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September 09, 2014  |  permalink

Harvard Business Review: Workspaces That Move People

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“Workspaces That Move People” is my new story in the October issue of Harvard Business Review. Written with Ben Waber and Jennifer Magnolfi, together we make the case that we are finally – finally – able to prove that: a) where and how you work define who you work with; b) who you work with drives group performance to a large extent, and c) we can finally start to map workspace performance metrics to organizational ones.

In a nutshell, it means we’re this close to finally designing (and then constantly redesigning) workspaces that actually help you do your job, rather than struggling against them. The key is deploying a new generation of sensors – in our phones, in our offices, or even worn around your neck (or your wrist) – that can collect the necessary breadth and depth of data. With that in hand, we can start to understand who we should really be working with, where, and why – a milestone that means the end of the office as we know it.

I had the pleasure of writing about Ben’s work in The New York Times and Jennifer’s work in Fast Company last year. I’ve been searching for ways to connect the pair’s ideas, and it was AMO’s Daniel Pittman who suggested we join forces and write an article about it. As with most of my recent work, this piece tries to tease out the implications of how real-time data and social network analysis will map onto physical space. What if you shouldn’t be working with your nominal colleagues, but with different teams at different offices – or even at different companies? Knowledge work has been confined to the office nearly a century; but now we have the means to disperse organizations across cities (which I hope will be as good for the cities in question as for the organizations).

The beginning of the piece is below; ready the entire thing at HBR.org.

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In Silicon Valley, the tight correlation between personal interactions, performance, and innovation is an article of faith, and innovators are building cathedrals reflecting this. Google’s new campus is designed to maximize chance encounters. Facebook will soon put several thousand of its employees into a single mile-long room. Yahoo notoriously revoked mobile work privileges because, as the chief of human resources explained, “some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions.” And Samsung recently unveiled plans for a new U.S. headquarters, designed in stark contrast to its traditionally hierarchical culture. Vast outdoor areas sandwiched between floors will lure workers into public spaces, where Samsung’s executives hope that engineers and salespeople will actually mingle. “The most creative ideas aren’t going to come while sitting in front of your monitor,” says Scott Birnbaum, a vice president of Samsung Semiconductor. The new building “is really designed to spark not just collaboration but that innovation you see when people collide.”

Faith is nice, but do executives have proof that this works? Social space like Samsung’s could be just another in a long line of fads and broken promises in workspace design: The “action office” becomes the cubicle. Cubicles are torn down for open plans, which leave introverts pining for private space. Quads. Hotel space. Couches. Rotating desk assignments. Standing desks. Treadmill desks. No desks. With apologies to Mark Twain, there’s no such thing as a new office design. We just take old ideas, put them into a kind of kaleidoscope, and turn. How do we know whether any of these approaches is effective? The key metric companies use to measure space–cost per square foot–is focused on efficiency. Few companies measure whether a space’s design helps or hurts performance, but they should. They have the means. The same sensors, activity trackers, smartphones, and social networks that they eagerly foist on customers to reveal their habits and behavior can be turned inward, on employees in their work environments, to learn whether it’s true that getting engineers and salespeople talking actually works.

We’ve already begun to collect this kind of performance data using a variety of tools, from simple network analytics to sociometric badges that capture interaction, communication, and location information. After deploying thousands of badges in workplaces ranging from pharmaceuticals, finance, and software companies to hospitals, we’ve begun to unlock the secrets of good office design in terms of density, proximity of people, and social nature. We’ve learned, for example, that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office. Birnbaum is on to something when he talks about getting employees to “collide,” because our data suggest that creating collisions – chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization – improves performance.

We’ve also learned that spaces can even be designed to produce specific performance outcomes – productivity in one space, say, and increased innovation in another, or both in the same space but at different times. By combining the emerging data with organizational metrics such as total sales or number of new-product launches, we can demonstrate a workspace’s effect on the bottom line and then engineer the space to improve it. This will lead to profound changes in how we build our future workspaces. Here are a few:

Recognize office space as not just an amortized asset but a strategic tool for growth. The consulting and design firm Strategy Plus estimates that office utilization peaks at 42% on any given day. By that logic, the best way to manage cost per square foot is to remove “wasted” square feet. But the data we’re generating reveal that investments in re-engineering space for interactions over efficiency can increase sales or new-product launches.

Design offices to reflect how 21st-century digital work actually happens. The buildings we go to every day haven’t changed as much as have the tools we use to get work done. Merging digital communication patterns with physical space can increase the probability of interactions that lead to innovation and productivity.

Re-engineer offices to weave a building, a collection of buildings, or a variety of workspaces into the urban fabric. The office of the future will most likely include highly networked, shared, multipurpose spaces that redefine boundaries between companies and improve everyone’s performance.

Getting there won’t be easy. It will require collecting much more data to inform new design and management principles while engaging urban planners and municipal governments. It will also transform HR, IT, and facilities management from support functions to facilitators. But if companies can change their spaces to refl ect how people work, performance improvement will follow. Don’t take that on faith. There are data to prove it….

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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