October 14, 2014
Two more major US firms scale back flexible working because people work better together
Perhaps the most talked about workplace issue of 2013 was the decision by Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo to oblige the company’s homeworkers to return to the embrace of the corporate bosom. It was controversial but a lot of businesses clearly prefer people to work together in one place for significant periods of time. Yahoo’s methods only differed from those of companies like Google in using a stick to drive them there rather than the carrot of a gilded and playful tech palace to entice them. The controversy in the Yahoo case seemed to derive from a challenge to the received wisdom about flexible working and the same voice have risen in indignation over the past couple of weeks as two more American companies have made it known it’s best for everybody if they spend more time working together under one roof. Reddit and Bank of America have joined Yahoo and HP in deciding people collaborate better when they are in physical proximity.
October 6, 2014
A feeling of togetherness is essential and motivating, so why would we kill off the office?
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Knowledge, Workplace design
It is still depressingly commonplace to read proclamations of the death of the office. These are usually appended to some survey or other about the rise of flexible working or a case study of a workplace devoid of desks (or, more likely, one in which none are pictured). Of course, the actual conclusion we can draw from such things is that the office as we once knew it is now dead or mutating into something else, but that’s true for every aspect of modern life. The constant factor that ensures offices will always exist, in some form or other is the human they serve. We know that because, as Tom Allen proved at MIT in the 1980s, people communicate less well the greater the physical distance between them. Now new research from Stanford University shows how the very idea of ‘togetherness’ can have a significant impact on the way people perform. The study, by researchers Priyanka Carr and Gregory Walton was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and concluded that ‘social cues that signal an invitation to work with others can fuel intrinsic motivation’.
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