NEW YORK–One of the arguments being made by proponents of returning to work is that chance meetings at the office help to boost innovation. One new analysis suggests “there’s no evidence” to support that.
In fact, says one person, for some people the office may even stifle creativity.
In a series of interviews, the New York Times found many executives say they don’t see anything that shows being together is a creativity-builder.
In fact, Jaqueline Reses, who in 2013 was an executive with Yahoo, which had banned working from home as it sought to encourage more spontaneous collaboration, now says an earlier memo she wrote that states some of the “best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings,” was wrong.
Today, Reses, is CEO of Post House Capital, and says she would write the memo differently. While she still believes that collaboration can benefit from being together in person, over the last year people found new, better ways to work, she told the Times.
‘May Even Hurt Innovation’
“…People who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration,” the Times reported. “It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people.”
Dan Spaulding, chief people officer at Zillow, told the Times the belief people need to be in the office has “led to a lot of the outcomes we see in the modern office environment — long hours, burnout, the lack of representation — because that office culture is set up for the advantage of the few, not the many. The idea you can only be collaborative face-to-face is a bias. And I’d ask, how much creativity and innovation have been driven out of the office because you weren’t in the insider group, you weren’t listened to, you didn’t go to the same places as the people in positions of power were gathering?”
He and others suggested to the Times a reimagination of the office entirely — as somewhere people go to every so often, to meet or socialize, while daily work is done remotely. At Zillow, nearly all employees will be remote or come in only once in a while. Several times a year, teams will go to small offices set up for gathering, the Times reported.
Yes, There’s Conversation, But…
“There’s credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation,” Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic, told the Times. “But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever. All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality.”
Indeed, Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions.
“People didn’t find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another,” Bernstein told the Times.