A post-Covid look at how collaborations are done in the office and how they can be done moving forward. A good read for people in management or people who want to be in management.

Following Covid and the introduction of remote working for those who were normally office based, we've all had to use various collaboration tools to improve the way we work together. Simon wants to take it one step further by advocating for collaboration tools to be used for creating a more productive and engaging work environment.
At the centre there needs to be a central hub (such as Slack or Microsoft Teams) where we communicate and share files, combined with ways to interact and communicate (such as Zoom or Google Meet) including video calls and making presentations.

By having everything saved in a central place, real-time conversations and sharing of files are easier.

Simon provides a number of tips on how to use collaboration tools effectively. He argues that it is important to create a culture of collaboration within the organisation, and to provide training (during paid working hours) on how to use the tools effectively.

I found this book to be informative and reassuring, as it echoed much of the way I and my team has been working since well before Covid. I also liked that it provides a number of practical tips that can be implemented immediately.

This was a great book post Covid about the workplace and technology. I wouldn’t say I learned a ton I didn’t already know or experience but it was a good refresher in technology.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy to honestly review.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, collaboration has been made more difficult. Not just at the time with everyone working remotely, but since life has returned to normal with a blended mix.

Some companies offer flexible working, others entirely remote - making it challenging for collaboration to be as effective as it once was when everyone sat across a room from one another.

As a millennial working for a tech company, I have used various collaboration tools before, during, and following the pandemic. Whilst this book contained some helpful information, I feel it was aimed at those who had yet to dip their toe.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Motion Publishing for an advance reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was really intrigued by this book, as my company has been distributed for way longer than just the pandemic. I thought of myself as pretty savvy with online collaboration. However, this book definitely taught me some things. I liked the idea of a hub and it made me reconsider my email usage. I also started to view Slack differently, as it is a record, and can always be searched.


Thank you NetGalley for my ARC!

This is a book about collaboration in the new era of Zoom, Teams, Slack and other such tools – not that they are completely new, but the pandemic and enforced remote working caused a huge boom in usage and some permanent changes in the way people work together. Author Phil Simon is a US specialist in business communications, and associated with the Agile methodology of software development – quite appropriate for this book, since collaboration is at the heart of Agile.

There are a few themes here. Simon believes that organisations need strong collaboration in order to thrive, and personally I think that is spot on. He spends some time distinguishing between collaboration and other related but different things like communication (a pre-requisite but insufficient on its own), or co-operation which can be a passive relationship; people can co-operate without actually collaborating.

Despite all the this, the main topic of the part 1 of this book, I am not sure that Simon ever nails what collaboration really is, at least not in this book. There are many examples of what it is not, but it remains, in my mind, a bit elusive. I did like his metric of organizational health: “The ability to rally around a common vision, execute effectively, and create a culture of innovation.”

Simon does show a good understanding of the human factor in productivity. He talks about managers versus makers, and how managers feel the need to communicate often with many people, while makers need to reduce distraction and focus on a task; I am not sure if he had software development in mind but this is a good description of what developers need.

Part 2 then gets to the heart of the book: better collaboration through technology. The key concept Simon uses is what he calls a “collaboration hub,” meaning any of a number of tools which form a central internet-connected space where users can interact with one another. This includes what the author calls the big three, Slack, Teams and Zoom, as well as other applications such as Expensify or Canva.

The author is a user of Slack and of Google Docs and while he shows a commendable neutrality in the sense that he considers other tools such as Teams just as effective, even saying that “It’s fair to call the similarities around today’s internal collaboration hubs remarkable,” his greater depth of knowledge of the tools he mainly uses does show. There is really much more about Slack than about Teams, and that is something to be aware of. Teams users can still benefit from the book but less so than Slack users.

There is a big theme here though which is that the author considers email, especially internal email, a blocker to collaboration. He gives reasons, including that inboxes tend to die when an individual leaves the company; that email is gaffe-prone since a careless email, or a careless reply-all, cannot be unsent; and that emailing attachments like spreadsheets leads to multiple forks of the same data. In fact, toward the end of the book Simon remarks that “Effective, long-term collaboration cannot take place via email. Period.”

While I have some sympathy with this view, I think it is overdone. I reminded myself that one of the most successful collaborative projects of all time, the Linux kernel, is based on email lists.

Still, Simon is quite correct, a collaboration tool with channels for team members has lots of advantages over email, gathering all the communications in one spam-free place and making search much easier.

Part three of the book is called “moving from theory to practice” and contains lots of discussion about how organizations can move towards using collaboration hubs and what can go wrong. Then part four peeks into the future and envisages smarter collaboration hubs which use AI to book meetings for us, automatically transcribes meetings and sends automatic alerts to Slack channels.

There is plenty of wisdom though I could have done with more on practical questions about how to get the most from Slack or Teams. How many channels or Teams should you have? When should you have a video conference versus a message chat? Should we have our collaboration hubs always open or sign out sometimes? Who should be able to create a channel, or should anyone? And what more advanced or intricate features of the products are worthwhile?

I enjoyed Simon’s willingness to be blunt at times, as well as some amusing reflections like “In my consulting days, I often saw project managers call meetings essentially because they were bored.”

Towards the end of the book we also get this: “Just because the discussion or task takes place in a hub doesn’t mean that it’s truly collaborative.” I agree. What then is the magic that enables an organization to be collaborative? In the end it is corporate culture rather than tools that matter most. I think the author recognizes that, but after reading the book, I am still not clear about the best way to get to the collaborative culture to which we should aspire.

great resource that is well organized and easy to follow. I learned a few new things while reading this book!