Communications of the ACM
Want to Help Your Colleagues? Try Logging Off for a While
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Here's a reason to step away from your e-mail inbox as you set out on that big project. Logging off occasionally may actually make you a better collaborator.
A recent study by business researchers at Harvard, Boston University, and Northeastern University found that colleagues who are in constant contact with each other may actually be less effective than groups that reserve some time to work independently.
"Our research suggests that . . . the idea that we should be always on and always connected and always sharing everything actually could be hurting us with complex problem solving tasks," says Ethan S. Bernstein, associate professor at Harvard Business School and coauthor of "How Intermittent Breaks In Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Bernstein and his colleagues found that groups of people who got together occasionally to talk about their ideas came up with better results than teams of people who only worked alone or only worked together.
The study found that, when they worked alone, people came up with more unique solutions—but while some of them were creative and effective, others were less efficient and brought the average quality down. Teams with constant collaboration, on the other hand, came up with more consistent results, but fewer exceptionally strong ideas.
From The Boston Globe
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