Collaboration tools have invaded our computers and our daily lives with the promise of transforming the way we work and increasing our productivity, because it’s a well-known fact that better collaboration means greater efficiency.
But isn’t there a misuse of language in this area that is misleading us?
In French, we usually say “collaborative tools” or “collaborative intranet”, whereas the English say “collaboration tools” and not “collaborative tools”.
It’s as if some people think that tools collaborate by themselves without human intervention, while others refer to them by the purpose for which they are used by humans.
Perhaps AI will one day make tools collaborate without us, but we’re not there yet.
A linguistic reflection that I won’t take any further, as I have the impression that no matter what language the users speak, they’re still being used just as badly (Collaborative tools in the workplace: a real waste?).
But perhaps the greatest abuse of language is simply to use the word collaboration to talk about it.
Collaboration tools are not used to collaborate
What is collaboration?
Collaboration generally involves joint, coordinated work to achieve a common goal, where each employee contributes his or her skills and ideas in an interactive process. The members of a collaborative team work interdependently: they build solutions together, share responsibilities and actively contribute to a common project.
To collaborate is to exchange and organize in order to accomplish something together.
It differs from cooperation, which consists of parallel, coordinated work (Don’t mistake team work for parallel work), but without necessarily interdependent tasks. Each member can work on a separate or independent part of the project, but following common guidelines. Contributions are then assembled to form the final product. Cooperation is more structured and based on a division of tasks, where each person or group is responsible for their own area, and direct interaction is sometimes less frequent.
Communication is not collaboration
But are we using these tools to collaborate or cooperate? In general, neither: we use them to communicate.
Sending an e-mail? That’s communicating.
Sending a chat? That’s communication.
Organize a meeting? More often than not, it’s to inform, and serves the organizer’s objectives more than those of the participants.
Sharing a file? Many people haven’t yet understood that a file isn’t sent but shared, but generally it’s just about passing on information.
Communicating may be a prerequisite for collaboration, but very often it only serves the sender’s purpose. And in any case, the notion of joint, coordinated work is totally absent.
The truth is that what we call collaboration is in fact nothing more than the mass sending of unidirectional messages which, instead of contributing to collective performance, actually harm individual performance , for the simple reason that processing these messages creates an unbearable information load (Digital Infobesity: When Collaboration Tools Degrade Productivity, QWL and Amplify Mental Workload) which leaves people with little time to do their work:
– Email management consumes a significant portion of working time: employees spend 3h14 a week dealing with their emails, while managers spend 10h45 a week on it.
– At the same time, meetings take up a large proportion of available time: executives, for example, have only 17% of their working time left to concentrate on individual production tasks.
And when you don’t have enough time to do your job, you have even less time to really work together, so you limit yourself to the simplest things: you send information, and come what may.
Too many one-way messages consume the time available for collaboration.
Worse: it only contributes to the “Hamster Syndrome”, inspired by two books by Mike Song and Vicki Hasley (The Hamster Revolution and The Hamster Revolution For Meetings). The underlying idea is that, like the hamster in its wheel, the faster it runs, the faster it has to run, so the more e-mails we send, the more replies we get, the more replies we have to send, and so on.
Send an email in the morning with 10 people in copy and you’ve started a machine that will produce dozens of emails in the hours or even days that follow.
Worse still: there have been attempts to measure employee activity on the basis of the quantity, not the quantity, of their use of these so-called collaboration tools (How to motivate your employees to blow hot air instead of being productive (thank you Microsoft).
But in this accumulation of one-way messages and meetings that leave us no time to work, there’s very little that really comes under the heading of collaboration, i.e. getting organized and working together to achieve a common goal.
There’s a lot of communication, little cooperation and almost no collaboration.
Bottom line
In the final analysis, the term “collaboration” could not be more overused.
The main problem with collaboration tools is that they’re not about collaboration, they’re about communication, and their use is based on individual rather than collective practices.
Using collaboration tools doesn’t make us people who collaborate, it’s the way we work that does or doesn’t, and this is independent of the tools, which are merely facilitators.
The difference between collaboration and communication tools isn’t so much a matter of the tool as of the way we think about work and use the tools accordingly.
Image: collaboration tools by Tada Images via Shutterstock
