Thursday, April 24th, 2008
White-collar workers collaborate more than ever
By Shiv Singh
The April 28th issue of Businessweek includes some collaboration statistics that I found very interesting. Apparently 82% of white-collar workers partner with co-workers. That number appears low. There are fewer and fewer roles that don’t require any collaboration whatsoever now.
46% of white-collar workers are motivated to collaborate because they learn form others when they do so. 30% collaborate to accomplish a specific task, 19% collaborate because it is required of them and 4% to get ahead. Here’s my question - which of these segments are most likely to use online tools to collaborate? And how frequently does that group collaborate? My sense is that those that are motivated by learning use the online tools and collaborate the most and they probably also get ahead by collaborating more without realizing it .
Another interesting finding, 51% of women like working together so that they can learn from others in comparison to 40% for men. In terms of the different age groups, 18-24 year olds like working together the most (60%), followed by the 25-64 year olds (44%) and finally only 28% of the 65+ enjoy collaborating. These numbers aren’t too surprising and as time passes I expect more people to enjoy working together. With our personal lives getting more collaborative because of the social networks, it is only a matter of time before we bring those behavior patterns into the workplace.
And finally, 9% prefer working in groups of two, 54% like groups of three, 27% like groups of four or more and 10% are happiest working alone. There is obviously something special about groups of three. I haven’t seen any research to explain this but one reason maybe that when you have three people it is easier to make decisions.
There’s no question that knowledge workers are being asked to collaborate more everyday. Given the amount of information they need to digest just to do their jobs, they have to depend upon each other more. The smartest employees are the ones that realize that they need to be an active and generous player in this knowledge sharing ecosystem. They are the ones that are probably going to succeed the most. The others need to get on board or they will get left behind.
