We upgraded our office using small creative measures (backed by science). You can do it too!
An office is not mandatory, but if you physically want to work together with other people, it's one of the best things to have. We think it's safe to say that every great team needs a great office.
Our own office space wasn't perfect when we moved in — it's still not perfect—but we've slowly turned it into a pretty good place to work together, learn together, and have fun together. That took some experimenting, as well as gathering ideas from unusual places. The academic world for example. It's truly amazing what one can find there.
Promote Collectivism on Doors
We're no stranger to wisdom quotes, and I bet you're not either. If you have a social media account, chances are you come across poignant, weird, funny and cliched quotes on a daily basis. So what good would hanging a few more in your office do you might ask.
Well, not much…
Unless… you seek out quotes, excerpts or principles that truly and clearly express the shared culture of your team. Even better if they appeal to a collectivistic mindset and promote collectivistic values. Researchers Chatman & Barsade found back in 1995 that working together works best when a collectivistic culture is promoted.
We found that cooperative subjects in collectivistic cultures were rated by coworkers as the most cooperative; they reported working with the greatest number of people, and they had the strongest preferences for evaluating work performance on the basis of contributions to teams rather than individual achievement.
Oh, and why hang them on the door and not the wall? Okay, we didn't find any scientific evidence for that, but our logic is easy. You'll probably gander much more times at the door than at the wall because of the very nature of doors: anyone could walk in at any time, allowing thus for continued surprise. And our craving for continued surprise is in fact well-documented.
Try reading Nir Eyal's Making Your Product a Habit: The Hook Framework. You'll discover how we love the variable reward and the dopamine ruckus that comes with it. Yes, that door you always stare at is like your very own casino slotmachine.
Use Windows for Sharing Goals
Okay, so our doors are filled with quotes promoting cooperation, now for our windows. How to go about those large see-through things… Well absolutely do not remove them. There happens to be research suggesting that even just looking at trees from windows is beneficial. But we'll get to that in a moment.
First we want to suggest using windows in a different way than simply as invisible walls. We think it's safe to say that people often look out of a window during an idle moment. So why not capitalize on that very tendency?
We definitely do not want to keep your team from looking out to the world, but you don't need an entire window for that. Instead we suggest collecting the most important shared goals of your team and taping them to that window.
Why? No matter how different everyone may be, working together starts with ensuring that everyone shares the same interest. We all must want to further the goals of our team. Chatman et al.'s research backs that.
[our research] suggest that the purported benefits of demographic diversity are more likely to emerge in organizations that, through their culture, make organizational membership salient and encourage people to categorize one another as having the organization’s interests in common, rather than those that emphasize individualism and distinctiveness among members.
Oh, was that too much of a reach? Well, remember the scope of this article; we're just talking about small improvements to the office space, not how you should lead your team.
Get Development & Marketing to Sit Together
What we don't want: marketing hot shots constantly blabbering in the developer's ear when she's trying to solve an annoying bug. Likewise we try to avoid cynical developer comments directed at creative—maybe somewhat far-fetched—marketing ideas.
Still, we did force our developers and marketers to take a seat at the same table. You see, in part thanks to our previous changes they now already have a cooperative mindset and a shared interest in the company's advancement.
Those prerequisites are very important, and that's not meant jokingly. Development and marketing have been natural enemies for centuries. There's nothing a marketeer wants more than to announce a super cool new feature, and there's nothing that a developer wants less than to launch an unfinished feature that might break more than it delivers.
Mutual understanding is key. Hence, the promoted culture of cooperation and shared goals. Van Der Vegt & Bunderson's 2005 research suggests that teams with low collective identification have a detrimental effect to the appreciation of diverse expertise. So, if you were thinking that just by placing your rockstar developer next to your nifty content creator you'll get an interdisciplinary melting pot, you're wrong. If there's no collective identification chances are that they'll have no regard for each other's expertise at all… Ouch.
