A group needs a truly private space they can claim as their own – a territory – if they’re going to do their best work together.
When groups have a territory they become a more cohesive unit, which is particularly handy when they face challenges. People work better on tasks, tactical and strategic, when they feel closer connections to their teammates.
An effective territory is owned indefinitely, it is continually available and isolated from curious eyes. When an organization provides a team with dedicated space, they signal that they value that group and the contributions it can make. After that sort of message is sent and received, teams work just a little bit harder and care a little more about outcomes.
To perform to their potential in a team space, a group needs to feel that it has some control over the area’s form as well as privacy there. Control means they can make modifications appropriate to project phases, for example. A space is private when people can work through to problem resolutions or try out new things there without worrying what people outside their group might think about what they’re up to. Only their teammates can see or hear what’s going on.
Physical places provide privacy in a way that electronic meeting areas can’t. Sure, someone can always be secretly recording a group session when everyone is physically in the same room, but the influence of that sort of potential activity or group behavior is less than the freezing effect created by the concern that someone unknown is lurking at an electronic gathering, ready to carry information to others in the organization.
We also communicate with each other more effectively when we’re face-to-face than when we’re connecting electronically.
A group space must reflect the culture of a team, and so should individual workplaces, if any are provided. Organizational cultures are continuing ways of ordering priorities and getting things done. The Competing Values cultural framework established by Cameron and Quinn establishes four cultural types, each of which is clearly supported by particular sorts of spaces, but there are other organizational culture systems that can be used to understand how a group works, and wants to work, and what sorts of spaces should be available to it.
A team’s group space should be acoustically separate from any individual workstations teammates might have. If it isn’t, everyone will continually be disturbed when group meetings begin. Also, moving from the space where individual thinking happens to the one where group work is in order leads to a useful mental shift. It’s fine to have people working on individual tasks within earshot of group meetings, but don’t expect either the group or the individual to work as effectively as they might under those circumstances.
If group members have individual workstations, their group space should be immediately adjacent to those individual workstations, and acoustically and visually isolated from areas frequented by non-teammates. A transparent wall between the group space and the individual workstations of group members, that acoustically shields each area from the other, is fine; providing a team with a transparent walled box as a group space, in the midst of other groups, creates an “animals in the zoo effect,” which dampens performance.
There are two ways that the zoo animal situation gets resolved: a group will never feel that a group space is theirs and won’t work to their full potential in it, or they will find a way to block the view of outsiders into their group space, if they’re allowed to do so. Furniture will move, charts will get posted onto walls, etc. If the organization does not allow these sorts of visual blockers, and for them to stay in place over time, the out-in-the-middle-of-it-all group room will be largely a waste of resources.
It’s important to remember that people generally want to do good work for their employer. They will do the best they can with the opportunities provided to them. Supplying groups with an acoustically and visually private space that they control, for their indefinite use, supports their efforts to work to their full potential, instead of stymying it.
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.