Maintaining a healthy work-life balance can be difficult in today’s culture that celebrates being always on. In fact, 94 percent of 1,000 professionals surveyed by the Harvard Business Review said they put in 50 or more hours a week at work. What’s more, nearly half that group clocked in more than 65 hours a week.
In today’s always on workplace culture, where employees are rewarded and oftentimes expected to work long hours and communicate continuously, balance can be hard to find. In fact, more and more people are prioritizing work over their personal lives, tipping the scales toward burnout and stress.
Team collaboration is what makes a team. Without it, you don’t have a team. Instead, you have a bunch of people working at the same time. However, true teams do more. They use collaboration to synergize.
Be that as it may, collaboration is not an intrinsic human need or priority. In fact, we learn to collaborate. And it’s a difficult process. This process has helped us achieve a lot. Most modern achievements are the result of collaboration.
Sure, you can cultivate greatness without collaboration. While writing poetry as a team might be fun, this is a one-person job. Also, a lot of other activities are not team activities. And that’s fine.
Team collaboration can be a metric on which you benchmark productivity. Yet, we should not confuse regular productivity with synergized productivity. In synergized productivity, the overall result is greater than the sum of inputs. Work has a final result of a value superior to the elements of work. For example, a Tesla S is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet, people could be very productive producing the parts. In this case, there is no added value, no synergy.
