Before your next office day: do you have a collaboration problem or a waiting problem?

Mari starts preparing a client project. She has the materials, but one decision is still open. The department head she needs is in a meeting. She sends a Teams message and moves on to another task. That task also needs a colleague’s approval, but the colleague is busy.

The next morning they hold a meeting. The first ten minutes go on bringing everyone up to speed, then they make a decision that could have been made the previous day. Nobody made a mistake. Yet one decision took two days.

When this happens frequently, the manager draws an understandable conclusion: people should come to the office more often, where they can walk up to each other and settle things quickly.

But why does so much work need to wait until someone else is available?

The office makes dependencies less visible

In an office, gaps in the way work is organised can often be covered with a quick conversation. If a task is unclear, ask a colleague. If a decision is missing, drop by the manager’s desk. If no one can locate a document, find the person who always knows.

This may be efficient for the person asking. For the other person, that question interrupts their work. Someone saves five minutes while someone else has to rebuild their concentration. We call this collaboration, even when part of it is the consequence of a poorly designed process.

When people work in different places, these dependencies become more visible. Questions move into messages, decisions await replies and meetings multiply. Remote work seems to be obstructing collaboration. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it simply exposes a problem that was always there.

Three dependencies that should not be confused

Real-time dependency. Work moves only when people speak at the same time. Sometimes that is essential, for example when resolving a difficult conflict. Other times, better preparation would remove the need.

Decision dependency. An employee knows what to do but must wait for sign-off. Changing communication tools will not solve this. Decision rights must be reconsidered.

Information dependency. Necessary knowledge sits in someone’s head, an old message or a document that only a few people can find. Better access to reliable information is the answer.

These dependencies can overlap, but they require different responses. A company does not become faster merely because questions can be answered immediately in the office.

One person’s speed is not the company’s speed

Imagine a task that takes two hours of actual work but requires four sequential approvals. Each approver is busy and replies the following day. The task takes four days to complete. This is an illustration, not an empirical finding.

Putting the approvers in one office may reduce the waiting. But are all four approvals necessary? Could the decision rules be agreed in advance? Could everyone see the relevant information? These are process-design questions, not location questions.

An office can make it faster to ask. That does not necessarily make the entire company faster.

Asynchronous work does not mean more messages

Synchronous work requires people to engage at the same time, through a discussion, call or joint decision. Asynchronous work allows someone to advance a task when others are not immediately available. It does not mean that everything must be written down or that meetings are bad.

Replacing one meeting with twenty Teams messages may change nothing. People still do not know who decides, when a reply is expected or where the latest agreement lives. The channel changed; the work did not.

Asynchronous work functions better when the goal and expected output are clear, decision rights are known, information is accessible and everyone understands when an issue requires a rapid live discussion.

When is working together genuinely better?

A study of collaboration among more than 61,000 Microsoft employees found that the pandemic-driven shift to full remote work made collaboration networks more siloed and increased the share of asynchronous communication. It describes changed collaboration patterns; it does not establish that every form of remote work damages relationships.

A separate experiment involving 1,612 Trip.com employees, published in Nature in 2024, found that two days a week working from home reduced attrition by about one-third without harming measured performance or promotion outcomes. Managers’ average expectation of the productivity impact shifted from −2.6% before the experiment to +1.0% afterwards. Those figures are managers’ estimates, not an observed productivity increase.

The studies address different questions. Less physical contact can alter relationships, while flexible work need not reduce performance. A video call can also be an effective live discussion. Physical presence adds most value when people need to build trust, learn together or solve something that benefits from being in the same room.

One practical change: stop reading updates aloud

Consider a weekly, one-hour leadership meeting. Eight participants take turns reporting what they have done. That information could be shared beforehand in a short written update. The meeting could focus instead on competing priorities, hard decisions and obstacles that require input from multiple people.

Progress updates, first-round document feedback and decision preparation can often happen asynchronously. Ambiguous problems, difficult trade-offs, coaching and relationship-building frequently deserve live interaction. These are not rigid categories; choose deliberately rather than by habit.

One experiment before mandating another office day

For one week, record situations where work stalled. Note the primary cause: (1) missing information, (2) unclear decision ownership, (3) an unclear task, (4) a genuine need for shared discussion or (5) approval required at every step.

Choose the most frequent reason and change one working agreement. Clarify a decision right, define the information required before work starts or reserve a regular slot for difficult issues. Check a couple of weeks later whether waiting time has decreased.

If many issues genuinely require discussion, organise better shared time. That does not automatically mean more office days. If most bottlenecks come from unclear information or decision rights, the office may only mask the symptoms.

More togetherness, or less waiting?

The office has real value. Trust, relationships and shared learning do not happen by accident. Yet a constant need to check with someone can also suggest unclear accountability, inaccessible information or decisions concentrated among too few people.

Do you truly need people to work together more, or have you organised work so that nobody can progress alone?

Sources

• Yang et al. (2022), Nature Human Behaviour
• Bloom, Han & Liang (2024), Nature