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In recent years, a number of large corporations – IBM, Bank of America, Aetna, Yahoo under former CEO Marissa Mayer – reduced their telework programs in the name of more interaction and more cooperation between employees, supposedly favored by being stuck together in an office. The economic model of companies providing coworking spaces, such as the $ 20 billion unicorn (a pre-initial public offering or a $ 1 billion mergers and acquisitions start-up) WeWork is also based on the proposition that if people find themselves in a shared space, they will network and cooperate more.
It does not work that way, however, recent research shows it. In the office, whether it is a business environment or WeWork style, workers are now housed in large open spaces designed to break down barriers. But in a recently published article, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban of Harvard University showed, based on two field studies, that modern open office architecture tends to reduce the volume of office space. Face-to-face interaction of 70%. increases the electronic communication accordingly. With such a communication scheme, the workers might as well be anywhere.
The two companies studied by Bernstein and Turban, the two Fortune 500 multinationals, were transitioning to more open and modern office environments. One of them has removed all the walls on one of its office floors. The researchers equipped workers with functions as varied as sales, technology, finance and human resources with high-tech tracking devices, called sociometric badges, for 15 days before and 15 days after their relocation of the new architecture. . In the fortified period, employees spent an average of 5.8 hours a day interacting face-to-face; in the open space, which decreased to 1.7 hours. At the same time, they ended up sending 56% more emails and 67% more instant messages, which increased by 75%.
The second company moved cabins to an open space for its entire international headquarters. The 100 employees with sociometric badges exchanged seats, spaced 6.5 meters apart, but separated by partitions, for workplaces as densely located without barriers, in groups of six to eight offices. This has reduced face-to-face interactions by 67% and increased email traffic. Counter-intuitively, the physical distance between communicating employees had no significant effect on their interaction. Physical proximity, it seems, is overestimated as an enhancer of cooperation.
Open offices, writes Bernstein and Turban, tend to be too stimulating. Too much information, too many distractions, too many people who walk around or even just watch their monitors – all of this "seems to have the perverse result of reducing rather than increasing the productive interaction."
"While it is possible to bring chemicals together under specific conditions of temperature and pressure to form the desired compound, more factors appear to be at work in the realization of A similar effect with humans, "the researchers concluded. "Until we understand these factors, we may be surprised to find a reduction in face-to-face collaboration even as we build transparent and open spaces to increase it."
The authors do not psychobadize their results. One possible explanation is that placing people in a huge aquarium in which they do not have personal space makes teeth cringe rather than make them more gregarious. The corporate world is pushing extroversion on people, most often through a relentless dating culture. Some find this not only uncomfortable, but they unconsciously attempt to minimize human contact and resort to less personal electronic communication.
There may be other explanations. For example, it is easy to see in an open space that someone is busy, so people may be reluctant to interrupt a colleague in the middle of a pressing task.
But no matter what happens psychologically, changes in communication can hurt the business. Bernstein and Turban noted that the leaders of the first company told them that "productivity, as defined by the measures used by their internal performance management system, had declined after the recast to eliminate spatial boundaries." They noted that this was consistent with research that shows that the decline in media wealth – that of the involvement of all our senses in communication – affects productivity.
Freelancers and founders of small businesses should be aware of this effect. when they exchange their home offices for WeWork subscriptions. In a WeWork office (there are currently 389 locations in 72 cities, including Dallas, Denver, Nashville and Atlanta), one gets 60 to 80 square feet of space, compared to the American corporate standard of about 200 square feet. While some may use proximity and common spaces designed ingeniously for networking, many might end up putting less effort into the work while communicating electronically rather than face-to-face.
Recent research shows that the work effort is greater in any office environment. Even if a full-time telecommuter becomes a little claustrophobic and begins to neglect personal care, it can be reasonable to make sacrifices to increase engagement and productivity, not to mention the benefits of eliminating commuting home-work
. enhance human interaction and face-to-face collaboration with the old, completely eliminate open offices is not the solution.
And there is no indication that people are working less productively or efficiently, simply because there are fewer face-to-face interactions; All the opposite could be true. Many employers already offer flexible work so that employees can sometimes work at home.
There is no academic research yet on what this mixed diet would do for the quantity and quality of interactions, but I suspect employers a hunger for more human contact, not for more emails and of gossip, while they are cloistered at home.
Modern technology allows employers to test all options using the same type of equipment as Bernstein and Turban. If the goal is to maximize productivity, they should do so rather than rely on intuition and anecdotal evidence
Editorial of 15/07/2018
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