Today’s architects, interior designers, as well as engineers are fully engaged in a journey of discovering the different ways our run-down-the-mill offices increase our overall efficiency while promoting collaboration at the same time. Much to their surprise, they discovered a risk that was often swept under the rug by today’s large majority: distraction.

Architectural firm, Gensler, made headlines when its 2013 US Workplace Survey revealed the detrimental role of focus in effective performance. The aforementioned study showed that whenever we are distracted at work, our capacity to focus and collaborate is immediately undermined. As a result, this specific piece of information became the ammunition of critics going against the open plan setting. Only a handful of participants reported at least an hour of heads down, concentrated work during their shifts. Their headline finding led people to wonder how professionals can successfully execute individual focused work in an office that clearly prioritizes collaboration.

Almost all industries carry complex work that requires a balance of focused individual activities and collaborative task but lead consultants of Genler decided to focus on software developers and engineers whose project require a lot of focus.

Developing software is an increasingly collaborative activity — self-organizing teams swiftly move through series of cycles. This fluid method of working splits tasks into small increments that would usually take one to four weeks with each one requiring a variation of periods of intense focus and intense collaboration. According to the interviews the team conducted within a global tech firm, it shows that about seventy percent of a developer’s time goes to individual work; some casual and uninterruptible by emails and instant messaging, while tasks like coding, testing, and debugging can only be interrupted at the expense of their productivity. At the same time, sit down conversations and brainstorming sessions are integral to a team’s progress.

The competition in today’s tech industry is fierce, with several companies prioritizing speed in marketing its services and products, and that pressure can easily inflame the problems open workspaces usually come with — it can be too loud and distracting for them. Despite of this, we don’t see it going away. The open plan setting is not going away any time soon and this is because of the mobility it offers as well as its cost efficient nature.

It became pretty obvious by then; people are doing more and more focused work but they feel ineffective at it. Solving it wouldn’t be as easy though, the organizational demand for collaboration hinders researchers from coming up with solutions as both work modes are attached by the hip. Their eureka moment came when they realized that in order for an office to be effective, it needs to serve both interests. It’s not just about the spaces anymore, how work happens matters as much as where work happens.

The participants involved in the research were situated in a brand new “agile” workspace that carries a series of of open team areas with 15 workstations each. And according to the interviews and focus groups, developers and testers said that the setup fitted their team dynamics, culture, and individual work needs, perfectly. They were incredibly satisfied. It allowed them to sit together and interact with one another amidst focused work. Its size and proximity allowed both work modes to become productive.

Unfortunately, user experience designers weren’t as enthusiastic. Their tasks required them to collaborate with large numbers of teams yet they have the innate tendency to sit along side each other, resulting to distractions. Episodically conversing with developers and testers, it became a tenuous activity that gave them less autonomy on where and how they worked within the office. And in order to cope, they would often look for more effective acoustic spaces elsewhere.

Based on the input they have gathered, it suggests that people can perform well, even in interactive situations, if they have the liberty to utilize workspaces and processes that allowed them to balance both collaborative and focus activities in real time.

Gensler’s report entitled “My Work in a We World”, enumerated four strategies in order to perfect the balancing act: choice and control over surroundings, team discipline, united code of behavior, and decision-making autonomy. Each strategy should be tailored to the organisation, the team, and the project. Taking into consideration other factors aside from the setting, it integrates team dynamics, organisational culture, as well as work polices and practices. In order for your people to truly flourish, they must have enough control over both their space and situation.

Interested in performing the balancing act? Talk to us today and we’ll give you a helping hand. Sales Rain’s spaces are designed to improve both your team and individual performance by syncing collaboration and focus in one rhythm.

The youngest demographic of today’s workforce – the Millennials – have brought a ton of change in the world of business. From the way we do business and even our work area. This generation’s penchant for autonomy pushed several corporations to reconsider the modern innovations occurring in terms of work.

And though these modifications have helped us become even more innovative and flexible, it also brought in a certain trend that alarmed companies as well as experts. More and more members of today’s workforce are becoming disengaged with their respective work with a number close to 70 percent. Some have traced it back to despite having available resources around them to familiarize themselves with the work models, there are certain employers that continue to fail in creating a fulfilling path and culture for their employees.

To make things even more alarming, a large number of these young professionals walking away from the corporate track are women. According to a Deloitte survey conducted among 7,700 millennials coming from 29 different countries, one out of four respondents plan on quitting their respective job within a year. Moreover, women are most likely than men to have left the company.

A recent global ICEDR study orchestrated during 2015 to 2016, leaders believe that the majority of women at the age of 30 leave because of the struggle they experience creating a balance between their work and their life. Yet contrary to what the study entailed, the women themselves said that there are other factors that influenced their decision to leave their respective organizations.

A few readers have argued that neither the work/life balance nor the compensation is their primary driving force for leaving, but rather the corporate environment itself have become taxing to them.

One of the most crucial factor is corporate politics – accompanied by incompatible values and toxic environment. Employees would often find themselves doing their best to dodge multiple stray bullets whenever they feel that their ethics and values is not in sync with those of the corporation. Women are frequently left burned out as they try to make a contribution to the business while making sure that their voices and opinions remain significant.

