11. Where We Go from Here: Of Face-to-Face Interaction, New Collaboration Tools, and Going Back to the Future

Throughout this book, you’ve seen a few common threads emerge about what makes workers effective and happy in the workplace. Chief among them is the importance of face-to-face communication—specifically, cohesive face-to-face communication, where the people you talk to spend a lot of time talking with each other.

The examples in this book have shown that this communication is important for transferring complex information in an IT firm and reducing stress and increasing information flow in a call center. Having these tightly knit, face-to-face ties promotes trust and creates a common language, crucial items for today’s organizations.

Having diverse ties is also helpful, as explained in Chapters 5 and 6, which cover expertise and creativity, respectively. Connecting with people from different social groups, people with access to different sources of information, helps you think of ideas that you normally wouldn’t hear in the echo chamber of your tightly knit group. Organizations can help foster these ties by changing the physical office space around, rearranging breaks, and taking other small steps to nudge people in the right direction. As you saw in this book, these small nudges had very strong effects.

Despite all these revelations, let’s step back and take a look at where we’re going as a society. Remote work is becoming more and more common. Telecommuting is on the rise, and many people are working almost exclusively from home offices. That’s partly a reflection of the times, because the flexibility people demand and the increasingly global nature of work require that we be able to work from anywhere at any time. To some extent, the new communication tools that are available support these arrangements.

We can use Skype to set up video chat with remote colleagues, use teleconferences to get everyone on the same page, or use IM programs to do some lightweight coordination. The data shows, however, that these tools aren’t enough to get the job done. Part of the issue is that we evolved for millions of years to deal with people who are right in front of us. We’ve only had phones for 150 years, barely an eye blink of time from a evolutionary perspective. Think of how far we have to go before we biologically adapt to more recent innovations such as the Internet and instant messaging.

One of the major issues of the day is that despite our desire and need for remote communication, people are still awful at collaborating over distance. This book has already listed some simple fixes: meeting face-to-face before a project starts, spending large amounts of time working on coordination in remote groups, and so on, but this problem cries out for a new solution.

Some of the problems can be solved by injecting social context into these alien environments. Systems such as the Meeting Mediator (refer to Chapter 10 and the real-time feedback it provides are an important part of this equation. These systems help regain much of what is lost when we separate ourselves by telephone wire or blinking computer screens.

Further down the line one can easily imagine that technologies such as virtual reality and holography will come into play to directly act on the ancient mechanisms that are buried in our brains. If it looks, sounds, even smells to us like we’re physically in an office with a bunch of other people, then for all intents and purposes we are. Of course, this technology has a long way to go before it becomes widely deployed, and if it is to be successful, some basic functionality will need to be supported.

One of the simplest things that throws off remote interactions is the eye gaze problem. If you’ve ever used Skype, you know what I’m talking about. This problem occurs because with current technology you can’t look at your screen and the camera at the same time. Some solutions are out there that combat this problem with varying degrees of success. Cisco has created a TelePresence system that uses specially designed rooms and finely tuned camera and monitor placement to make it appear as if the people you’re collaborating with are all sitting around a table with you. The effect is fairly striking, especially with HD cameras and a dedicated network for transmitting the video as fast as possible. The price tag, at around $300,000, however, makes this technology fairly impractical for most situations.

Other solutions, such as BiDi Screen from Matt Hirsch at MIT, take a more elegant approach. Matt developed a technology that combines a camera and a screen, so that you can look directly at the person you’re talking to over a video connection. If it gets produced in mass quantities, it has the potential to be orders of magnitude cheaper than the Cisco system, but currently it’s still a research project with no immediate plans for commercialization.

For now, however, let’s say that this problem will be solved in time whether by BiDi Screen, TelePresence, or a similar system. One can safely say that in the next two decades this issue will become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with these systems is much harder to crack and involves the fundamental design of all contemporary communication technologies. At a very basic level, in the way that every one of these systems is conceived, they are designed around planned meetings.

This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault; it’s just what is supportable and what designers have identified as important. This stems in large part from the enormous emphasis that has been placed on formal processes in the past hundred years. Meetings are important; talking by the coffee machine is not. So we made and continue to make better and better meeting systems, until down the line we’ll come up with a system that allows us to do meetings so well over distance that we won’t mind getting up at 2 a.m. for a meeting with colleagues in India (well, night owls won’t mind).

