Corporate says "we want to collaborate better!"

In September 2017, a decision by a small software company would begin a career and journey of self-exploration I never expected. Microsoft announced the retirement of Skype for Business. The world was rocked to its core! How could this software that only does IMs and video calls be going away?!

What came next for me was the start of my career in cloud services and conferencing technologies. The company I worked for at the time didn't have an engineer that "owned" video conferencing products. When more serious internal conversations started about retiring Skype in 2019 before the 2021 deadline I was the one that fell upwards into the responsibility.

So like most professionals I surveyed the software landscape: Teams, Zoom, WebEx, Avaya. There were so many options. I was leaning toward Zoom as it really was leader of the pack in 2019. When I did demos of Zoom to my leadership everyone was impressed. Others grew flustered with the options.

Then someone spoke up that tipped the scales.

"We just want to collaborate better!"

The room went silent. Some with nods, others with disdain. No longer was it going to be about simply picking a more feature-rich and stable tool. Now it was about defining collaboration.

Years. Years of my life then went into this problem. What does it mean to collaborate in a business? How do you successfully know you have collaborated? How do you make it standardized? What does it mean to collaborate to one type of job title vs another in a different field?

At first it was a workshop. 6 months of helping lead workshops. We hired an external consultant to build a framework to solve the problem and really lead us through it with open-ended and whimsical questions. Leaders, technologists, accountants, customers service reps, and more from all over the business were represented. Sticky notes with wishes and dreams of collaboration were attached to sprawling whiteboards in an ancient conference room. Sometimes we moved the sticky notes to other sections of dusty whiteboards under new columns. No idea was too crazy. Shoot for the stars with what you want.

The end result of those 6 months? Everyone just wanted collaboration to be easy.

Okay? That didn't leave me with much to move on. That wasn't a solution on what it means to collaborate or how to collaborate better. We had only rediscovered the challenge that collaboration is difficult.

It felt like all this time and money had been a waste. I could have told you that people want things to be easy, but maybe I couldn't have predicted how highly valued ease was. So highly valued that six figures of company time was spent confirming this.

Regardless the irony isn't lost on me that in a 6 month workshop on collaboration we failed to collaborate. 😅

This was 2019. After all this we decided to migrate from Skype to Teams in early 2020. A month later the pandemic happened and all our employees began working from home.

With a completely remote workforce suddenly the "collaboration" problem was at the forefront. From 2020-2024 the conversation never ended. It started with how to collaborate now with tools like Teams, Whiteboard, and other products in the O365 suite. Then as lockdown eased up it became how do we collaborate both as a remote workforce and as an onsite workforce.

After roughly 5 years of discussion, more experience in the professional world, more networking with peers in similar positions, I have learned that "collaboration" means nothing.

"Let's collaborate," they say. At some point this became a technology problem. The easy answer for any business to checking off the "collaboration" box is to introduce a software that facilitates conversation and work. This is what all of them do. Small companies, Fortune 500's, Silicon Valley, non-profits, all of them. They dump a software into their business and let everyone bumble through it.

What's never discussed is how to connect with your fellow human beings. If you don't know how to connect with others the tools will only get in the way.

Reviewing these years of my life, that was the problem all along. This was literally a struggle of the human condition. That 6 month workshop's true end result was a discovery of a desire to connect. "We want to collaborate better" is easily reframed to "we are struggling to connect."

Well that's definitely above my paygrade to fix. I have no answers on that. This is a problem that transcends work. We want to be understood. We want to be appreciated. We want to be respected. We want others to read our mind. We want others to agree with what we say. We want many things universally through all the different social groups we traverse.

I'm not going to leave you with a solid resolution, dear reader. Maybe in coming years I'll have a "top 10 ways to be human with your fellow humans" list for you to read. For now my action items are for me alone. I have been thinking a lot about human connection recently, my failings there, and how it bleeds across all facets of life.

I encourage you to do the same. Learning to live is learning to collaborate.