Another reason cited by the readers is impact. As most professionals would, they want to fulfill their purpose and make a difference. No matter the industry, most of us wish to give our own input into making the world a better place. We all want to leave an accomplishment of good, solid work as well as other recognizable achievements.

“Wonder Women” or ladies of the industry would often feel that their thoughts get easily drowned out by corporate noise. To them, they are helping a group of people build their dreams without being recognized for the contributions that they make in the process. Some women dream of their ideas coming to life right before their eyes. There are also certain young ladies who choose to continue their profession independently so that they have more control over their goals.

And the last most common reason is the overwhelming feeling of being undervalued or underutilized. The corporate world seldom fully recognize women’s ability to contribute, nor do they curate an environment that allows women to reach their potential and succeed at the highest levels. Whether it’s because of gender discrimination, family-unfriendly policies that take its toll on women with children or simply the overall unfair culture – when faced with these types of environment, females or workplace wonder women would make it their goal to ‘lean out’ of these corporations.

As a result, the number of female entrepreneurs expanded, globally. Over the past 15 years, women-owned firms have grown at a faster rate and would have provided an estimated of more than 5 million jobs by the year 2018.

These office wonder women are crashing the glass ceiling as they continuously disrupt the traditional corporate culture by building their own companies, taking over executive leadership roles and curating workspaces that cater to both the needs and interest of women.

The fast growth of flexible workspaces brought upon the unexpected appearance of several coworking offices globally. Though as expected, majority of them are built for co-ed occupation. But as the years progressed, the presence of niche shared offices have been observed. More and more female-friendly spaces are opening up to fill in the gaps of the available resources to women.

Providers from all around the world are now coming up with more ways to invite female entrepreneurs into joining them. Specific spaces in the US have started providing on-site child care services so that mothers of their community could fulfill both of their duties.

Whenever offices are reorganized, most workers view the process as nothing else but a nuisance interrupting their daily work and for what exactly? They’re not really sure. Design firms and experts have long discussed the benefits of changing up work environments, claiming that when people are able to circulate freely and had more opportunities to engage with different sets of coworkers, they become more communicative, collaborative, and creative.

Even world-famous managers believe so too; when Steve Jobs was designing the new headquarters for Pixar, he designated large central bathrooms in the building’s atrium, rendering employees to walk a couple of distances to use them creating unplanned “collisions” that would later on spark innovations. Several studies have backed it up but the financial return rate of such investment had been hard to prove – until recently.

A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Sunkee Lee, came across a “natural experiment” within a large South Korean e-commerce company that was moving into a new office. In their old building, six Merchandising teams tasked with sourcing and marketing flash deals for various products were seated in one area while six other merchandising team sat in another, separated by a common entrance. And though the company wanted both groups to be in one location altogether, space constraints would render nine of them to be in one open area and three in another with a common entrance between them. Both areas are identical in terms of its decoration, lighting, equipment, distance between teams and their respective workstations, as well as proximity to management – there’s no denying that it was pretty similar with those of the old headquarters and employees had no choice where they would sit.

Lee looked at over 38, 435 deals done by 60 merchandisers over 200 days – 120 days before the big move and 80 days after – and found that those merchandisers in the area that contained more teams sourced over 25% more deals from new suppliers, on average, than all merchandisers had sourced before the reorganization. The thing was, the deals didn’t come from collaboration, they were a mark of change in the quality of the employees’ work. Lee identifies the change as a shift away from “exploitation” or the repetition of offers to “exploration” – the formulation of new ideas. More importantly, the daily deal revenue of each employee sitting with a previously unknown colleagues was 40% higher, on average, than that of their average prior to the move.

The aforementioned increase in creativity and the jump to exploratory ideas was statistically significant for those whose experience sourcing deals within the organization. They were above the median and had no social ties to most of the members of their new workspace. Lee explains that once a person learns enough about the area they specialize in, exposure to new peers would help them enhance their creativity. He adds that physical proximity promotes trust and the exchange of knowledge between new colleagues.

In addition to this, the change of surrounding seemed to boost the employees’ performance compared to the other switches the company has made. Moreover, the effect brought upon by the relocation was quick.

Sunkee Lee’s study is one of the first to use a before-and-after setup to examine how a change in a office seating arrangement affects individual innovation and sales performance. But it became part of a long line of research suggesting that where we seat can do significant effects on how they work together. Another prominent example of this is MIT professor Thomas Allen’s study on communication among engineer in the R&D facility of a multinational company during the 1970s. His finding, popularly known as the Allen curve, shows the dramatic drop in dialogues between employees who sit apart. Though most of the earlier research focused on businesses, the aforementioned phenomenon happens in other arenas too. A 2015 study said that members of the US Senate who will sit in close proximity with one another are likely to support each other’s legislation, regardless of their party affiliations.

And though majority of today’s organizations have left closed-door offices behind in exchange for open spaces for communal workspaces, few have gone as far as routinely changing office seating arrangements. Lee still suggests that such interventions is of big help to organizations who live by knowledge sharing and innovation.

And in any case you want some help in keeping things fresh, hit us up!