Is collaboration creating mediocrity?

A good blog posts of Geoffrey james about Collaboration about studies that show that top performers leave their entreprises because of the tolerance of mediocrity. And this tolerance of mediocrity comes along the collaboration fashion where everybody needs to say something about everything. 

We know that in IT TEAM peer to peer collaboration are more based on skills and competences. Best teams are acting in duo but are in the acting model way : we act more than we debates. 

“Modern-like” companies put collaboration at the top of their priorities with open-space where the constant noise only suppress any will to work of the majority of the people in the room.

By the way, the applied psychology study is studying marketing, sales and classic administrative floors where to be honnest creativy is not always the core of their daily task. Perhaps this conclusion must be challenged with different environnement but we have the frame.

For the open-office is largely spread there is no worst option for any kind of employees. A lot of studies, articles show exactly the same conclusion :

– It leads to decrease face to face communication (Harvard Business School study of 2018) by 70 %

– People who work in an open-plan office had a deterioration in their perceived health and performance, and more absences due to illness (Richardson, et al., 2017)

People are feeling vulnerable and exposed with no privacy during hours and hours. Not only does hearing your conversations give a toxic coworker “ammunition” to use in the future, it puts you on the defensive – constantly scanning to see who is within earshot.

I don’t speak about how to pick the right temperature if you have A/C between women and men where they don’t have, physically, the same feeling of temperature.

Then modern studies tend to show that collaboration is not the “nec plus ultra” and open-space is toxic.

Bad news, it’s the two pillars of the modern economy and nobody seems to change something to that.