Why You Should Rotate Office Seating Assignments

When corporate workspaces are reorganized, many employees view the process as nothing but a nuisance. Desks are cleared, boxes are packed, daily work is disrupted—for what, exactly? Design firms have long touted the benefits of such changes, promising that when people are able to circulate more freely and to randomly encounter different sets of colleagues, they’re more communicative, collaborative, and creative. Some managers believe that too: When Steve Jobs was planning a new headquarters for Pixar, he famously located the large central bathrooms in the building’s atrium, requiring employees to walk some distance to use the facilities—but creating unplanned “collisions” meant to spark innovation. Dozens of research studies have backed up these contentions. But the financial return on investment for office reconfigurations has been hard to prove—until now. Sunkee Lee, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, happened upon a “natural experiment” at a large South Korean e-commerce company that was moving into new headquarters. (The company requested anonymity.) In the old building, six teams of “merchandisers,” tasked with sourcing and marketing flash deals for various product categories (electronics, baby, fashion, and so on) were seated in one area, while six other merchandiser teams sat in another one; the two groups were separated by a common entrance. Although the company wanted all the teams together in the new location, space constraints meant that nine of them were situated in one open area and three in another, with a common entrance in between. The two spaces were identical in terms of decoration, lighting, equipment, distances between teams and workstations, and proximity to management, and they were very similar to those in the previous headquarters. Employees had no choice about where they sat. Looking at 38,435 deals executed by 60 merchandisers over 200 days—120 days before the move and 80 days after—Lee found that merchandisers in the area containing more teams sourced 25% more deals from new suppliers, on average, than all merchandisers had sourced before the move. The deals weren’t the result of collaboration; they marked a change in the quality of people’s work. Lee characterizes that change as a shift from “exploitation” (simply repeating offers that worked in the past) to “exploration” (coming up with new ideas). Perhaps more important, the daily deal revenue of each merchandiser sitting with previously unfamiliar colleagues was, on average, 40% higher ($16,510 a day) than the merchandisers’ premove average. “It Makes the Company Less Clique-y” Katie Burke is the chief people officer at HubSpot, a Boston-based marketing-software company with nearly 2,000 employees. She recently spoke with HBR about her firm’s approach to rotating seat assignments. Edited excerpts follow. Cody O’Loughlin How does HubSpot’s office space reflect the organization’s culture? From the start we wanted to be collaborative and antihierarchical and to prevent “corner office syndrome,” where executives are isolated from employees and certain teams don’t engage with others. So we’ve always had open offices. We also do a seat reshuffle roughly every three months, though that can vary by team and office location. Why make people switch desks so often? Our founders realized that in every office there are good seats and bad seats, so they set up a lottery in which everyone, including them, participated. If you drew number one, you had first choice, but in a few months someone else would get the top pick. The point is to eliminate perceptions of power imbalances. The reshuffles also emphasize that change is constant, so you need to be adaptable. And we want people to get out of their entrenched social patterns so that they will collaborate and learn. If I’m in marketing, on our blog team, and suddenly I’m sitting next to a sales rep and listening to her calls, I’m going to know a lot more about how to explain what we offer. Do you move teams together, or mix up the functions? We keep teams together, but we change adjacent groups and mix up the people within each team. We also try to put interns and new hires near people who have been here awhile so that they can learn more about how we work. How much time does your team spend on reshuffles? It’s a pretty time-intensive collaboration among our employee-experience, administrative, and facilities teams. But we think the benefits far outweigh the costs. Given the importance you place on seating assignments, are employees allowed to work from home? Everyone has a laptop, and we do promote flexibility and remote work. We have some people who have never come into any office; but some teams encourage folks to come in at least three or four days a week. We try to be transparent about what is expected in each group. We also have spaces in our offices that people can move to for calls or intensive individual work: nomad desks in less busy areas, quiet rooms, and soundproof pods. Don’t people get tired of packing up their desks every quarter? There are people who question the practicality of it