Where, oh where, to sit?
This is the question faced by many people when they head into their workplace. Even the employees who still have an assigned seat often have the flexibility to move to many different locations, depending on what they’re trying to get accomplished.
When left to choose on their own, people often select the same seats every day, even when they have complete freedom to sit wherever they’d like. They also often sit right next to the people they know best. This can lead to professional silos. So can setting up floors based on which teams and teammates work together most frequently. That locks in whatever is happening now, for better or worse.
For years Tom Allen of MIT’s Sloan School of Management has been suggesting locating people and groups so that chance encounters between members, at coffee pots and break areas, make encounters that can lead to creative/innovative solutions frequent. And creativity/innovation-driving encounters are also more likely when people are doing everyday office tasks, such as traveling to the rest room, and encounter each others’ ideas – people walking by conference rooms and seeing what’s going on in meetings can also develop innovative, intergroup solutions.
Locating people based on the basis of who works with whom now, data regularly collected by programming surveys, doesn’t necessarily lead to creative/innovative outcomes.
Finding out who should be running into whom to come up with creative/innovative solutions requires talking with managers and learning about organizational possibilities. Managers know things about how the organization can function.
For example: Although now it might be that product designers or research and development types are interacting most frequently with product marketers, the real possibilities for leap frogging forward may require that those designers bond with manufacturing or shipping types – and managers (hopefully) know this. Where people work should reflect these managerial insights.
To make it more likely that people whose interactions can lead to creativity/innovation do indeed interact, some sort of seating plan is needed, and on a relatively small scale. Areas where particular sorts of people are supposed to sit need to be identified, and a full set of place-use options – relevant for the work that they do –needs to be provided for them there; that means places with more or less acoustic and visual shielding, for example. A set of 15 desks might be assigned to be shared by an 8-person and a 7-person team, for example.
Not all employees in all firms, at least at any one time, may be likely to contribute to the creative/innovative breakthroughs required for organization success. These may be more tactical/transactional employees, as opposed to more strategic ones. Seating “plans” for tactical/transactional employees can be more functionally based or more organic, depending on company culture, and less creativity/innovation oriented.
To develop new products and ideas, a seating chart that would make a fifth grade teacher proud may be just what’s needed.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.