Something that seems to get lost in discussions of hybrid work arrangements is the fact that not all employees who toil away in offices do the same sort of work.
Some employees are doing more tactical tasks. For example, they may be processing information in ways they’ve done many times before or using protocols that are quite structured, detailed and straightforward. These are jobs where little is left to the imagination regarding next steps and assignments are pretty routine. Sometimes this work requires interacting with others, but often it doesn’t.
When people are doing routine tactical work that doesn’t require any real interaction with other employees, working from anywhere can be a fine way to go. Real estate doesn’t need to be rented or workplaces provided for these employees and people from anywhere can be hired (many of these jobs are already being done by workers outside the first world to save money on wages). These employees don’t get much mentoring or access to other professional opportunities, and the individuals filling these jobs may or may not even want that sort of job enrichment. Mainly solo, routine tactical folks are the people who work well in open environments, also. Since their jobs are often not very mentally stimulating, being in a more active environment can boost their performance.
Other employees spend much more of their time doing strategic sorts of work; they’re involved with the sorts of endeavors that, when done well, generally lead to gaining more responsibility and moving up the proverbial corporate ladder. Essentially, these people are doing creative work. These workers are often solving complex problems, coming up with new strategies, etc., and, generally, must focus – sometimes intensely – as they do their jobs. Even though these people spend some of their time working alone, planning and development of this type are generally group efforts, with significant amounts of time spent both preparing for and attending group meetings.
Creative workers need to be together in one place to develop the best, most effective solutions, and instead of continually searching for places to gather, it is more efficient for their collective work to be done at corporate offices. Individuals and teams focused on strategic thinking particularly benefit from working without auditory and visual distractions, in activity-based workplaces or similar locations, where the sorts of lighting conditions, aesthetic profiles, and other design elements that research has linked to optimum cognitive performance (and that are often discussed in this column) are present. When these people are together in one location for longer periods of time, spontaneous meetings become a viable way to deal with unanticipated or particularly thorny issues.
The importance of gathering people together for effective group strategizing has been known for some time and a recent study confirms the value of colocation in this context. After conducting a series of lab and field experiments, *Brucks and Levav (2022) report that, “videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas. . . . in-person communicators generate a greater number of total ideas and creative ideas compared with virtual pairs. Our results suggest that there is a unique cognitive advantage to in-person collaboration.”
Of course, there are people doing a mix of tactical and strategic work and where they work and what sorts of spaces are provided for them at the office should depend on which of the tasks they do adds most value to the organization—and that can be identified via programming-type research.
There are employees who must come into an office, without exception. For example, they may have some on site responsibilities for maintaining company computer servers that require “eye contact” with those machines. The nature of their work often makes it very clear how their onsite workspaces should be designed.
There are also employees who have decided that they are no longer going to work in their employer’s office, no matter what they are doing and no matter what their onsite work conditions might be—articles in both the peer-reviewed and general press document this group. These employees will remain part of the organization or not, but remote work policies or corporate office design will not influence their decisions to remain. Employers may decide to retain these employees, with decisions based to a great extent on their distinctive contributions to their organizations. It seems likely that many in the “never-going-back-to-the-office” set will become gig employees because they have few bonds to their employer, which is consistent with the degradation of the psychological contract between employers and employees mentioned in previous editions of this column.
When the varieties of professional work present in an organization and the range of workplace solutions that are effective for each are acknowledged, employees have more positive professional experiences, they work effectively, and employers find that their corporate wellbeing, as measured by parameters such as income, have the potential to grow.
*Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levav. 2022. “Virtual Communication Curbs Creative Idea Generation.” Nature, vol. 605, pp. 108-112.
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.