Why Place Still Matters
As a founder of the New Ways of Working, a consortium for researching how to work better through technologies, work practices and workplaces, I would be the first to say that working alternatively is here to stay. Our most recent benchmark study found that organizations are adopting new ways of working at a good clip: as much as 80% of the responding organizations have adopted new ways of working in the past five years, 40% in the past two years. That said, I also am convinced that place not only still matters but that it is more important than ever before.
A couple of stories illustrate this point. My wife works for HP as part of their acquisitions and merging team. When HP bought and merged with EDS, her “cold room” team of 150 people moved physically en mass between four HP sites so that they could work face to face to get the planning done in a short time of one month. The second example is Samsung, now the heir apparent of Sony’s former status as one of the most innovative companies in the world. There, their engineers convene at an “innovation Center” outside of Seoul to work and play together 24 by 7, from a few days to weeks to get over difficult development hurdles in collaborative rooms, dormitories, recreation spaces, and the all important hot tub.
Why did HP move 150 people around every week for over a month? Why did Samsung invest in an expensive innovative center? Because working face to face (F2F) was the best way to get the job done.
There are reasons why F2F is better than working virtually. First, you can’t communicate better. We know that 60 to 80% of communication is non-verbal: the spatial distance between you and the other, the slight tilt of the head, the lines about the eyes and mouth. You would miss most or all of this working virtually with existing technologies. They say that within ten years, others will not be able to tell the difference between your avatar and the real you, but in the meantime you will miss most of the non-verbal cues. And there are some things that technology probably will not be able to mimic: shaking hands, putting your hands on the other person’s shoulder, having lunch together. Not in the near future, anyway.
Second, the high fidelity of F2F communication is essential to the establishment of trust, the basis of good collaboration. Certainly trust can be established in virtual teams but it takes a lot longer. Trust, the willingness to put yourself in the hands of another, more likely comes about when you and the other person share a common social identity: an understanding of each other beyond work, the family, kids, favorite vacation spots, their sports teams. Researchers have found that every additional sensory exchange reinforces the emotional bonds between people, and F2F uses all the sensory channels. The best place to learn about the other person socially is at work where you can interact F2F casually. That’s what the old water cooler and coffee machine is all about.
Third, you pick up a lot of communication informally or tacitly. The
New employee learns about how people work by watching and overhearing. For better or worse, even the workplace itself communicates the organizational culture. Is the space open and visible; or is it enclosed and private? Is the refreshment area warm and inviting or does it say, “Just get your coffee, don’t linger and get back to work?” How can you communicate these tacit messages via the Internet? Not very well.
Finally, it is very difficult to have serendipitous meetings virtually: those happy accidental meetings in the hall way or at the coffee machine where you find out that someone else you accidentally met has been working on the same problem but from an entirely different angle that you hadn’t thought about. Working well virtually requires good planning, schedules, careful management, all of which conspires against and prevents surprises and accidents. And these serendipitous events are important for innovations and breakthroughs because they are often the result of the coming together of two previously unconnected people and their ideas.
Yes, new ways of working are coming strong and there is too much traditional office space and it will have to change, but the workplace is here to stay and more important than ever for building social ties and trust, for collaboration, for communicating organization culture and for innovation.
Joe Ouye
New Ways of Working, LLC
co-founder and partner
Graphic Artist Representation