Okay, the phrase is a bit provocative, but it’s an observation I see in most organizations: they want results without addressing the way they work.
As I have already observed, there is an overabundance of so-called collaborative tools that are used for everything except collaboration (Collaboration tools in the workplace: a real waste?). We invest in tools, we train teams, we display great ambitions for collaboration, sharing, efficiency… but the practices do not change. Worse: they are deteriorating.
It’s as if we are trying to find the stupidest way of working while waiting to find a way to make it worse.
In short:
- Organizations invest heavily in so-called collaborative tools without questioning existing work practices, which leads to a deterioration rather than an improvement in collaboration.
- Despite the implementation of technical solutions (chats, intranets, knowledge bases), obsolete habits persist: excessive reactivity, silos, overload of meetings and lack of real knowledge sharing.
- Inappropriate use of tools often results from temporary solutions introduced in the face of old constraints, which are retained even when conditions have changed or better tools exist.
- Employees continue to ask their peers to do tasks that could be accomplished with modern tools, not out of ignorance but out of habit or ease, thus transferring their mental load to others.
- A real transformation requires an overhaul of practices, routines and evaluation methods: good behavior must be facilitated by the system, and not left to individual initiative alone.
New tools but old practices
Tools such as chat have been deployed to supposedly “improve collaboration” while continuing to value responsiveness at all costs, along with email chains in which nothing is clear anymore and the cult of permanent urgency (How to survive the workplace urgency imperative?
). Will we ever learn to juggle synchronous and asynchronous tools appropriately depending on the context? Will we understand the power of asynchronous tools and the rules that go with them?
We implement intranets or knowledge bases but we leave the business silos, a culture of every man for himself maintained by the methods of evaluation (Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave) and no breathing time for real exchanges of knowledge. Have we forgotten that the need that led to the implementation of these tools was precisely the dissemination of knowledge? But everything is being done to prevent the tool from doing its job.
We talk about working in a team, but we still measure individual performance, we overload diaries, we ignore everyday irritants such as useless meetings that serve no purpose other than to collaborate and are often just information points where one person talks and the others listen.
People therefore make poor use of the tools, but not through ill will or incompetence. It’s not even their fault, but simply because the system makes it simpler, faster and sometimes more rewarding to do anything as long as we don’t question the working practices and stick old practices on new tools.
Don’t forget that when something goes wrong in a business, it’s 96% because of the system and 4% because of the people (The Problem Isn’t the Employee, It’s the System)!
Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems
When I try to understand the reason for the misuse of collaboration and communication tools, I am usually told that “we have always done it that way”. This is true of many other things, and the cause is always the same.
At a certain point in the work process, we face a constraint that blocks our progress. This may be a lack of resources or skills or, in the case that concerns us here, tools with limited capabilities.
What do we do at that point? We find a way around it, a “workaround” to accommodate the constraint. This often consists of a somewhat twisted ad hoc process, the use of an unforeseen resource or the misuse of a tool for something it was not originally intended for, but it solves the problem.
It’s normal, it’s human, it’s sometimes ingenious.
This is how our mailboxes have become to-do lists, chats and tools for collaborating on documents, even though they weren’t designed for that purpose. But for lack of anything better, we were happy to use them that way.
But one day the constraint is lifted. Because we acquire new skills, we recruit the right people or a tool arrives that is specially designed to do what we used to do a bit by tinkering.
And what do we do? We keep the hacks, the habits, the DIY solutions.
In other words, we continue to use a tool for what it was not designed for and we neglect a new tool that would do certain things better than the old one. Worse still, as we do not transpose the old uses, we try to find new uses for the new tool, sometimes more stupid than the last.
That is the difference between an established use and good practice.
It’s better to make people waste time than to use tools well
Another remnant of old practices that die hard is using people as if they were tools.
It wasn’t that long ago that we had search engines that didn’t find or index well, that it wasn’t so easy to identify the right person to get the answer to a question and contact them in a fluid way, that information was lost in shared drives where no one knew how to find it, and so on and so forth.
So we put in place the most effective workaround: for lack of a tool, we used people.
Rather than using tools that searched and found poorly and were not fluid in terms of communication, we relied on our office neighbors. At that time, many conversations in the open space boiled down to:
“Can you send me the file back? I don’t know where it is”
“Do you know where it’s stored?”
“Can you remind me what we said in the meeting? I can’t find the email with the minutes”.
Today we have hyper-powerful search engines and AI, but no… we still ask humans. Perhaps because we still have doubts about AI (AI in the digital workplace: A brilliant assistant, but an unreliable colleague) but above all because habits die hard.
Moreover, one of the most common use cases of business social networks was to ask others for information that we didn’t want to look up.
Because that’s the thing: behind the “I don’t know” or “I can’t find it” often lies an “I don’t want to make the effort”.
Talking to a human being will always seem more practical to us than using a tool, even an AI. Orally because it is spontaneous and natural, in writing because the human being makes the effort to understand a vague request without needing to be an expert in prompt even if sometimes the lack of clarity pays off (CRM can save your business, but not the CRM you think!).
It may seem humane and practical, but it is an admission of failure to see that the working practices are themselves that the simplest thing is to ask another person rather than using a tool provided for that purpose.
In doing so, we transfer the mental load and the time lost to someone else when we don’t need that (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden).
And then we are surprised that employees are exhausted, overwhelmed and stressed.
You can’t reform a system with good will
As long as bad practices remain possible or, worse, are encouraged, they will prevail over good intentions.
It is not enough to say “use this tool” or “be more collaborative”, but the system must make good behavior natural and bad behavior costly or even impossible.
Ultimately, it comes back to what I wrote ages ago about social collaboration (Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?): if you don’t formalize routines and operating procedures and evaluate in a way that favors bad behavior, it doesn’t work.
In other words:
- It’s not enough to provide tools. You have to get rid of obsolete practices.
- Training is not enough. Irritants and workarounds must be eliminated.
- Hoping is not enough. The organization and working practices must be rethought.
Bottom line
True transformation does not come from tools, but from the way in which work, flows and decisions are structured. Collaboration is not improved by adding a functionality.
It is improved by correcting what makes collaboration useless, time-consuming or painful.
In any case, behaviour is not changed at the margin. It is changed by reforming the system that induces it.
Otherwise, we will continue to invest in tools only to find that not only are they misused, but each new tool is used less well than the previous one.
Image: collaboration tools from Tada Images via Shutterstock
