Is it just poor workflow or is it willful information hoarding! A good friend emailed me recently about the concept of information hoarding at work. I write and speak extensively about individuals who sabotage coworker performance and productivity at work.
The act of withholding information is a common tactic used by difficult and uncooperative employees. This article outlines examples of information and power hoarding, both aimed at maintaining the offending employee’s informal power at work.
Hoarding has become a pretty popular term lately, and more people are familiar with this psychological syndrome. It’s become popular on lifestyle magazines, self-help psychology websites, a few TV shows (remember the hoarding woman who didn’t even notice the dead body in the chaos of her house on CSI?), and there are even whole reality shows (think Hoarders) following the habits of people with the condition and their struggle with cleaning up that mess their house turned into.
The fact that daily e-mail traffic becomes a time-waster for many office workers is often due to the careless handling of the cc and bcc fields. Do you know that too? They emailed information to a specific distribution group and cc’ed all of them.
And then you get some replies to your email. Such an approach is a common and annoying mistake in business email traffic. Often enough, it also happens that colleagues randomly fill in the CC or BCC line with addresses – the message could be of interest to more than just the actual recipient.
In this way, mailboxes are clogged up by bystanders, who have more work to do as a result. Show that professional handling of the cc and bcc looks different! When sending your email, always ask yourself: Who really needs to receive the message? Who is the addressee of the message? And who only gets to know them?
Knowledge hoarding — when employees purposely keep critical knowledge to themselves — is a fairly common phenomenon found in companies of all sizes. It’s an uphill battle to create a culture of knowledge sharing if you don’t address knowledge hoarding head-on.
As our team grows from our initial product and engineering teams to content, marketing, customer support, and beyond, we’ve looked for ways to prevent knowledge hoarding from finding its way into our own company culture. To do this, we first had to identify why employees hoard knowledge.
One of the more peculiar subreddits (on a site full of them) is r/DataHoarder. The subreddit’s moderators describe the community as a forum for those suffering from the ‘digital disease’ of data hoarding, the practice of retaining, to an extreme degree, all forms of data.
With more than half a million members, the community prides itself on enabling those who suffer from an inclination to hoard data. One of the top posts is from a verified user who claims to have 87 TB of storage, at a cost of approximately 5,000 dollars.
The American logic is give, not get. If an American colleague has information that is relevant to the work of other colleagues or teams, that person is obligated to provide that information.