Workspace of the Future: Making the workspace work

The workspace is continually evolving. Long gone are the typing pools, cubicles made way for the open planned office which is again changing to a hot desk environment with the virtual office quickly become a real option for many “office workers”.

As business start leaning towards a ratio-ed desk count of 8 desks to 10 people and reducing,  working virtually is becoming something of a selling point in corporate worlds. Depending on how cynical you are, the reason is help reduce real estate and IT costs, encourage collaboration and/or increase creativity.

But what impact does it have on productivity? Does it prevent lime lost for travel between meeting rooms, reduce the incidence of interruptions and allow people to get on with it? Or does it allow people to deviate from their work, run the risk of being too reliant on often sketchy technology and reduce knowledge transfer through incidental conversations (ie chatting around the water cooler)? 

My independent, but scientifically challenged evidence says that it depends on the person how which way it will go. Some people find it a gold mine of productivity, while others find nuggets of procrastination.

Why do people procrastinate? Because they get bored. Listening to a Freakanomics podcast recently, I learned that people are willing to give themselves electric shocks rather than be bored. Up to 190 times in 15 minutes! Another experiment that was mentioned in the podcast looked at ways to reduce boredom. They found that paying more per outcome, being monitored and showing progress all worked to increase productivity in dull jobs.

Another piece of research showed that most people (83%) were distracted by other things when they were waiting for their slow computer. Millennial are more distracted. Not only that, but they are more likely to do non-work related tasks. Baby boomers favour getting some paper work done (58% vs 45% for Gen X and 44% for Millennials). Gen X or Millennials are more likely to take a bio break (55% and 56%) or chat with a co-worker (43% and 45%) than do paper work. They are also much more likely to do something personal online like check Facebook or play a game - Gen X 21%, Millennials 28% compared to only 8% of baby boomers.

As leaders, do we foster the right environment when we have a virtual team? About three in five people who work virtually think that people who work in the office feel more engaged then they do. About half of the virtual workers feel disconnected when from colleagues when they work virtually. A similar proportion only communicate with their leaders via email. No wonder they feel disengaged.

The IBM Smarter Workforce Institute reinforce these findings when they show that people feel more engaged in their role, and less likely to want to leave when they receive recognition through multiple sources - email, instant messaging, social networking etc. They suggest that this is due to a more timely, and potentially more regular recognition.

So what does this mean for a leader of virtual teams?

Keep your team connected

When you are in the office it is easy to ask “how was your weekend”, even if you don't really care. This is a lot more difficult to do in virtual teams unless it is set up to facilitate a sense of community. Build in social media or conversation communication tools. Yammer and Slack are two great examples of allowing people to be connected in a conversation manner.

Spend more time on recognising progress and outcomes

Your people are looking for recognition of their progress. They want to know if they are doing a good job and that they are on track. Find ways to allow them to stay on track in the virtual space. Gamify with metrics, rewards for reaching achievements and the like, or simply just check in from time to time and congratulate and thank people for doing a good job(only when they have done a good job of course!). 

Be a visible leader

Don't micromanage, but being visible builds accountability. Maybe its a system that shows when people are working - does it show call time and wait time? Drop in for virtual chat when you notice that they appear “online” in their messenger box. Keeping the communications up is probably the important aspect of this, but knowing that the boss is about can certainly help reduce the boredom!

Keep technology smooth and remove distractions

Make sure that you have great technology. if you are using systems and programs that make it hard to do their job, people will become easily distracted. And they won’t always use that down time for work purposes. Great technology means that people will be more engaged, because it shows that you care about them (or more so, bad tech shows that you don't care). 

If you have the right tools, it can really encourage the interaction between team mates where they can form that sense of community, share and solve problems together and just good old fashioned getting the job done. 

Credit where it is due

• Freakanomics podcast transcript for their episode “Am I boring you” can be found here. (October 2015)
• This research from Dimensional Research, sponsored by Appsense told us about how people use their downtime. (September 2015)
• Interact reported on the Disengagement and Separation of the Virtual Worker in this report (January 2015)
• And the IBM Smarter Workforce institute shed light in the impact of multi-channel recognition in their report “How do I recognise thee, let me count the ways” (July 2015)
• Also, thanks to China Gorman, who writes the blog that pointed me in the direction to some of these papers.