Is it possible for teams to communicate too frequently? Research by Ethan Bernstein and colleagues suggests that groups that meet less often may be better at problem-solving.
Always on, always connected isn’t always better when it comes to solving problems at work. In fact, teams get better results when they collaborate only intermittently, according to recent research.
Insights on work collaboration highlight the study, How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence (pdf), written by Ethan Bernstein, the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Jesse Shore, assistant professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business; and David Lazer, professor at Northeastern University. Their results appear in the August 2018 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Many organizations have a bias toward solving sticky problems through collaboration, either in person or virtually. The more eyes on a problem, the theory goes, the better the solution. But is the persistent collaboration encouraged by today’s communication tools like Slack and Skype good or bad for finding the best answer?
“I DON’T WANT THERE TO BE ZERO COMMUNICATION, BUT I DO THINK THAT TRANSPARENCY AND COMMUNICATION DO HAVE DOWNSIDES"
To find out, the researchers studied how well people performed solving a problem with varying states of interaction with teammates: zero interaction with peers, intermittent interaction, or constant interaction.
