The Truth About #OpenOffices
”When the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%.”

#HRM #WorkplaceDesign https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

But ”hybrid #openoffice designs are not a panacea. If you are going to let people choose the spaces that best meet their individual needs, your workers might as well be remote.”
#remotework

And #remotework hinders #communication: ”we found that remote workers communicated nearly 80% less about their assignments than colocated team members did; in 17% of projects they didn’t communicate at all.”

The answer to the problem lies in #leadership:
”Leaders need to make the call about what collective behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged & how... not just the design of #workspace configurations and technologies but the design of tasks, roles, & culture as well.”

”If the aim really is to boost #collaboration, you need to increase the right kinds of interactions and decrease ineffective ones.”

And what interactions are effective depends on the team: ”where intrateam cohesion was more predictive of #productivity and worker #satisfaction than cross-team collisions were, increasing #interactions between teams undermined performance.”

”If people need uninterrupted time to #focus, distractions are costly. When that’s the case, creating more opportunities for #collaboration can amplify the cost without providing a corresponding benefit.”

Advice: run experiments (meaning: there is a control group) that last for several months and get your own evidence of what works for your organisation.

”Optimizing #collaboration doesn’t have to entail a radical overhaul of #officespace; tweaks can make a difference, and it pays to test their potential impact.”

”events deliberately designed to achieve particular #interactions between specific individuals and teams had a more precise and valuable impact on interaction patterns than did changes to the office space. Those events can be internal workshops, hackathons, or even barbecues.”

”the location of its #coffeemachines significantly influences #interactions. If a team needs to focus internally, the company puts a coffee machine in the center of its area. If two teams need to #collaborate, it puts the machine between them.

”CONCLUSION
A single best physical or digital #workspace architecture will never be found. That’s because more #interaction is not necessarily better, nor is less. The goal should be to get the right people interacting with the right richness at the right times.”