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If you think toxic workplace culture doesn’t affect the bottom line, think again. Businesses have been losing over $40 billion annually on average in turnover during the past decade due to toxic workplace culture.
How would 73% better work or a 60% more innovative team sound? When you fix poor collaboration, businesses see faster, better, and more innovative work and more satisfied employees.
Regardless, 93% of companies report a need to improve collaboration within their organisation. Can you imagine how much this costs your business?
According to Deloitte, improving collaboration in the workplace could lead to a gain of $2,517 per employee annually. A lack of collaboration could result in a missed opportunity for the same amount per employee.
It’s been long understood that poor collaboration and communication in companies lead to poorer job satisfaction, engagement, and psychological safety. But, these effects directly impact businesses, and the costs can manifest as a loss in profit due to poorer performance, talent attrition, correcting errors, or reworking. Poor collaboration reduces quality, productivity, and profits in the workplace.
What do we mean by bad team collaboration?
Poor communication is one of the many symptoms of dysfunctional collaboration. When it comes to collaboration among teams, bad or inefficient collaboration is even worse than no collaboration at all.
Bad collaboration is when a team can’t productively combine their skills and efforts. Team members are left to their own devices, needing to learn everything the hard way instead of helping one another, brainstorming efficiently or being able to use each others’ skills and efforts to overcome blockers.
Imagine being a part of an excellent team, only to be left to learn everything through making your own mistakes. It’s necessary and daunting.
Some symptoms of bad team collaboration include a lack of contribution, miscommunications, groupthink, disproportionate workloads, missed milestones or deadlines, and, at worst, conflicts. Poor collaboration hinders psychological safety, creativity, and innovation in teams and the flow of information and knowledge shared within teams and organisations.
For example, outdated data due to poor collaboration in engineering can lead to rework, delays, and errors. This, in turn, translates to lower-quality work and products, higher costs, missed deadlines, and delays.
Why teams don’t collaborate well
Essentially, lousy collaboration happens when team members don't understand one another. Poor collaboration goes hand in hand with poor communication, resulting in misunderstandings, mistakes, gaps in the information flow, and inefficiency. But understanding requires facilitation and support.
There are 7 classic reasons for poor collaboration among teams:
1. Communication breakdowns
Teams have unclear goals and expectations and don't listen to each other. It's hard to work together effectively when team members aren’t on the same page.
2. Lack of trust
If team members don't trust each other, they're less likely to share ideas openly or be willing to help each other out.
3. Differing personalities and work styles
Not everyone works the same way. Some people are introverts who prefer to work independently, while others are extroverts who thrive in collaborative settings. When these different styles clash, it can lead to frustration and inefficiency.
4. Unclear goals or roles
It can be difficult to collaborate effectively if team members don't understand what the team is trying to achieve or their individual roles.
5. Lack of resources and support
Teams need the right tools and resources to do their jobs. If they're constantly struggling with inadequate resources, it can make it difficult to collaborate effectively.
6. Unhealthy team dynamics
Teams can develop unhealthy dynamics, such as having an overbearing team member or a culture of fear. This can make it difficult for people to speak up and share their ideas, ultimately hindering collaboration.
7. Unhealthy competition
A little competition can be good, but too much can be destructive. If team members focus more on outshining each other than achieving a common goal, it’ll be hard to collaborate effectively.
If your organisation is experiencing talent attrition, conflicts, a lack of responsibility or psychological safety, addressing collaboration and communication should be your company’s biggest priority.
What are the challenges when you try fixing inefficient team collaboration
Have you tried fixing your team’s collaboration and failed? You might have bumped into some of these challenges.
1. Overcoming resistance to change
People are creatures of habit and may resist changing how they’ve always worked, even if it's ineffective.
Overcome this challenge by making it a team effort. Include everyone and encourage the whole team to participate.
Support their agency by reminding them that they’re free to change their work practices. For example, if they want to have meetings only during certain hours, they should be free to suggest that and work around it as a team.
2. Addressing underlying personality conflicts
Sometimes, team members just don't mesh well. It can be tough to get past personal clashes and focus on the work.
Overcome this challenge by encouraging open communication and facilitating a space where everyone can express their feelings openly.
Sometimes, it’s also a good idea to shift some practices among the team, but always ask how your colleagues feel about it.
For example, instead of forcing two people who don’t really get along to work together, what would they prefer? Would it be possible to have someone switch teams, or would dividing tasks work better?
Again, ensure that everyone feels heard and understood when discussing new actions.
3. Time commitment
Improving collaboration takes time and effort. It can be difficult to carve out the time needed for team-building exercises, communication training, or other initiatives.
Overcome this challenge by setting up small, uplifting practices for the team. For example, encourage them to take coffee breaks together, set up small games or challenges during the week, and take a moment for small talk before weekly meetings.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is just be open to hearing others. Be mindful of what you hear from your team. Are there any needs that aren’t met? Are there any desires for activities that they’d really enjoy? Pay attention and listen.
4. Holding people accountable
Even with the best intentions, people can fall back into old habits. It's important to have a system to hold team members accountable for following new collaborative practices.
