Returning to the office doesn’t guarantee collaboration

Detailed summary

Getting people into the office is a question of attendance. Helping them do something worthwhile together is a question of leadership, Dorothy Kudla writes

Dorothy Kudla is the founder of Full Circle Connections and author of the book Six Functions, One Vision. She helps modern leaders simplify leadership, build alignment and drive results.

You can bring employees back to the office and still have a team that doesn’t know how to work together.

People can sit a few desks apart, protect their own priorities and make decisions without involving the colleagues affected. They can attend every meeting and contribute nothing beyond an update.

I once asked a participant at a client’s project kickoff why they were there if they had no plans to contribute. “Because I was invited,” they said, “and I don’t know why.”

We’ve spent considerable time debating where people should work, but have we paid enough attention to how we expect them to work together?

In its simplest form, collaboration means working with others to create something of value. Standups, updates and huddles need to happen. But sharing updates alone isn’t collaboration.

Working together is harder than it sounds. We assume we can bring people together and they’ll figure it out. A 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 18,000 employees found that only 29 per cent were satisfied with collaboration at work. Returning to the office won’t change that on its own.

Leaders need to set people up to collaborate. That starts with clarity on the four Ps: purpose, people, process and performance.

Are we generating ideas, gathering information, establishing direction or making a decision? Be clear about that at the start of the collaboration.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Globe and Mail (Report on Business). To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.