Job Therapy by Tessa West

Author:Tessa West [West, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

How Does the Office Layout Influence When You’re Interrupted, and How You Get Back to Work?

We can learn a lot about workplace culture by observing people in their natural habitats, even if just for a short window of time. Things like whether people eat lunch at their desk or take a break, and how far the managers sit from everyone else, offer insight into norms and routines.

But no career goer benefits from seeing an office environment as much as the Stretched Too Thin. The physical layout offers clues to questions like “How likely is it that I will be interrupted at work?” and “How hard is it for me to stay within a working sphere?” These are important questions to ask during an interview. But answers alone won’t get the data you need to make an informed decision. You need to see the environment for yourself.

To illustrate, let’s return to the Gloria Mark study I discussed above. I mentioned that the most efficient employees organized their work in terms of working spheres—high-level units of work that include multiple tasks that often cut across roles.

Most people, it turns out, struggled to stay within their working spheres. In fact, 57 percent of people had a working sphere interrupted at least once, when they were pulled out to work on something unrelated. Working spheres that were central to their job were interrupted 83 percent of the time! On average, people spent eleven minutes and four seconds working in a sphere before they were interrupted.

People’s physical proximity to other team members offers a clue as to why. The researchers compared people who are colocated (they work in a cubicle with at least one team member in an adjacent cubicle) to those who are evenly distributed (they are physically separated from their teammates, because they work across the room from them, have an enclosed office, or they are in another building). They found that people who work next to each other spend more time in a working sphere than distributed people do, but they are also more likely to be interrupted. What can explain this seemingly contradictory pattern of findings?

Not all interruptions are created equal, and even though people who were close interrupted one another more (it’s easy to interrupt people next to you), they were more strategic when they did it. People in cubicles would listen to what their neighbors were doing and only interrupt them during opportune times, like during a lull in their work. The people who worked farther away from one another interrupted when it was convenient for them.

When you interview, ask to see the physical layout of the office and, more important, where you will work relative to others on your team. If your work is hybrid, ask when others are in and where they work. And if you work in a hoteling environment—where the office changes every day—find out how much control you have over who you work close to and whether you can always get the same working space.

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