Earlier this year Harvard’s Ethan Bernstein published some research looking at the impact of open plan offices on collaboration levels in the workplace.  The research found that they were largely detrimental, with considerably less face-to-face interactions between employees deployed in them.  Instead, most of the communication between employees was moved online, with virtual collaboration taking the place of face-to-face.

It’s perhaps natural therefore, for him to issue a follow up study exploring the best way to collaborate virtually.  Whilst open plan offices have been an undoubted workplace trend of the last few decades, we have also seen a proliferation of virtual communication tools, from email to instant messaging, social media to Slack.  The rise of smartphones have meant we are literally always connected to these platforms.

If advocates of enterprise software tools are to be believed, this surfeit of digital tools must mean that collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation have sky rocketed?  Perhaps not.

The perils of being always on

The researchers compiled a number of three-person teams and asked them to undertake a complex problem-solving task.  The groups performed under a number of different conditions: one set of groups worked in isolation, never interacting with each other; a second set were constantly interacting; whilst a third set interacted intermittently.

The hypothesis being tested was that the group where participants never interacted would be the most creative on the task, largely because they wouldn’t succumb to the groupthink and other challenges that afflict group working.  Whilst this group would be capable of producing the best ideas however, they would also produce the worst, and thus represent a high level of variance that would drag their average performance below the other two types.

They also hypothesized that the groups who interacted constantly would have a higher average quality of solution, but individually they would not produce the same level as the other groups.  Both of these hypotheses were proved to be correct by the evidence, but what did surprise the researchers was the performance of the intermittent collaborators.

They managed to preserve the best qualities of both of the other groups.  They would have the high average quality of the constant collaborators, and the variation of the solitary groups to ensure that high ‘outliers’ were also produced.

Optimum performance

What is perhaps most interesting about the results was that in the intermittent collaboration group, the best performers were able to learn from their peers, even if they were individually low performers.  This only materialized when the interaction was sporadic, as constant collaboration didn’t see this knowledge sharing occur.  In these ‘always on’ groups, the weaker members of the group simply copied the stronger members, whilst the stronger members largely ignored the weaker ones.  When communication was sparse however, there was a much more fruitful exchange of ideas and knowledge.

So what does this mean for the workplace?  Well, the researchers believe it should highlight some of the limits of current physical and virtual workplace designs, and prompt a rethink over when we are best working alone and when we are best collaborating with others.  The march of technology is ostensibly designed to support better working, but in reality it might do more harm than good.

“As we replace those sorts of intermittent cycles with always-on technologies, we might be diminishing our capacity to solve problems well,” the authors say.

This intermittent approach to collaboration is already evident in practices such as agile, with collaboration confined to short sprints.  Likewise, they suggest hackathons also have this element to their design.

As we gain a greater understanding of what helps, and what hinders, the best quality work, hopefully our workplaces will increasingly grow to support these ways of working.