Collaboration is Intentional

Recently, a large Fortune Top 50 company pulled back its Work At Home program, citing collaboration as the reason. They stated that productivity by this segment was proven and wasn’t the concern. It was very specifically the collaboration. Naturally, that brought forth concern to many in similar organizations about the future of at-home programs where they work.

Think back to a time when you worked in a building with other people. Did you know all of them? Did you talk to all of them? Even if so, was the conversation really “collaboration”?

Let’s remind ourselves first on what collaboration really means. Collaboration is a verb, and is defined as working with another person or group in order to achieve or do something. The origin of the word, when broken down to its Latin roots means “to labor together”.

So, back to the earlier question – The conversations you had in the break room were likely not collaboration. They were conversations. They helped fulfill your sense of belonging and engagement, which are important, but there is no product as a result of that interaction. You didn’t walk away with a new gizmo or idea. You had the together part taken care of, but not the labor.

Now that we understand that casual chitchat is different, let’s focus on what actually would be considered collaboration. Clearly, you are employed because you bring something of value to the table. Same goes for those around you. And in theory, your collective minds will smoosh your ideas together and come up with new things and innovative solutions. So, you can read between the lines with this move that the company in question feels like they are not seeing as many ground-breaking steps forward as they would like.

But is that because people work at home? Collaboration doesn’t just happen. And it isn’t a product of proximity. Even in the office, you had to be intentional. You locked yourself away in a conference room drawing on the board and bouncing ideas around. You set up meetings and scheduled time to pull your colleagues together to explore a topic. Your partnership was planned and purposeful.

This doesn’t change because you work at home. You have all of the tools that you need. You have calendars to schedule meetings. You have IM to ping spontaneous ideas around. You have phones to talk to one another. You have webcams and video chat to see each other. You have annotation tools and whiteboards to scribble mutual ideas.

The ONLY plausible reason for collaboration failing when you work at home is – YOU. You stopped trying. You don’t put in the effort. You use your situation as an excuse. You became lazy.

If collaboration always takes effort, and the tools are ubiquitous, then that’s the only logical conclusion. Therefore, if you are worried about losing your at-home situation, you better take stock in what you are doing each day to collaborate. Are you really collaborating, or just communicating?