A trip to Pittsburgh to visit old friends from WhizBang-Intelliseek-BuzzMetrics days, combined with a visit to Google's Pittsburgh office, coincident with the news that Live Labs was finally calling it quites led me to considering the nature of innovation and how to win in markets driven by technology.
Innovation, as I've mentioned before, is only partially about ideas - all the rest, the majority, is about execution. How to get the idea out to the customer. Intentional innovation requires the right people, but the execution requires the right process and the right environment.
Getting the right people can be tricky. Ideas are easy, and finding people with interesting ideas is easy - but can these people deliver? Can they both come up with the idea, motivate a team to execute and stick out the engineering to production?
Coming up with the right process is also hard. Should you create some sort of venture fund microcosm (no)? Should you promise 20% discretionary time (maybe)? How long are you willing to let an idea explore possibilities before marking success or failure?
Perhaps the one thing that you can universally improve is the environment. We can easily tap in to knowledge regarding how humans best work together, their basic social needs, how to stimulate engagement and passion through social interaction.
Dr. Mike O'Neil, of Knoll Research, has a paper summarizing some of the research into the pros and cons of open plan versus private office environments. Some of the highlights:
Yildirim, et. al. (2007) examined the impact of proximity to a window and open plan workstation partition height on employee satisfaction. The results indicated that visual access to a window from the workspace positively affected employee satisfaction. Satisfaction was even more enhanced for employees with 60” panel height workstations and a view to a window, presumably because that height partition optimizes visual privacy and minimizes distractions and interruptions.
Vietch, et. al. (2007) studied 779 open-plan office occupants from nine government and private sector office buildings in five large Canadian and US cities. They found that open-plan office occupants who were more satisfied with their environments were also more satisfied with their jobs, suggesting a role for the physical environment in organizational well-being and effectiveness.
A seminal three-year research project conducted by UCLA revealed that companies who had modified their business processes to encourage collaboration and supported new work processes by moving from private spaces to open, collaborative environments realized performance increases (speed and accuracy of work) averaging 440 percent (Majchrzak and Qianwei, 1996). Research examining human resources, procurement, finance and other functional areas (O’Neill, 2007; Majchrzak et al., 2004) confirms the notion that workspace designed to foster group work has a positive impact on business process time and cost. O’Neill (2007) found a 5.5% reduction in business process time and cost for employees who moved from traditional enclosed office space into a mix of non-assigned and assigned open plan furnishings. While these results show quantitative improvements in work process efficiency related to use of open office environments, simply placing employees in a open environment designed for collaboration without training or re-designing work processes will not produce the best performance gains.
...dry wall offices, even with the door closed, only achieve 75% acoustical privacy compared to 8’x 8’ open plan offices with 60” high acoustical panels, acoustical ceiling tiles and sound masking which achieve 93% acoustical privacy. Research has found that software developers working in spaces in which noise distractions are reduced, performed significantly better than peers working in environments where they could be more easily interrupted by noise (DeMarco, 2002).
The author summarizes another study conducted by Knoll in terms of the pros and cons thus:
Open Office Space
- Most appreciate the sense of community that an open work environment can support.
- Open space allows for better communication and exchange of information among co-workers. It is easier to ask each other questions in an open environment.
- Some employees prefer being among other people, not wanting to feel “closed in” or “all alone.”
- The open work environment allows some to know what’s “going on” in the office – being “in the know.”
Enclosed Private Office
- 90 percent of participants reported that privacy is the number one benefit of a closed space/work environment.
- The idea of having walls around you, keeping roving eyes from drifting over to your work and “your space” makes some feel more secure.
- Another key benefit of working in a closed space is the reduction in noise.
- For some, an enclosed space also translates into a larger amount of floor space which is seen as a perk.
On the other hand, and loath as I am to believe anything I read online, the web is full of news articles quoting a certain Dr. Vinesh Oommen, allegedly of Queensland University of Technology. The news articles are happy to quote scary research into how open plan offices make us sick (as in flu) and aggressive. In the version of this story appearing in the Telegraph, we hear:
A review of global studies into the impact of modern office design found the switch to open-plan spaces had been overwhelmingly negative, with 90 per cent reporting adverse health and psychological effects.
High levels of stress and conflict, elevated blood pressure, and rapid staff turnover were associated with open-plan environments, according to review author Dr Vinesh Oommen.
In classic media-hysteresis style, the web owns Dr Oommen with this story making it hard to track the doctor down. In fact, even searching on the web site of the Queensland University of Technology, the organization cited in association with the original article, doesn't turn up the author. A search on Google for the Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management results in a dead link (i.e. the top link for this search term is dead: http://www.achse.org.au/journal/journal_body.html). At any rate, we can certainly acknowledge there are two sides to the debate, and that ill health and aggression are more newsworthy (and thus less in need of corroboration) than the good news about the benefits of open plan experiences in the workplace.
Somewhat more accessible (literally) is work in Environment and Behaviour by Alan Hedge, with the following abstract:
A total of 649 employees at all job levels working in open-plan offices on each of the five floors of an office building completed an extensive questionnaire on their work and the office environment. The results showed that a variety of ambient environmental problems were present in these offices. Also, a clear relationship between job characteristics and attitudes toward the office was demonstrated. Employees who enjoyed performing managerial and technical tasks reacted more unfavorably to office conditions than did clerical staff, who generally viewed their work as undemanding. Loss of privacy and increased disturbances were consistently at the source of these negative reactions, and the interrelationship of these problems also emerged from factor analysis of the data. Although the office did create a favorable social climate, this did not offset employee's negative reactions to work conditions but rather appeared to exacerbate the problems. Consequently, no evidence was found to support the claim for improved productivity in open-plan. Finally, various areas for future research are briefly discussed.
Of equal interest is the list of article titles associated with this one, including:
- Employee reactions to office redesign: A naturally occurring quasi-field experiment in a multi-generational setting
- Office Type in Relation to Health, Well-Being, and Job Satisfaction Among Employees
- Traditional versus Open Office Design: A Longitudinal Field Study
- Windows and Environmental Cues on Performance and Mood
The office environment does have an effect on the productivity of individuals, and different people prefer different environments. Institutions can partly impact the interpretation of the environment (should an office mean status) and transfer some of the interpretation elsewhere (slate computer means status) and, perhaps, create flexible environments that can be optimized for different tasks (e.g. project teams), different personality types and so on.
