Chutes and Ladders, Do They Matter?

When reviewing the myriad “best places to work” lists, it’s hard not to be struck by the commonalities of top employers – company mission, organizational culture, employee-friendly policies, and the like are typically cited as differentiators. For me, however, one of the most remarkable similarities is innovative office design. Witness Google’s interior slides, Facebook’s video game rooms, and Salesforce’s Ohana Floor.

To appreciate why office design is key to employee engagement, productivity, and company culture, we have to look back almost 100 years to a series of socio-psychological experiments conducted at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in the late 1920s. The intent of the Hawthorne studies was to examine the effects of physical conditions on employee productivity by altering workplace attributes (e.g., lighting). Prior to the Hawthorne studies, the prevailing view was that economic factors had the greatest influence on productivity. The results were surprising to say the least - productivity improved, but for reasons unrelated to the environmental changes – leading the researchers to conclude that employee morale and productivity are affected less by the conditions in which people work than by the attention they receive from others. In this case, the researchers.

A decade later, Leon Festinger conducted a study at MIT to examine the impact of architectural and ecological factors on student housing satisfaction. Not unlike the Hawthorne studies, the "Westgate" experiments at MIT had implications for workplace design, and gave rise to propinquity theory - the notion that the more we interact with others, the more likely we are to like and become friends with them. Results from the MIT study led Festinger to conclude that physical space was instrumental to building relationships and that “friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood.”

It took almost 50 years for Festinger’s ideas to catch fire in the business community, but in the late 1990s interest in workplace design waxed, and for good reason. Steve Jobs bought into it! It was Jobs who gave life to previous socio-psychological findings via his pioneering redesign of Pixar’s campus in Emeryville, California. Yet, it was Festinger’s insight that physical space is vital to relationship building that was incarnate in Jobs’ vision for Pixar’s HQ, which transformed from a multi-building site, housing animators, computer scientists, and everyone else in separate locations, to a unified space purpose-built for encouraging cross-department collaboration and innovation. According to Jobs’ biography, Pixar’s campus was conceived to be a place that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.”

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to tour Pixar’s offices in Emeryville. The tour was the capstone of a 2-day meeting on HR Innovation. As we passed through the front entrance into the magnificent lobby, our guide explained that Jobs’ vision for this great space was to serve as the central hub for the campus. And what better way to achieve that vision than by using the atrium to house the facility’s only restrooms?

The tour lasted an hour, but our guide generously offered us the opportunity to linger in the atrium and sample the array of drool-worthy cuisine. I had a late flight, so I decided to hang out for a few hours. As I sat in the atrium, I couldn’t help but be captivated by the amount of interaction. For two hours, I surveilled editors talking politics with engineers, accountants discussing Agile with animators, and interns educating executives on the latest social networking apps. It was simply electrifying and I became so absorbed in my observation, I nearly missed my flight. When I returned to my less impressive office digs the next day - comprised of cubicle farms, bland coloring, and artificial light - I immediately felt my energy dissipate. On the upside, it was only a short walk to the nearest restroom.

Slides, game rooms, and doodle walls aren’t for every company. And, there’s no shortage of debate on the pros and cons of open workspaces. Still, for companies looking to promote collaboration and innovation it’s hard to argue against workplace design that encourages a healthy dose of impromptu interaction. There will always be some who view spontaneous conversations as a wasteful distraction - an activity worthy of relegation to Covey’s dreaded Quadrant 4. Yet, in my experience, I’ve only seen positive outcomes.