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Sat, Jul 07, 2018 – 5:50 AM
In recent years, a number of large companies – IBM, Bank of America, Aetna, Yahoo under former CEO Marissa Mayer – reduced their telework programs on behalf of more interaction and cooperation between employees, supposedly favored by being stuck in an office.
The business model of companies providing co-working spaces, such as 20 billion US dollars, is also based on If people find themselves in a shared space, they will network and cooperate more.
It does not work like that, however, recent research shows
. WeWork style environment, 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 Face-to-face interaction of 70%. and increase 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 in transition 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 walled-up 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 also increased by 75%.
The second company moved from cabins to an open space for all of its international clientele. Headquarter. 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 reduced face-to-face interactions by 67% and increased email traffic. Against all odds, the physical distance between communicating employees had no significant effect on the way they interacted.
Physical proximity, it seems, is overestimated as an enhancer of cooperation. Open offices, wrote 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 substances together under specific conditions of temperature and pressure to form the desired compound, more factors seem to be at work in the achieving 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 psychoanalyze their results. One possible explanation is that placing people in a huge aquarium in which they do not have personal space makes people squeak rather than make them more gregarious.
The business world pushes extroversion on people, most often through an incessant culture. Some find this not only uncomfortable – they subconsciously try to minimize human contact and resort to less personal electronic communication. There could 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 task. pressing.
But no matter what happens psychologically, changes in the composition of communications can hurt the business. Bernstein and Turban noted that the leaders of the first company told them "that productivity, as defined by the parameters 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. swap their house officers for WeWork subscriptions. In a WeWork office, one gets 60 to 80 square feet of space, compared to the US corporate standard of about 200 square feet.
Although some may use proximity and common spaces ingeniously designed 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 higher at home than in any office
Sacrifices for Higher Commitment and Productivity
Even though a telecommuter becomes a little claustrophobic and begins to neglect It can mean reasonable sacrifices to increase engagement and productivity, not to mention the benefits of eliminating commutes.
For large companies that value human interaction and face-to-face collaboration "
And nothing indicates that people work in a less productive or efficient way simply because it there are fewer face-to-face interactions;
Many employers already offer flexible work so that employees can sometimes work at home. There is no academic research yet on what such a mixed diet would do for the quantity and quality of interactions, but I suspect that employers might find workers will develop a desire for more human contact , not for more emails and couriers.
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 relying on intuition and anecdotal evidence. WP
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