It’s in vogue now to tout the benefits of collaboration and the importance of breaking down silos, but employers are seeing a backlash against an overly collaborative work environment that can make a little siloing seem like a relief. Where once a high-achieving lone wolf was celebrated as an employer’s coveted asset, now high-performance teams are more fashionable and sought after. And while workplaces designed with few or no walls have gained popularity in recent years as a way to encourage collaboration, resentment about the arrangement has set in. 
Without walls for privacy, workers struggle to maintain focus and may even pine for the good old days when they had their own space, either in an office of their own or a cubicle that provided at least a degree of quiet. And it’s not just the noise and other distractions inherent in an open office that put a strain on productivity. It’s also a feeling that individuals can’t make a move without consulting the team.
Knowing how to mix collaboration with individual responsibility is like the old joke that goes:
Question: What’s a camel?
Answer: A horse built by committee.
Some tasks are better handled by camels, and others are best accomplished by horses. The trick is to know when to build a camel and when to rely on a horse.
Finding focus
DEGW, now named Strategy Plus, is a part of global infrastructure and support services firm AECOM. In 2010, the firm released research that included details about “the agony of trying to get work done in many organizations.” The research charted how 26 people described a typical day in their life in one business. The researchers noted that the core of the workday was dominated by scheduled meetings, and workers involved in virtual meetings tended to use the time to multitask. They also found that non-collaborative, individual work was pushed to the margins of the workday—often earlier or later than typical work hours.
The report identified the following challenges to focus:
- People intentionally distracted themselves with more information than they knew what to do with.
- Multitasking appeared to change how people processed information, and that made them less discriminative and more impulsive.
- Noise made it hard to concentrate.
- Unscheduled “pop-ins” as well as emails and instant messages disrupted concentration.
- Poor temperature and air quality also could lower task speed and accuracy.
Global design and architecture firm Gensler released its U.S. Workplace Survey in 2013 that claimed just one in four U.S. workers were in optimal workplace environments. Three in four were “struggling to work effectively, resulting in lost productivity, innovation, and worker engagement,” according to a statement from the company.
The survey found that workplace effectiveness had declined since 2008, and the inability to focus was to blame. The research found that the survey respondents who considered their workplaces balanced between collaborative work and individual focus were the ones who were thriving.
“Our survey findings demonstrate that focus and collaboration are complementary work modes,” Diane Hoskins, co-chief executive officer at Gensler, said when the research was released. “One cannot be sacrificed in the workplace without directly impacting the other. We know that both focus and collaboration are crucial to the success of any organization in today’s economy.”
What can HR do?
While attention often turns to the pitfalls of workplaces and practices emphasizing collaboration, it can fall to HR to help organizations find ways to overcome impediments. The Gensler research called for a balance of focus and collaborative space within a workplace, and HR can help employers realize the best ways to blend collaborative and focus areas.
Technology also is touted as a way to avoid the downsides of collaboration. Social media platforms designed for business users have gained ground, and HR professionals can be instrumental in researching and determining what technology will work best in their organizations.
In July 2012, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report titled “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.” It claimed that although most companies were using social technologies for product development, marketing, and customer service, “twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises.”
The report went on to say that the institute’s “estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals—by 20 to 25 percent.”