners.

Different Types of Resources Gained through Collaborative Work

According to Cross, Rebele and Grant, the top collaborators of the companies easily shared the social and informational resources with the people who ask for help in a task as these collaborators keep some for themselves then provide useful resources to others (2016). On the contrary personal resources are not so easily shared as this make the employees lazy to learn. The seekers of information need to acquire knowledge for themselves which they can easily have if they libraries and other online sources which will only need few minutes however, instead of this, they request for information to these collaborator and waste both the time of the collaborators as well as hamper production.

In every organization, there are some employees who possess better skills as well as knowledge but very few of them are willing to share their knowledge to others. The top collaborators of the companies are among these people. other employees who do not possess much information come to these collaborators for assistance which eventually affect the production of these collaborators. they cannot concentrate on their tasks hence cannot achieve their own professional goals. This is the reason they are devoid of any reward or recognition from the part of the organization. On the contrary those employees who seek information are more productive than these collaborators. as the authors have disclosed “in most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees” (Cross, Rebele and Grant 2016). 

In addition to this, the organization do not acknowledge the diversity of task that these collaborators assist others to perform. Due to constant assistance these employees feel overtaxed but gradually become the bottleneck of the organization. Without their intervention, no work can be done which slow down the administrative process of the organization. These employees waste effort and time to help others to get the work done but their effort remain hidden behind others’ success. This is the reason why most of these collaborators feel stress for not achieving recognition yet perform tasks. Therefore, these employees do not feel attachment with their organization and leave with a large amount of data and networks.

In order to retain the employees in their organizations the managers can take various initiatives like proper distribution of tasks among the employees, encouraging the top collaborators to take negative attitudes and identify factors through which the mangers can measure the engagement of the employees with the organization.

Impact of Overreliance on Top Collaborators

The management of an organization need to encourage the employees to rely in the collaborative measures. Before they motivate employees to do so, they need to check and understand the demand of the requests and their supply. There are various tools and methods with which the managers can measure how much requests are being sought each time and then arrange for responding the issues. The tools like 360 feedbacks and customer relationship management programs can offered valuable data on type, origin, volume along with destination of requests. These can more deeply analyses networks and tools for measuring requests.

The authors of this article has provided strategies to the managers through which they can reduce the pressure of the top collaborators of the company. The overburdened collaborators become frustrated when they are disturbed for helping other employees of the organization the manager hence can allow them to take a negative approach while come across the request for help. The managers may show these collaborators, the method of filtration as well as prioritization of the requests so that they can avoid the request for help. The mangers can also build a strong substitute of these collaborators so that they can be communicated while the collaborators are busy. This will reduce pressure in the organization. There is various team collaboration software that can help the top collaborators of the organization to build a strong barrier around them and regulate incoming and outgoing information flow. This behavioral change method will help the employees to increase personal resources 6his they will find their tasks to be stimulating rather than exhausting.

Making the much needed information available for the employees is mandatory for the managers. This is the only method which will immediately reduce the overload upon the collaborators. As all the employees of the organization need ample mount of resources to get the work done and training to increase personal skills, they seek resources. Through this method, they will get needed information and resources they will not ask for help of request to the collaborators. This is how a permanent solution can be explored.

According to the authors of this article, the leader of the organizations can also bring a structural change in the organization. The top collaborators who aim to leave the organization due to feeling of stress and unviability of rewards, may be given a promotion of chief collaborative officers. These employees will be acting like buffer against the demand for collaboration and the request for help from others. The pressure of production will not be there on these employees but they will be responsible for providing any kind of help associated with information and any type of resources. These methods can be helpful for the mangers. By following these methods, they will be able to redistribute the resources among the employees, maintain collaboration and retain employees for a long time.

The study has revealed the fact that the companies which need collaboration among the employees record discrimination among the male and female employees. The female employees have special skills to learn tasks easily and intensely. Moreover, they care for others hence they show willingness to help their subordinate employees in the organization. The managers seem to be satisfied as these women employees are responsible as well as dependable enough to help others. More precisely, the women employees show more emotional attachment with their workplace culture than of men employees. This is the reason why they feel the workload more than the males and leave their organizations more than male. The authors state, “women experience greater emotional exhaustion than men” (Cross, Rebele and Grant 2016).  Therefore, as the authors have discussed in the article that proper method of collaboration must be applied to get the best result as well as reduce workplace discrimination.

Therefore, it can be concluded that collaboration in the workplace is a mandatory element and has become most important factor to run the administration smoothly. In order to maintain a healthy work culture in the organization, and reduce employee turnover, the managers need to take more care of the highly resourced employees through recognizing, promoting and efficiently distribute resources so that crisis do not emerge. Possessing resources is good but being the institutional bottleneck for possessing resources is not beneficial for the firms. Hence the managers must understand where the resources will be needed and take initiatives to regulate them by redistributing.

References:

Cross, R., Rebele, R. and Grant, A., 2016. Collaborative overload. Harvard Business Review, 94(1), p.16.