Collaborating between various members of a team is an inevitable part of running a business. While business collaboration has long been heralded as the cost-optimal way to delegate tasks and increase productivity, a research paper released by Harvard professor Jennifer Mueller found that collaboration itself comes at a cost. For her research, Mueller studied the performance and collaboration among members of 26 corporate design teams in the United States.
The results were interesting – while larger teams were quite understandably more productive than smaller teams, the individual contribution among members increased with a drop in the team-size. Mueller concluded that this was because the cost of collaboration increased with team size. A primary reason why this happens is because with increasing team size, there is a larger stress among members as they realize they have fewer resources to do what is expected of them. Also, the responsibility of the individual team members is diluted and as a result, the noise-signal ratio increases as members spend greater resources trying to find the exact member responsible for particular tasks.
Having said that, larger team size is not a choice. Complex projects do require larger teams and with an increase in the number of team members, the productivity per member inevitably comes down. But with proper optimization, this drop in productivity may be plugged. A study conducted by Cisco found that deploying the new age collaboration tools could effectively increase the productivity of retailers by as much as 17%.
Take business unified communications for example – in a typical setup, members of a team may be reachable only through certain communication channels at any particular point in time. If the team is spread across multiple geographies, not everyone may be reachable on email or work phone at the same instant. With unified communications, it is possible to integrate the various communication channels of team members over a single business VOIP connection and thereby make all team members accessible irrespective of their preferred communication channel at a particular point in time.
Similarly, online collaboration with the help of governance tools via tools like SharePoint makes documentation and task delegation easier. As Mueller reported in her research study, members of large teams found it difficult to reach out to other members for help; and even if they did, they found that the other members were not committed or had the time to help them out. With collaboration tools like SharePoint, it becomes simpler to manage internal knowledge management documents and thereby make it easier for members to find help.
With the opening up of the freelance economy and the culture of business outsourcing, more and more small businesses will find it hard to manage projects with team members from across the various parts of the world. While large teams may not be an immediate concern for small businesses, the challenges still remain with team members from multiple timezones. Collaboration tools make project management simpler and help in effectively improving the productivity of the individual team members that often gets impacted by team size and geography.
Cover photo credit: Philip / Flickr
