By Ellie Stewart
Building a collaborative culture is the ultimate business goal, but it can be a slog in practice. It doesn't take much—just one broken link in the chain—to throw a whole project off the rails.
To see how teams are collaborating and staying productive right now, Adobe for Business surveyed over 1,000 full-time US workers. They wanted to see which tools and processes are actually helping and which are just adding noise.
The cost of collaboration barriers
Collaboration struggles can last just minutes, and they're resolved in no time. Sometimes it takes several days or even weeks to get to the bottom of a breakdown before a shared understanding is reached. To help quantify the cost of collaboration breakdowns in terms of lost time, the Adobe for Business study found that on average, 97 hours are lost due to communication struggles, and 81 hours are wasted in unproductive meetings.
The 97 hours a year lost to communication breakdowns equates to nearly two hours a week, so what can businesses do to avoid these breakdowns and help employees reclaim valuable time?
The workers surveyed estimated that if ineffective collaboration processes were removed, they could reclaim 178 hours a year, nearly 3 and a half hours a week, to put toward strategic, high-impact work. For anyone in a leadership spot, clearing out these hurdles isn't just about efficiency—it’s about survival. In fact, 90% of those surveyed think that if you just got the blockers out of the way, they could wrap up a 40-hour week in four days. That's a massive chunk of time currently being thrown away.
The study also considered the time workers in different industries think they could save, finding that employees in the finance industry are particularly in support of this workweek change. Nearly all (94%) finance employees surveyed reported that they could switch to a four-day workweek if collaboration were improved.
Inefficiency causes across roles, industries and location
The why behind collaboration inefficiencies varies by job role and industry, providing valuable insights for business leaders on potential changes to implement to best suit their teams. The data shows that "death by meeting" hits the C-suite the hardest. Senior staff are losing roughly 91 hours a year to meetings that don't go anywhere—that’s two hours gone every single week. It’s better for entry-level staff, but not by much; they're still losing 65 hours. The size of business matters here, too: big enterprise teams are wasting 69% more time than people at smaller shops.
Top 5 states losing the most time to unproductive meetings:
- New York - 90 hours lost a year
- New Jersey - 81 hours lost a year
- California - 79 hours lost a year
- Florida - 76 hours a year
The potential benefits of addressing collaboration challenges are increased for certain industries where a significant amount of valuable time is being drained. Workers in the manufacturing industry reported they could reclaim the most time back due to collaboration blockers, at up to 214 hours a year, which is over four hours a week.
Industries losing the most time to collaboration friction:
- Manufacturing - 214 hours a year
- Sales - 208 hours a year
- Finance - 200 hours a year
- Marketing - 186 hours a year
- Tech - 179 hours a year
These teams stand to gain valuable time back if effective methods of collaboration are put into place to increase productivity, more than the national average of 178 hours lost a year.
Here's why projects fail and goals are misaligned
It’s not uncommon for some projects to veer off course, but it’s important for teams to examine why this happens in order to reclaim time lost to inefficient collaboration. The employee survey from Adobe for Business indicates that communication breakdowns are the key contributor to blocking effective collaboration, causing nearly half (46%) of all project delays.
It’s no surprise people are exhausted when a third of their projects (36%) start without any real consensus from the stakeholders. Most projects tend to get stuck before they even get a chance to start. It leaves the rest of the team scrambling to clean up a mess they didn't even make in the first place.
Without team alignment from the offset, the consequences to projects are immediately felt. Here are five key ‘costs’ of disconnected teams, according to the employees surveyed:
- Leads to wasted time and effort - 76%
- They experience missed deadlines - 58%
- Report decreased work quality - 57%
- Flag struggle to track progress - 47%
- Encounter budget overruns - 23%
One of the most substantial ways in which team misalignment in project goals can impact employees is by causing a significant rework. Roughly a third (33%) surveyed identified that they have had to rework projects due to misalignment.
Employees also noted the key reasons why they feel projects are thrown off course:
- Unclear leadership directives - 40%
- Lack of standardized processes across teams - 34%
- Frequent changes in project priorities - 34%
- Insufficient visibility into other teams’ progress - 28%
- Too many disconnected tools - 28%
In addition to the above impacts felt by employees, they also cite a lack of regular cross-functional check-ins (27%), an absence of a single source of truth for project information (23%), and a lack of training on processes (17%) as blockers to projects staying on course.
The psychological toll of collaboration blockers
Aside from the impact of ineffective collaboration on the project at hand, there’s a significant impact on the workforce from a psychological perspective. More than half (56%) of US employees surveyed said navigating collaboration hurdles caused mental fatigue.
Varying work environments also led to employees citing different levels of mental toll thanks to ineffective collaboration. Over half (55%) of both remote and on-site workers noted poor collaboration as cause of stress. Without supportive workflows in place, this stress goes on to have repercussions in the form of retention. On-site employees are 47% more likely to seek new job opportunities due to a lack of effective workflow management and team collaboration.
What employees want to dismantle ineffective collaboration
Instead of opting to add more tech solutions to try and solve inefficiencies in collaboration, there needs to be strategic intervention, and employees in the Adobe for Business study point to the enablers they see as most valuable in unlocking smoother ways of working with their teams.
The set up of clear and consistent communication channels (42%) was the most requested improvement to help solve a lack of effective collaboration according to employees. This was followed by explicitly defined roles and responsibilities (38%) within the team to ensure everyone is aligned on expectations.
Demand is also high for a platform that acts as a ‘single source of truth’ for the project, over a fifth of all employees deemed it to be essential. This demand increases for remote workers who are 28% more likely to request a ‘single source of truth’ as a solution for collaboration breakdowns compared to on-site workers. Employees seek this unified approach in order to avoid a siloed team structure, as over one in five employees identified this approach as a major barrier to collaboration.
Understanding collaboration enablers is extremely important and as part of this, it’s essential to consider the varying support required by different demographics within the team. Timely decision making and clear next steps (41%) is highly valued by Baby Boomers, whereas Gen X and Millennials want to prioritize clear communication channels (42%) to effectively collaborate. Gen Z say a shared understanding of project goals (40%) would be most valuable to them.
To support employees in reducing the collaboration gap, teams want to see updates to workflow management that centralizes project insights to a ‘single source of truth’, automates low-impact admin tasks, and formalizes processes to provide the structure and real-time visibility of performance necessary.
Companies can’t afford to just sit back and hope their teams figure out how to work together. You have to be proactive about fixing these gaps—not just for the sake of the bottom line, but to avoid high performers from leaving. Once you get everyone on the same page, the busywork falls away and the real work finally starts.
Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.
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