for a company at the scale we are at now. Some see it as annoying or a nuisance to move away from a friend or someone they’re working with on a project. But it’s been part of our culture since the start. It makes the company less clique-y. And it keeps us all from getting complacent. One of our strong messages to employees is: The day you think you’ve got it all figured out is the day we lose as a company. Physically shifting your seat is a good visual reminder of that. The increase in creativity—the shift to exploratory ideas—was statistically significant only for people whose experience sourcing deals at that organization was above the median and who had no previous social ties to at least some of the colleagues in their new workspace. Lee offers this explanation: “Once you’ve learned enough about the area you specialize in, exposure to new people will make you more creative. In particular, physical proximity promotes trust and the exchange of valuable and novel knowledge between newly met peers. Given the ability to do so, you will recombine this new knowledge with your own to innovate.” Examples of the new products sourced include a rice cooker that plugs into a car (a combination of the living and leisure categories), earmuffs with a built-in Bluetooth function (fashion and electronics), and a training potty that plays music (baby and electronics). The merchandisers didn’t work directly with their newly met peers, Lee says; rather, they were inspired by overheard dialogue and informal conversations to shift from “incremental” to “radical” creativity and increased sales as a result. Interestingly, the change to employees’ physical space seemed to boost performance even more than did another switch the company made (which Lee also studied), from individual incentives to fixed wages. In addition, the effect generated by the relocation was quick—the rise in cross-category deals occurred within a month—and it increased throughout the 80 days postmove. Lee’s study is one of the first to use a before-and-after setup to examine how a seating change affects individual innovation and sales performance. But it’s part of a long line of research suggesting that where colleagues sit can profoundly affect how they work together. In the 1970s, for instance, MIT professor Thomas Allen studied communication among engineers in the R&D facility of a multinational company. His finding, the Allen curve, depicts the dramatic drop in dialogue between people who sit far apart. Although most of the prior research dealt with businesses, the phenomenon holds in other arenas, too. For example, a 2015 study documented that members of the U.S. Senate who sit in close proximity are more likely to support one another’s legislation, regardless of party affiliation. Lee suspects that had he continued to collect data at the South Korean firm, he would have seen a maturation effect: “When you sit near a new person, there’s only a certain amount of knowledge you can absorb from him or her,” he explains. “This kind of thing can wear off in time.” He also notes that his findings shouldn’t be interpreted too broadly; the study involved a relatively small pool of employees at a technology start-up in a country with a collectivist culture. Still, Lee sees potential for such interventions to get results at other companies and elsewhere in the world. “It depends on your organization’s goals,” he says. “If you want to maintain productivity, there’s certainly a case for keeping your workspaces as they are. Research shows that moves, especially to open areas, can reduce employee motivation, satisfaction, and even health. But if your organization competes on knowledge sharing and innovation, periodic reconfigurations could be worth it”—provided previously disconnected people are brought together and those newer to their jobs are given more training and support. Although many companies have ditched closed-door offices and even open cubicles in favor of communal, desk-to-desk workspaces in an effort to encourage unplanned interactions (and to save money), fewer go so far as to routinely shake up seating assignments. Some that do: the gaming company Valve, which has put wheels on its workstations so that employees can move wherever their interests and projects take them; the travel website Kayak, where new hires are often used as a reason to move people around; and the marketing-software firm HubSpot, which randomly reassigns desks every few months. Whether such office reconfigurations can boost revenue in the same way as they did in the South Korean e-commerce company is a question for future research. But they are increasingly common. “The idea is to encourage people from different worlds to mix and match ideas so that you come up with the best from both,” Lee says. “That boosts both individual and collective performance.” About the Research: “Learning-by-Moving: Can Reconfiguring Spatial Proximity Between Organizational Members Promote Individual-level Exploration?” by Sunkee Lee (Organization Science, Volume 30, Issue 3)

Why You Should Rotate Office Seating Assignments

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