The good other side of the coin is that when team identification is high, there are actual positive effects to be noticed. Still, would a few quotes and goals be enough to reach that team identification? Of course not.
Luckily we picked up the idea of boundary spanning activities from Ratcheva's 2009 research. In it the suggestion is made that successful integration of multidisciplinary knowledge (the thing we want) rests on having those boundary spanning roles, as well as reaching out to multiple professional and social communities.
So if you have a startup team that does not have very limited and confined responsibilities, sitting them together might not be such a bad idea.
Library For All
Okay, what more did we do. Well, we are building our very own in-office library. It's quite modest right now, but at least we made a start. While we didn't get the idea from the academic world—the library kind of arose on itself—there's actual evidence of the positive effects of information and knowledge sharing within a small company.
For that evidence we go to Tunisia. El Harbi, Anderson & Amamou found in 2011 that information and knowledge were key to the operational success of small Tunisian ICT firms. The successful ones developed very useful internal systems for sharing information, as well as efficient methods for tapping into existing external knowledge.
While digitally we made steps to ensure such benefits, we took that a step further with our offline library. Sharing books, comments and reviews physically is a great way to introduce new knowledge to team members and find new perspectives on old discussions. Therefore we love our new library.
Plants are your Friends
And as promised, we now return to the trees. Early on our office felt lifeless. It lacked joy and was purely functional. That's not good for a place where your purposely come to spend time and work on great things together. Luckily we soon found a little green to be the perfect solution.
Raanaas et al. found in 2011 that plants in office do much more good than just make the office space feel more alive. Their research suggests that indoor plants can prevent fatigue during attention demanding work. That's truly amazing. But what's even more crazy is that beneficial effects even occurred when an office had a window view to nature.
So don't plaster your entire window with goals.
Raanaas et al. are joined in their conclusion by Fjeld et al. Their 1998 research goes as far as to suggest positive health effects. Get this:
Complaints regarding cough and fatigue were reduced by 37 and 30%, respectively, if the offices contained plants. The self-reported level of dry/hoarse throat and dry/itching facial skin each decreased approximately 23% when plants were present. Overall, a significant reduction was obtained in neuropsychological symptoms and mucous membrane symptoms, while skin symptoms seemed to be unaffected by the presence of plants.
If that doesn't motivate you to buy a few plants for your office, then we're not sure what will.
Discussion
As we said, our office is far from perfect, but we're working on it with the limited resources at our disposal. We're curious. How did you turn your office into a great place to work together? And we're not talking about on-site smoothie bars or on-demand baristas. What are a couple of things any company (no matter the size) could easily implement? Let us know in the responses.
Feel free to recommend the article. Your choice :)
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Sources:
Chatman, J. A., & Barsade, S. G. (1995). Personality, organizational culture, and cooperation: Evidence from a business simulation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 423–443.
Chatman, J. A., Polzer, J. T., Barsade, S. G., & Neale, M. A. (1998). Being different yet feeling similar: The influence of demographic composition and organizational culture on work processes and outcomes. Administrative Science Quarterly, 749–780.
Van Der Vegt, G. S., & Bunderson, J. S. (2005). Learning and performance in multidisciplinary teams: The importance of collective team identification.Academy of Management Journal, 48(3), 532–547.
Ratcheva, V. (2009). Integrating diverse knowledge through boundary spanning processes–The case of multidisciplinary project teams. International Journal of Project Management, 27(3), 206–215.
El Harbi, S., Anderson, A. R., & Amamou, M. (2011). Knowledge sharing processes in Tunisian small ICT firms. Library Review, 60(1), 24–36.
Raanaas, R. K., Evensen, K. H., Rich, D., Sjøstrøm, G., & Patil, G. (2011). Benefits of indoor plants on attention capacity in an office setting. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31(1), 99–105.
Fjeld, T., Veiersted, B., Sandvik, L., Riise, G., & Levy, F. (1998). The effect of indoor foliage plants on health and discomfort symptoms among office workers. Indoor and Built Environment, 7(4), 204–209.
