Poor collaboration is costing your company.
Our traditional view of collaboration is just people in the room working (for why this is wrong, see here). But this view is costing our business and the wellbeing of your people.
Collaboration is SO much more. And there are significant, compounded costs to your business for not investing in it.
Zoom’s 2024 Global Collaboration Report found that leaders spend more than one hour each day resolving collaboration issues. That costs an estimated US$16,491 per manager per year. And this is where scale really shows it off: in a company of 1,000 people, every hour spent costs a company more than US$874,000.00 per year.
So, that’s looking at time spent by a manager focusing on behavioural or process issues.
Now, let’s add the following:
32 days of productivity loss annually due to fragmented collaboration tech stack causing constant switching (Deloitte).
US$12,506 lost per employee per year due to poor communication (Grammarly & Harris Poll).
All those meetings are costing over US$25,000 per employee per year (Rogelberg; Otter.ai).
Disengagement results in 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity and 15% lower profitability (Gallup).
Decentralising information, poor processes and knowledge management is resulting in 25% of executives and teams spending a quarter of the workweek searching for information (Atlassian).
All these inefficiencies and conflicts are resulting in lack of engagement and ultimately the loss of employees. That’s resulting in 1.5–2× annual salary cost to replace employees (Bersin).
Zooming out, we have a $10 trillion global productivity loss from poor engagement (Gallup).
When we consider that 75% of cross-function teams are ‘dysfunctional’ (Harvard Business Review), that is a significant cost, strain and pain to your people and your company.
These are conservative figures.
What this shows is that by treating collaboration as solely a ‘soft’ nice to have, this results in compounded losses to your business.
When we get collaboration right, the research is strong: we get better engagement and thinking, resulting in innovation and profit.
The numbers are hard to ignore:
Companies with strong collaborative cultures are 2x more likely to be profitable (Deloitte & Google).
Organisations with highly engaged employees experience 23% higher profitability (Gallup).
Organisations experience a 51% reduction in employee turnover when engaged (Gallup)
There is a 68% improvement in employee wellbeing (Gallup)
Customer-centric companies experience 2x revenue growth by comparison to peers (McKinsey).
Customer co-creation is an important strategy in customer experience for 90% of executives (McKinsey).
We also create buy-in, shared purpose and people who can bring their best insights and thinking to the table.
It’s time to invest in collaboration.
Because we’re better together but nobody taught us how.
