Over the last 2 weeks I have been onsite with clients in Ontario and Quebec and I was impressed and excited by the changes they had made to their office space.<\/p>\n
The workspace and team collaboration spaces were open, bright, modern, colourful, multi-purpose and very tech savvy.\u00a0 We have explored the issue of workspaces before, but I wanted to re-visit again to see if the research supports that a capital investment in more collaborative and engaging spaces actually improves performance.<\/p>\n
In a Harvard Business Review article, they explore the benefits of \u201ccolliding\u201d into colleagues and the benefits of informal and frequent interactions between employees from different areas of the business.\u00a0 They state that, in the future \u201cwe must aggressively change the definition of what workspace is, from where<\/em> work is done to how<\/em> it\u2019s done, and then design spaces\u2014physical and digital\u2014around that. The office of the past was a literal box of cubicles and desks, meeting rooms and common spaces. In the office of the future, we\u2019ll be thinking and working outside it\u201d (Workspaces that Move People, October 2014)<\/p>\n The article shares a number of interesting insights about the benefits of creating opportunities and literally forcing people to mingle through:<\/p>\n One organization profiled in the article found that when they measured social interactions, the data showed that when a salesperson increased interactions with coworkers on other teams\u2014that is, increased exploration\u2014by 10%, his or her sales also grew by 10%. An elegant correlation.<\/p>\n\n