Returning to the office: How to let people connect safely
Planned vs unplanned communication
There’s an important distinction between planned and unplanned communication at work. Unplanned communication typically takes place via serendipitous encounters and, importantly, involves conversations across teams. Here proximity is needed.
This is because different teams are typically not part of the same reporting line, and so communication depends on unplanned engagements like overhearing each other talk or chance encounters in the corridor. This can have real business benefits. As one of us has documented in ourrecent book, unplanned social interaction across nearby desks in a Wall Street trading floor improved the use of financial models.
In the case of planned communication, remote conferencing technology has made proximity less important. The reason is that within-team communication typically happens on a planned and routine basis, so all it needs is a digital platform.
This message came out clearly from a panel event we organizedat the LSE’s Systemic Risk Centre. Charles Bristow, global head of rates trading at investment bank JP Morgan, and one of the panelists, explained that “a team of people trading together on a single product are getting incoming inquiries through the same channels” and “use the same tools”. For that reason, communicating remotely is incredibly easy and can even be more efficient.
So physical proximity is primarily needed for unplanned communication. It means remote working can continue at little cost to planned communication. And it potentially means that if companies want to bring limited numbers of people back to the office, they should focus on having at least one member from every team. This will enable cross-team communication, which relies on physical proximity.
Keeping everyone engaged
Another important element of office design to take into account is the extent that it facilitates employee engagement – whether people leave their desks to come into face-to-face contact. This is important for building better relationships between colleagues and company culture.
To facilitate this, the focus on social distancing must distinguish between distance and accessibility. While distance reduces the extent that people can engage with each other and collaborate, research in architecture shows that ease of access and facilitating movement can partly compensate for distance.
As Sailerhas established, in a house where every room is accessible to every other room via a door, connection is far easier than in one where you can only access a given room from the adjoining one. The same degree of distancing between people, in other words, can lead to vastly different levels of engagement.
To achieve this connectivity (while maintaining social distance), companies can leverage the staggered return of employees to remove some desks and create a corridor around the periphery of their open plan offices, giving employees the chance to easily access each other. Encounters and conversations can be further facilitated by nooks and corners outside such a corridor, so that employees can have quick one-on-ones without blocking circulation.
The return to the office after months of remote working gives companies a chance to make their setups more effective. They can incorporate the benefits of remote working, while ensuring people can interact and exchange ideas in a safer way than if they blindly replicated their pre-COVID work arrangements.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyDaniel Beunza, Associate Professor of Management,City, University of LondonandDerin Kent, Postdoctoral Researcher in Management,Aalto Universityunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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