However, when you look at what makes people productive, about where people really get work done, how much of that occurs within the confines of a formal meeting? Even thinking about yourself, how much of the time you spend in meetings do you feel is productive? Is that where you get your real work done? Chances are, the answer is “No.”

Unfortunately, with current technology, fostering the serendipitous interactions and post-meeting socializing that forms the basis for the effectiveness of face-to-face communication is hard. There have been some attempts at addressing this problem, each with limited success. Google Hangouts is a recent foray into this area, where people leave a webcam on and invite others to come in and out as they please. There have been similar systems in the past, using always-on video, typically in common spaces, to connect workplaces in different parts of the globe.

My team at Sociometric Solutions uses Google Hangouts frequently, so I’m not going to say these systems are without merit. Right now we have people in California, Massachusetts, and Finland, so rarely is everyone able to get together in person. Even finding a time to have meetings when we’re all at work is hard for us. Using Hangouts every day makes connecting when we do meet in person much easier.

Time differences, of course, can’t be solved no matter how much technology you pour into the equation. Current systems are also limited in that they represent only a small window into another place, and a fairly unnatural window at that. Perhaps the solution will come when we can make screens so big with cameras of such high quality that entire walls become windows and every surface in a workplace becomes a monitor to help connect us to remote coworkers. My intuition says that it will need to be something more than that, that using social context data we could make a system that would be infinitely more subtle but no less communicative, one that visualizes social context in an intuitive way that will subtly affect our perception of other places. Time will tell.

For now, however, there needs to be an acknowledgment that face-to-face communication is critical for the complex, intensely collaborative tasks that are the lifeblood of our economy. Even when factoring in the rising cost of airfare, spending a few thousand dollars flying people to a central location is almost certainly cheaper than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on thousands of high-definition screens that will need constant maintenance and a huge IT support staff.

There is also a need to shift away from the focus on formal communication and into the informal. Indeed, informal communication is more important to a company, both from a productivity and job satisfaction perspective. This realization needs to make its way into every facet of work if we’re to continue on a curve of increasing complexity. With big M&A deals and projects involving millions of workers becoming commonplace, time and again it becomes evident that the current way of doing things breaks down.

Office layout will likely lead the charge as a new area of concentration for companies. Currently, office design is relegated to an afterthought, and if management is involved in the process at all, it’s usually to offer opinions on whether a particular design looks “cool.” Although looks are important for a company’s image and morale, an incredibly delicate dance is going on that demands close attention.

One of the issues is that choosing office space is often a political process. Bosses with good connections can typically secure the “best” space for their team, with corner offices and large desks, while politically impotent teams get stuck in the basement. Companies need to turn that process around, and instead bring a strategic approach to office design, one where political concerns take a backseat and collaborative considerations (that is, group A needs to talk to group B) drive decisions.

The problems that plague office layout are mirrored in seemingly banal furniture purchasing decisions. However, factors as ostensibly insignificant as desk length, cubicle height, and the brand of coffee machine have profound implications for collaboration. Of course, executives can’t spend weeks pouring over different options, but a general directive is needed to guide furniture decisions toward high-level cultural goals. This information can filter down to individual groups so they can shape their space to fit their collaborative needs and still match the company’s cultural values.

The cultural tone of a company is extremely important, and that often manifests itself in how people act during breaks. In American culture, there is a widespread belief that time not spent at your desk is time wasted, and typically people found schmoozing by the coffee machine or eating lunch at a table with colleagues are viewed with disdain. People will even spend effort to make it look like they’re working.

In one office where I worked, I had a direct view into another company’s space across an atrium. One of the employees was facing her computer screen, and because she was only about 30 feet away, I had a vague sense for what she was doing. I can say without exaggeration that about 90% of her time was spent watching videos on Netflix. She would get in at around 9 a.m., fire up Netflix, and proceed to watch old movies and TV shows for the entire day. Sometimes I would look up to see what movie she was watching, and I rarely saw her use another program or even get up to talk to a coworker. I guess she figured that if her boss thought she was working, everything would be okay.

People need to change this mindset. The results in this book argue that workers’ most productive time occurs when they collaborate and interact with others. This means getting up and walking around, spending time in the coffee area, eating lunch with colleagues, jumping into chat sessions, and becoming heavily involved in the social life of the workplace. These cultural changes have to start with individuals, but the higher ups need to show that they care about them, too.

