People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work by Ben Waber

Author:Ben Waber [Waber, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2013-04-23T14:00:00+00:00

Long Table, Short Table

Seemingly lost in this discussion is how the actual furniture that populates offices impacts face-to-face interaction. There are many furniture choices in the workplace: cubicles, long desks, wall separators, private offices, and so on. From the previous analysis of distance effects, we can already make some strong predictions.

Long desks increase distance between people, and thus should have a chilling effect on the amount of interaction. Private offices increase distances even further. Smaller cubicles are positive from a distance perspective, but high cubicle walls could potentially make communication more difficult.

The question of desk size in particular is interesting because it seems like such a minor difference. After all, a six-foot-long desk versus a seven-foot-long desk doesn’t seem like a big deal.

In our Bank of America project, we were fortunate to have groups that sat at desks of different lengths. One group had longer desks with low cubicle walls, while the others had traditional cubicles with smaller desks. The group with the longer desks had 43% less intragroup communication, while the groups with cubicles were internally very tightly connected.

These effects aren’t only limited to desk size. Other seating areas around the office are also strongly impacted by distance. In a study at an online travel company, the size of the lunch tables was a strong predictor of future communication and individual performance.

At this company, people could eat lunch at their desk, in a small café area, or downstairs in the main cafeteria. Obviously eating lunch at your desk meant eating by yourself, while the small café area had tables that could accommodate up to 4 people. The cafeteria, on the other hand, had tables that could fit up to 12 people.

After collecting badge and e-mail data for four weeks, we saw that, not surprisingly, after an employee ate lunch with someone, he was more likely to talk to that person during the rest of the day. Eating lunch together enables people to get a sense for what everyone is working on and what problems they’re having. This deep knowledge is crucial if you ever have an issue with your own work because you’ll have a strong network spread across a diverse group of areas, making it more likely that you’ll know someone who can help you find a solution.

What was interesting, however, was that people who ate lunch in larger groups weren’t going to the cafeteria with that entire group. The larger tables forced different groups to sit together, which caused smaller lunch groups to merge into a “super-group.” This activity wasn’t possible in the café, because the tables were too small.

These larger lunch group interactions directly led to higher group cohesion and consequently to higher performance. People who interacted in these large lunch groups were 36% more likely to interact with each other at some other point in the day compared to other groups, and they were also significantly more resistant to the effects of stressful events such as layoffs.

At the root of these incredible effects, however, was a simple element: a longer lunch table.

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