Excessive Collaboration Is Fueling Pandemic Burnout

There’s a workplace threat among us, even with so many people working from home: collaboration. Excessive collaboration, that is. It was already surging before the pandemic and has crescendoed into a tremendous surplus of Zoom meetings and cc’ing, says Rob Cross, associate professor of global leadership at Babson College, a private business school in Wellesley, Mass. Cross has tracked the phenomenon for 20 years through Connected Commons, a consortium of more than 100 companies including Citigroup, General Mills, and Microsoft, where he follows the work habits of high performers and traces the interactions of hundreds of thousands of employees through social network analysis. Cross, whose new book is Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being, sat down to talk about the problem. The interview was edited for length and clarity:

It’s not that collaboration itself is bad, but the sheer amount of it. Pre-pandemic, about 85% of most people’s work was spent on the phone, on email, or in meetings. As we’ve gone through the pandemic, that number has gone up about five to eight hours a week, with people working in collaborative activities on email, Slack, and organizations’ own apps, and employees are on earlier in the morning and later into the night than ever before.