Effective collaboration is the cornerstone of business success. This foundation also has a crucial role in creating a positive impact on team members themselves, with those working with high collaboration reporting a 30% increase in job satisfaction and a 20% decrease in turnover intent.

However, it’s easy for firms to become stuck in poor collaboration habits. Despite the plethora of tools and apps facilitating hybrid work, it’s in people’s nature to fall back into old patterns. Organisations might not recognize when a process or tool needs updating to better their collaboration efforts.

I’ll explore six signs which can indicate ineffective collaboration, along with some considerations for improvement.

1-      Meeting overload

A work diary overflowing with follow-up meetings suggests similar information is being relayed throughout the work week, indicating team collaboration is not efficient. Beyond time and money spent for businesses pulling employees into meetings, excessive touch points can cause fatigue and prevent people from working optimally.

Careful consideration is required around whether each recurring meeting is truly needed. Are team members learning or applying new information, or are they just being reminded of the status of items? Asynchronous collaboration can act as an effective alternative to extra meetings. Visual collaboration, for example, allows individuals to collaborate in their own time and reduces the need for extra meetings. In some situations, the quality of collaboration will become more valuable as it gives team members time back and decreases the pressure of coming up with ideas on-the-spot.

2-      Unorganised meetings

Meetings play a crucial role in team alignment, but poor preparation for meetings can undermine their effectiveness and make them a source of poor collaboration. If meetings overrun, start late, lack proper agendas, or do not have a formalised notetaking or documentation process, it can quickly lead to needing additional meetings to feel aligned.

Efficiently run meetings benefit the overall productivity of the team, giving workers the information they need to do their job well and, critically, some time back. Compiling effective meeting agendas helps prepare attendees for discussion, encourages participation, and keeps meetings focused and to time. A visual canvas where notes, action items, and decisions are recorded can help enhance alignment as everyone has access to it during and after meetings and are expected to collaborate.

3-      Multiple versions of documents

As multiple people work on the same doc it can be easy for different versions of the same one to emerge. This runs the risk of employees working from outdated information and losing time finding the right version. As people come and go in an organisation or change roles, there can be confusion over who owns documents, wasting even more time.

Having a single source of truth – a centralised repository for your team’s documents, data, and information – can provide teams with a one-stop shop for people to easily add to and pull from, eventually eliminating unproductive searches, avoiding duplicate work and identifying patterns within ideas and data.

4-      Miscommunication between workers

Poor communication between team members can quickly result in wider organisational misalignment. This often stems from workers lacking clarity around project goals, timelines, and priorities. Constantly seeking answers to seemingly basic questions or leaving meetings without clear direction are indicators that a clear record of decisions or other project details are missing.

While central documents are important in addressing this, the mere creation of them does not mean the issue is resolved. Teams can interpret things differently when only using text-based communication like emails or Slack. Visuals speed up the process of understanding concepts or information to confidently move forward on tasks and projects.

5-      Being overwhelmed by spreadsheets

When it comes to managing and analysing data, there is no doubt spreadsheets are king. However, even in this role, they can be overwhelming to interpret and highly error-prone. They’ve grown to be used in other ways as well, like visuals in presentations or a means to collaborate. But spreadsheets aren’t optimised for internal communication, so teams still rely on other tools, like Slack and email, to ask questions or communicate needed changes.

Spreadsheets will always have a role, but when it comes to making sense of data, visual collaboration platforms are often more intuitive. For example, they leverage work already done instead of having to manually input data.

6-      Hearing from the same people all the time

If a few voices keep dominating meetings, it’s likely indicative there’s an issue with collaboration equity. Businesses must offer all participants the same opportunity to contribute and communicate equally, regardless of whether they work in-office or remotely, have different collaboration styles, are at varying levels of seniority, or are neurodivergent. Otherwise, they risk not achieving the full potential of their teams. Employees also may feel frustrated and dissatisfied or as though their organisation doesn’t value their input,  potentially resulting in the business missing out on great ideas.

Understanding different working styles is vital to create fulfilling sessions. For instance, expressive collaborators like working in teams, while introspective collaborators prefer a more thoughtful, deliberate approach to collaboration. By empowering people to do their best work in the way they do it best, businesses can benefit from more satisfied employees and a more equitable workplace.

Escaping the same old rituals

Breaking old working habits can be hard to manage, as we naturally tend to stick with familiar routines rather than opt for better methods. However, making small changes to inefficient day-to-day processes can result in significant improvements in collaboration and productivity between and amongst teams.

Keep an eye on the frequency and quality of meetings and ideations, and assess whether documentation processes are indeed helping to share knowledge or actually producing siloes. Focusing on these elements will help accelerate decision-making and drive innovation for businesses in the long term.

Dan Lawyer is Chief Product Officer at Lucid Software.