Overcome this challenge by regularly reviewing team objectives and progress. Encourage your team to reflect on their behaviour and habits. If they don’t seem motivated, take some time to reflect on what’s in it for them.
Don’t simply ask for favours—create systems for change that feel motivating and rewarding. Celebrate the small successes—change is hard.
5. Keeping everyone engaged
Building a strong collaborative culture takes ongoing effort. Finding ways to keep everyone engaged in the process and motivated to collaborate effectively is important.
Overcome this challenge by checking in frequently, remaining curious, and asking your team questions. If your team doesn’t seem engaged or motivated, don’t be afraid to ask them about their thoughts and give them a chance to voice their thoughts and needs.
It’s natural for motivation to fluctuate, but sometimes things are left unsaid—reflecting on them together could be really beneficial.
6. Finding the right balance
There’s a fine line between too much collaboration and not enough. You don't want to micromanage your team, but you must ensure they communicate and work together effectively.
Overcome this challenge by giving your team space to reflect, discuss, and change their practices. Encourage them to create and change their own systems for meetings.
Sometimes, change needs trial and error, and having the ability to choose your own systems is sometimes the most efficient and agile way.
How you’re [probably] measuring the financial impact of bad collaboration right now
In the past, there hasn’t been a good, objective, and universal way to measure the impact of poor team collaboration. But here are a few indirect proxy metrics you might use now.
Lost revenue and missed opportunities
Sales cycle length
Ineffective collaboration can extend sales cycles. You may monitor how long it takes to close deals and identify if internal delays due to poor communication or handoffs impact sales velocity.
However, this metric doesn’t give a complete picture of collaboration performance, and it’s more of a symptom than a cause.
External factors, such as market conditions or customer behaviour, often influence sales cycle lengths. That's why analysing sales cycle length and collaboration performance should also include an overview of other metrics that may have contributed.
Project delays
You’re probably tracking projects that miss deadlines. And analysing if collaboration issues, like rework due to miscommunication, are contributing factors. Maybe you’re estimating the lost revenue from delayed product launches or missed market windows.
However, examining project delays only gives a reactive assessment of collaboration. It can illuminate the patterns or causes, but it would be even better to aim to identify issues before they affect project deadlines.
Customer satisfaction and churn
You might survey customers to understand if team communication breakdowns impact their experience. Dissatisfied customers may churn or spend less, leading to lost revenue.
However, it can be difficult to isolate the impact of team collaboration on customer satisfaction from other factors. It also requires ongoing and in-depth customer surveys, which may not always be feasible or accurate.
Decreased productivity
Employee surveys
Surveys can reveal wasted time due to rework, difficulty finding information, or waiting on colleagues. You might use these to estimate productivity losses.
However, surveys are ultimately subjective to each person and the moment they answer. Besides, people might not feel safe sharing the hard things for fear of retaliation. Once someone is truly disengaged, they might stop responding altogether.
Time tracking tools
You might be tracking how employees spend their time if a lot of time is spent on tasks related to poor collaboration, like searching for information or attending unproductive meetings.
However, your team might see these trackers as micromanagement in jobs that don’t track client work hours or aren’t tied to strict working schedules. And team members will most likely bulk-fill them instead of accurately tracking worked hours if they don’t see the benefit.
Wasted resources
Unnecessary meetings
Some teams have started tracking the number and purpose of meetings. Identifying if redundant meetings or unclear agendas are wasting valuable time.
However, eliminating unnecessary meetings must be organisation-wide since most people with meeting-heavy weeks tend to work cross-functionally. So, eliminating meetings might be hard without objective reasons why those particular ones should go.
High employee turnover
Due to collaboration problems, disengaged employees may be more likely to leave. In this case, you might factor in recruiting and training costs to replace them.
However, this is a lagging metric to track. These employees have already left, so this mostly indicates problems in the past instead of finding the issues to resolve proactively before people leave.
Use of collaboration measurement tools
Project management software
Many project management tools track team communication and activity. You might use this data to identify projects where collaboration seems dysfunctional and estimate the associated time wasted or rework needed.
However, like any tracking tool, they’re only good when teams use them and have systems in place.
Employee engagement platforms
Some platforms allow employees to anonymously report collaboration roadblocks. This data can highlight areas where communication is breaking down and impacting productivity.
However, just like employee surveys, these platforms only tend to show what people are willing to share, and disengaged employees tend to stop using these once they see that feedback doesn’t lead to change.
Benchmarking
You’re also probably looking at industry standards for project completion times, sales cycles, or customer satisfaction metrics. Significant deviations from the benchmarks could indicate collaboration problems impacting performance.
However, benchmarking is only an indicator, and results from another company or team might not be relevant for your team. This metric should be a starting point instead of a direct comparison metric.
Increased operational costs
Rework
Some projects already track instances where work needs to be redone due to miscommunication or lack of collaboration. This can help estimate the labour costs associated with this rework.
However, many other factors affect rework, so blaming collaboration alone might obscure other reasons why work needs to be redone.
Overtime
Inefficient collaboration can lead to teams needing to work overtime to meet deadlines. Tracking overtime costs associated with projects where collaboration issues were present can help.
