What makes collaboration click?

We’ve all been there before, staring blankly into the Zoom squares of a team retro. Someone asks if anyone has anything to add; the Zoom is silent.

Something feels off. Everyone leaves the meeting, and dives back into their work and digital “collaboration” tools, feeling as if something tangible has been lost.

Why does working together feel so hard? Even with clear goals, expertly articulated roadmaps—even collaborative digital spaces where we can “be together”—it often feels like we’re missing each other. What’s wrong with this dynamic? And how can we fix it?

When we say we are “collaborating,” what we actually mean is we’re performing a variety of synchronous and asynchronous acts that are in tension and harmony with each other. We wanted to better understand what it takes for people and teams to collaborate well—to identify gaps and empower people to improve their experience—so we did some research.

People consider a lot of different activities to be forms of “collaboration.” Including, but not limited to, work that’s carefully divided, giving everybody a role to play—for example, contributing asynchronously to a massive user journey diagram in a digital whiteboard tool. It can also be very freeform—for example, coordinating in real time to troubleshoot or file a bug via Slack or Zoom. It can be very high-stakes—for example, meticulously planning a kick-off workshop for an important company priority. It can also be super mundane, like reconciling a comment in a document or design file.

In order for work to be collaborative, the process or outcomes need to be shared. But different roles may think about their collaborative responsibilities in totally different ways, and the potential for failure is high. Without a more precise way to talk about the stuff that makes it work, “collaboration” will go the way of many corporate buzzwords—something we say we do without meaningful consideration for the rituals and behaviors that make it successful.

Some of the (many) things people do when they collaborate:

Different roles may think about their collaborative responsibilities in totally different ways, and the potential for failure is high.

“It’s complicated” is the default when it comes to working relationships today. Consider what you and your team are up against, and why making it better matters

We wanted to understand not just what collaborative activities people were doing, but which ones led to better product outcomes.

So we fielded a survey that asked teams to rate how well these activities described their teams and to rate the quality of the products they were building. We measured “great products” with 7 different questions, like meeting customer needs, being innovative, well-crafted, etc. Our analysis looks for the collaboration behaviors that predict better products.

We found five statistically significant behaviors:

To further quantify the impact of the collaborative activities, we compared them to important organizational factors, like good planning, goal setting, and shared success criteria like KPIs. What we found was that the collaborative behaviors were just as important.

To wrap our heads around the relative size of the impact, we normalized the “great products” score into a scale. The way to think about this: a work group engaging in all of the team-level behaviors would score 25% higher than a team that did none of them.

These relatively simple collaborative practices lead to better products:

It’s not just one thing that makes work, work. Collaborating well takes practice, repetition, and reflection.

After following up with teams that had the highest product scores (i.e. teams were doing all the significant collaboration activities), it became clear that, in addition to participating in the five key activities, they also had a habit of reinforcing each activity throughout their process. So while it’s true that decision clarity or frequent feedback can have a measurable impact, those things in combination and in tension created a truly virtuous collaboration cycle. As you improve one, the others become easier and more impactful. But what does this look like in practice?

CO-CREATE: Make time to edit at the same time

ROLE CLARITY: Know who needs to be involved

RAPPORT: Know your team as humans

FEEDBACK: Make time for others to weigh in

REFLECT: Make time to adapt

Take role clarity, for example. Reinforcing the boundaries around different responsibilities can help smooth out synchronous co-editing time, which in turn strengthens a sense of rapport between team members. The same is true for feedback: By giving teammates the space and time to react and respond, you’ll naturally cultivate a reflective, constructive workspace where people are comfortable talking about what’s working and what's not. Each of these practices feed into and amplify each other, which is what makes the cycle of co-creation, feedback, reflection, role clarity, and rapport so vital. Here are some tips on how to nurture a collaborative system that is more than the sum of its parts.

Start small

Co-creation is rarely a large group activity. More often, co-editing sessions happen on successful teams with close collaborators with a lot of context. These sessions work, because collaborators can show one another what they mean instead of sifting through endless comment threads.

Know Your Role

The most successful teams understand who makes the final call. They’re leveraging the context and skills of others on the team to get “unstuck.” They’re not opening up every decision to a vote. When you have this clarity, a co-editing session isn’t a committee meeting. Each individual still has their part to play.

Start with camaraderie

If your team doesn’t have a basic level of camaraderie, start there. Simple warm-up or icebreaker exercises can humanize teammates, get everyone laughing, and create good vibes for your reflection time.

Allow for prep time

Give people a heads-up, so they can collect their thoughts privately before sharing. When people are comfortable being real, this openness and authenticity increases the team’s camaraderie, which then supports the effectiveness of future reflection moments.

Be Clear

Use reflection activities to have explicit conversations about the other important collaboration activities. Talk about how the team’s feedback approaches have (or haven’t) led to useful iterations or even breakthroughs.