There’s a tendency to overmanage complicated collaborations. But additional meetings and structure put additional stressors on productivity. There’s a better way.

Jack Skeels September 23, 2025 Reading Time: 9 min

Summary:

Managers need better strategies for managing collaboration. One option is to organize employees into pods: cross-discipline groups that mix and match on projects as needed. This structure requires less oversight and fewer meetings than multiproject environments that don’t use pods, and it can help keep employees from being pulled in too many directions.

In collaborative organizations, where teams are matrixed, workers are multi-allocated, and the work itself is often fluid, exploratory, or evolving, managers face a major challenge: Cooperation is often messy and opaque, and it rarely follows a linear path. Today’s joint work products and multiproject environments don’t have the simple measurability of, say, a 1930s Tayloristic assembly line.

Managers nonetheless feel the need to manage and often revert to meetings and interruptions, which reduce productive time and stress schedules. Meetings and their resulting to-do lists increase the need for oversight — which leads to more meetings. A single 30-minute meeting might seem like a small tax on efficiency. But when meetings are multiplied across overlapping projects, they can result in hours of context-switching and time-wasting. What’s worse, most productivity metrics fail to capture this inefficiency. Time card hours look full, projects appear to be staffed, and everybody says they’re busy — but in reality, people are treading water.

At one large automotive client that my company consulted with, the customer relationship communications group — which served multiple brands, regions, and internal service organizations — had reached a point of “meeting wars.” Meetings were being proactively scheduled simply to secure people’s time, which dug into their productivity weeks in advance.