Can Lunch Room table size affect productivity in a company? Surprisingly, yes!

Can an abstract number like the ‘size of the lunch table’ affect the performance of employees at work? Well, surprisingly yes! And that could even be proved statistically. It has been proven that increasing the boundaries of the lunch table increases productivity, it was analyzed to be 10% in augmentation. This surprising study has more far-reaching implications than just being bound to the cafeteria!

It wouldn’t be much surprising to state that we spend a significantly large portion of our day at work. People involved in a job end up devoting a pretty great amount of time to the office, reason being which the workplace has a significant impact upon us. All of us are not fortunate enough to land in a place where we can thoroughly enjoy work, for a number of pitiful workers their workplace might just not be up to the mark. In a compelling work environment, productivity withers away and employees literally have to plod. What if we can enhance an institution’s productivity by using data that shows us how to make people effective at work! With a little experimentation, we can revamp the workplace, adding satisfaction, better performance, and progress in the employees’ kitty.

A wide range of multifarious data analyzed overtime at the workplace can be used to draw conclusions regarding the way how employees collaborate overwork. The sole motive of designing the workplace shouldn’t be reducing cost; in addition, the design should include cues for understanding ‘employees bonding over the job’. One of the many ways to achieve this purpose is to distribute sensor embedded, wearable badges to the staff which can be examined to map patterns of interaction between the employees and the major areas of social networking at the organization.

Such experiments can reveal astounding facts about the workplace, one of the most striking results being the relation observed between the size of lunch tables in a travel company’s cafeteria and the performance of the workforce.

There was an unexpected 10% hike in the productivity of the company with the subsequent increase in the size of lunch tables. It was observed that more productive people tended to sit in larger groups of around twelve.

The group members changed day-to-day but the size of the group remained constant; thereby maintaining high productivity. The least productive people were observed to be clubbed in groups of around four people. Though the people in the groups altered, the size remained the same.

What possibly could have caused a sudden increase in productivity due to the changed size of lunch tables? Actually the demographic patterns were set according to the size of the tables; thereby bringing larger groups of skilled programmers to eat together and bond over lunch. The table effect demonstrated the fact that by eating in larger groups of twelve, higher-performing employees were creating well-built networks of quality people which led to a significant influence on their performance. In contrast, the tables which had just four seats did not show any such improvement in performance. Later on, the simple decision of replacing all the cafeteria tables by twelve seaters tweaked up the performance by 10%.

When examined over time, the statistics showed that people associated with larger groups were actually less stressed. The effect of ‘cohesiveness’ was mapped to have been amazingly helpful in reducing tensions and increasing productivity. The more the teammates bonded over lunch, the better their teams became. Lunch tables can be counted as just a single factor among many unexplored factors such as seating distribution, office layout, and other designs.

By: Mandy Sidana, Founder

More research on the effect of collaboration on productivity: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep05277

Complete research: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/67762/766797397-MIT.pdf?sequence=2size