However, like other indirect metrics, overtime is affected by many other factors and can also show issues many weeks or months ago.
And although these can help give you an indication of collaboration issues and business impact, they’re not direct or even easy to link to collaboration problems.
The better way to measure the cost of your team’s bad collaboration
The best way to measure the cost is to do it objectively. When there’s a lack of open communication or psychological safety, surveys become unreliable sources to measure the real situation.
If team members don’t have a sense of team efficacy and trust that they can solve problems and overcome issues together, it simply doesn’t make sense to be vulnerable about one’s feelings when it comes to the workplace.
That’s why you should measure the cost objectively and proactively.
Here’s where technology can be of a big help. Tools like Ayda Insights can measure different markers directly from the team’s collaboration and communication, for example, in online meetings. This way, instead of the perception of individuals, you’re measuring actual behaviours.
Some markers you should focus on when measuring the cost of poor collaboration include productivity, attrition, absences, total meeting cost, average meeting cost, and hours spent in meetings.
Productivity cost
How much has the team’s productivity fluctuated within the last month or six months?
You can calculate productivity cost by setting a default average productivity score, including metrics like employee engagement and work impact on goals and tie it to average salaries.
Attrition cost
How much has your company lost in terms of talent churn? Are there changes when compared to the previous month or six months?
You can calculate the attrition cost by calculating the turnover rate by the recruitment costs.
Absences cost
What’s the rate of unplanned absences in your team or organisation? What’s the change when compared to previous numbers?
You should measure absences cost by calculating the number of absent days per employee times their daily salary.
Total meeting cost
How much does your company spend on meetings? If it’s common for more people to be invited than necessary, the costs can climb unintentionally. Protect your employees’ focus time, which affects your bottom line.
You can measure the total meeting cost by calculating the total meeting hours times the team members’ hourly salaries.
Average meeting cost
How much do meetings cost on average per team? Does it change between teams, and if so, how could it be addressed? For example, defaulting to 45-minute meetings instead of 60 minutes can significantly reduce costs over time.
You can measure the average meeting cost by adding the number of people in each meeting by their hourly salary.
Hours spent in meetings
How many hours do your teams spend in internal meetings in total? What’s the change over the last month to six months? The number of meetings can increase without you noticing.
You can measure hours spent in meetings by adding up all the hours spent in meetings, for example, per week, by the number of employees present in the meeting.
How you can really fix your team’s collaboration problems
Once you have a better idea of your team’s situation, there are a few things you can do to fix the issues.
1. Work on your team’s communication
Ensure that your team’s on the same page about the current priorities, and make asking questions really easy. There really isn’t such thing as too much verifying and clarifying one can do, especially as a leader.
Additionally, if you’ve identified any gaps in your team’s communication—for example, a lack of empathy, nervousness to express and receive feedback, or underlying conflicts—start by addressing those.
2. Work on your team’s psychological safety
In short, expressions of vulnerability—expressing difficulty, challenge, doubt, asking tough questions, and challenging the status quo—should always be met with empathy and curiosity instead of punishment. Only seeing your colleague get punished once for a mistake can be enough to destroy any sense of psychological safety.
At best, psychological safety will also support your team’s innovation and creativity, supporting collaboration even further.
3. Encourage accountability and start with yourself
Make learning from mistakes the norm in your team. Bring them up and discuss them together. This will support collaboration and encourage them to learn from everyone’s mistakes instead of everyone having to learn the hard way.
Encourage mutual accountability whenever your team needs to meet shared goals.
4. Support collaboration by creating structure
Set spaces for collaboration and focus time. Set intentional meetings with curated invitations and normalise not reacting immediately to all messages at set hours, protecting focus time. You can even set different days for focus time and different ones where collaboration is encouraged.
5. Invite others to collaborate
Instead of impromptu meetings, be intentional. Ask for help, create well-thought workshops, and ask engaging questions. Make problem-solving a creative team effort. Instead of groupthink, encourage different responses and welcome them.
This is an eternal practice in progress, as it requires open-mindedness, but at best, it can be an incredible tool for teams.
As always, start with yourself.
6. Reflect on your own behaviours
How do you collaborate? Are you open-minded when collaborating? Are you intentional about the times you collaborate and when you’re doing a task that requires high focus and sitting down on your own? Start with your own work practices and behaviours and go from there. And remember, there is much to gain from improving collaboration.
Don’t let bad collaboration ruin your team’s good work
Poor collaboration in companies can be costly, resulting in lowered productivity, missed opportunities, and even talent attrition—estimating that bad team collaboration costs businesses $40 billion annually. Counteracting this requires improving communication, fostering psychological safety within teams, and promoting mutual accountability. Besides, teams benefit from structured spaces for collaboration and focused work.
Consider evaluating your team’s collaboration practices. Implement changes where necessary and measure the impact. Remember, effective collaboration enhances innovation, job satisfaction, and, ultimately, the bottom line.
For a roundup of all the tips in this article, get the PDF ⤵
About the author
Darja is a Behavioural Scientist and Customer Success Manager. She holds a Master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki, specialising in business anthropology and organisational psychology. She is also working on service and product development.
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