It has become vogue to refer to the workplace as being ‘all about people’. It points in all directions at once. Organisations need fit, healthy, happy, skilled, motivated, engaged and purposeful people being (and feeling) productive and doing their best work every day. They want their people working closely together – they’ve spent a lot of time and money drawing in those they feel can contribute to a whole that is other than the sum of the parts.
Yet the struggle for the perfect physical space that would most likely enable this to happen has been a constant for over a century. The key issue is that irrespective of the workplace in which we reside, we need to be in two places at once. That is, ‘place’ in the broadest sense, both physically and mentally. We need to have deep conversations with people we need to work with, in our teams, yet we also need to give ourselves the best chance of broadening our network to create opportunities for new ideas to emerge and teams to form around them.
The essence of the problem is that we see it as a design issue, that the physical arrangements we make will prompt the right behaviour, simultaneously allowing both. We would naturally expect that as the world of workplace is run by property folk, that a property solution would be pursued. Late in 2018 as the arguments once again raged about ‘open plan’ I created a taxonomy of the fourteen workstyles we have brought into being and explained that we have fourteen because no single workstyle yet has negated the need for the other thirteen. It’s not about workstyle.
Curved space
In his 1977 book Managing the Flow of Technology (yes, technology existed before the internet) Thomas Allen found that people in the workplace were four times as likely to communicate regularly with others located up to six feet (1.8 metres) away as they were with people sitting sixty feet (18 metres) away – and that people on different floors barely communicated at all. It gave rise to the Allen Curve. With the advent of electronic tools and social media it was assumed that the famed ‘death of distance’ would render the curve an artefact. However, when Allen re-visited the study in 2006, he found that instead the position had solidified: those who were co-located connected more frequently over digital media too. If we see people, we are prompted to communicate.
Almost every Silicon Valley leader over the last decade has confidently expressed the view that physical interaction in the workplace drives innovation. It led to decisions such as the ‘Mayer Memorandum’ in 2013 where Yahoo’s flexible workforce was required to return to the office to be with their colleagues. However, the overriding assumption on the part of each has been that interaction should be left to chance, with the workplace providing the routes and the prompts. Few appear to have ventured that this might be a risky strategy in two respects – of the interaction happening at all, or of its quality if it does. Relying on luck, on two levels, to drive the lifeblood of the organisation seems strangely vague in an impatient world. It is also expecting a lot of the static and impartial physical workplace. No prizes for guessing where much of the blame is likely to land.
The rise of the agile (or ‘activity-based’) workplace rekindled the idea from the cubicle farms of the 1970s and 80s of the ‘watercooler moment’ – serendipitous casual encounters, unplanned and accidental interactions or collisions that would spark innovation. Some companies have even started to measure this – Zappos (no surprise) refer to ‘collisionable hours’, being the number of probable interactions per hour per acre as a measure of workplace effectiveness. A possibly more accurate definition of the watercooler moment might be that in the Urban Dictionary – ‘a significant moment in television history that is discussed the next day in the workplace’. That is because interaction in workplace amenities is most often social interaction first, with the slim chance of anything useful arising from it second.