Collaboration software often just feels like those group projects you hated so much in school
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The prevalence of G-suite (with its less than stellar applications — Google Docs for Word, Google Sheets for Excel and Google Slides for PowerPoint — that are substitutes for the more full-featured Microsoft Office applications), Smartsheet, and lots of Cloud-hosted apps are forcing (yes I said forcing) employees to collaborate. It’s a brave new world! We can all create together! It’s like magic and so much better!
Except, it’s not. Not yet anyway. People are too new to this idea and not comfy with it yet. The results can be awkward or even close to disastrous.
What happens, from what I can see, is one or two of the team members are the “Alpha” dogs and tend to take the lead, work hard and help contribute to the overall project, while the rest sit back, do little, or simply follow what the Alphas say. In other words, you all get a B+ even though only one or two of you did the work — your worst school group project nightmare.
Not that I don’t love the idea, you can always see what others are doing, and you never have to save your work. Several people can add content in real-time, while the others in the Zoom meeting watch. It IS kind of cool.
But it may take a while before it really is integrated fully for everyone. For now, it feels like I am back at school and we just got assigned another one of those group projects (groan).