Cultural change won’t happen unless people at the top do it first. Until the CEO starts eating lunch in the cafeteria instead of her desk, it’s a risky proposition for anyone making the leap themselves. They just have no idea whether this cultural change is actually something that’s valued and will help them move up the ranks. Instead, pressure from the top has to come on people who aren’t engaging in these activities. Not I’m-going-to-fire-you-unless-you-do-what-I-say pressure, but a steady beat of suggestions that “this is the way we do things.”

Some people mingle naturally, the social butterflies that have an innate ability to chat it up with colleagues and enjoy the social side of work. These people will probably have an easier time adapting to this style of work. People who are more introverted, however, will have a tougher go.

This is where many organizations stop, worrying that they’ll force people to be something they’re not. My goal, however, is different. Introverts still talk to people. Companies are, after all, fundamentally about getting people to work together to accomplish something that people can’t do by themselves. For anyone to do his or her job, interacting with others is necessary. It’s not that people need to interact a lot more or completely change their personality, but rather that they should be interacting with the right people at the right time.

Maybe instead of eating lunch at our desk every day, we take one day out of the week to eat with a coworker. That’s a small change, and I think we could all agree that’s not much of an imposition on someone who is naturally more introverted. From a collaboration perspective, however, that one interaction can make all the difference by providing a mental model of the other person’s expertise. If a problem comes up down the road, people can easily call on that expertise. They’ll feel more connected to the workplace, being able to trust their coworkers just a little bit more when it comes to stressful events or work-related problems. Strengthening these relationships is essential for building the ever-more-complex workplace of the future.

In addition to doing away with this individual view of productivity, we need to get rid of the notion of the lone genius. An easy way to think of our creativity, and our impact on our colleagues as a whole, is to think about how much work we can actually get done by ourselves. Imagine you discover a way to increase your performance by 10%. Assuming you work 40 hours a week, you can end up saving 4 hours of your time every week by using this new method you’ve discovered. If you keep it to yourself, over one year you will end up saving about 200 hours.

But what if you shared your discovery with five of your closest coworkers? Maybe it takes you awhile to teach them this new method, say 20 hours. In that case, individually you would only save yourself 180 hours, but collectively everyone would save about 1,200 hours in that first year. On top of that, however, you’ve now created a community where sharing tips is expected. If everyone starts discovering different time-saving tips, suddenly each person is saving 10 or 15 hours every week. The group as a whole starts saving thousands of hours, meaning more people can help out on other projects and make more connections or come up with their own projects to work on that are radically different than anything else out there.

This is why we form organizations and why hundreds of thousands of years ago we began to develop more and more complex groups: to learn from each other, to make ourselves stronger than the sum of our parts.

Then suddenly this all changed. In the span of a few decades in the mid-1800s, we went from organizations built on cohesive relationships to ones where factory lines and faceless masses were the key to profit and success. More and more emphasis was placed on the importance of the factory, the importance of formal process, until only 100 years later we had completely forgotten our roots. From a biological perspective, 100 years is nothing. Biological changes take millennia to manifest themselves, and we are most certainly geared toward working in tightly knit groups.

Today, people need to be creative and able to work on complex projects, infinitely more complex than anything mankind has strived to accomplish in our entire existence. Hundreds of thousands of people must work together toward a common goal.

The factory model doesn’t work in these conditions. The same factors that led to our meteoric rise now make functioning in a fast-changing world increasingly difficult.

So let’s think back, only a second, really, in the grand scheme of things. Let’s think back a few hundred years. Back then we mostly lived in small towns, villages where we knew the other hundred or so residents by name. We trusted each other, knew how to talk to each other, and put in the time to form a communal bond. We need many of the exact same things today.

Our minds and biology are still rooted in that time. We still have the capacity to develop deep connections with each other, to create communities within larger organizations that are seemingly too big to comprehend. It’s ironic, then, that these ancient abilities are our future.

This future consists of connection, collaboration, and data, a future where we’re judged not solely by our own deeds, but by that of our entire community. It’s a future where age-old practices of relationship building and trust are married with the new age of data gathering that the world of sensors and digital data streams has brought forth.

This future is an exciting one, where fundamentally new measurements can enable a radically new view of management. And yet, 200 years ago this new organization wouldn’t be radical. In a great paradox, the company of the future will look more and more like the company of the past.

These changes will start slowly, but the walls put up around us in recent years will soon tumble down. At first this new world of work will look old, almost ancient: bustling activity as people roam around the office, small groups stopping to chat while others continue on their way, reminiscent of town squares from long ago. In fact, they look nearly identical. There’s only one thing, really, that distinguishes this workplace of the future from that of the past: a small, white badge.