I like having casual talks about nothing in particular without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for growth in many aspects.
The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly.
Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company that can do it should be and any that isn’t should go the way of the dodo.
But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.
One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their offices in order to facilitate random meetings between people:
> However, almost as many fruitful interactions described in the book can be traced to architectural features. Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate the building were included intentionally, so that chance encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:
> In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to investigate the effects of inter-office communication. They convinced their employees to where sociometric badges for the duration of the experiment and identified three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by about $200 million.
I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way, companies definitely should play around and see what works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.
Ultimately, only the social aspect (building relationships, small talk with coworkers) remains. This should not be completely discounted, but everyone should do an analysis of what they are willing to go through to be in office. A 20-30 minute commute or a slightly longer public transit ride where you are assured of a seat? Sure, office will be worth it. 1+ hour each way in bumper-to-bumper traffic? Might as well WFH.
That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.
And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably invisible to you because you don’t take the time to get to build a relationship with your fellow workers.
I’m honestly curious about where you work that that doesn’t happen.
Engineer only stand ups are a good one
I misspoke and I'm sorry, your suggestion of remote work staying is brilliant and definitely your original idea. I know we've all been embracing remote work, myself included, I'm glad you told me it's here to stay. That's great news!
That’s so wildly untrue and obviously so, I’m blown away that you could declare something so obviously false so confidently.
Where do you work? I’d love to short that company’s stock.
I’m betting you can imagine who is helpful and who is less so, and further I bet it’s pretty obvious in most cases, which makes the folks who are on the bad end of it defensive.
Why on Earth would I not want any of that, and spend all that time out of my life with people who are not also my friends? What a sad way to look at life.
People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense.
Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've implemented in companies comes from employees having beers together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things should be".
I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and another person who wasn't really in the conversation overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.
As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire buildings were built with this in mind.
If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres more to life (and business) than that.
Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and depressing.
It’s interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways, and it makes life better to know them a little bit.
"Revenue driving" is one metric. Another one is, "cost reduction", and still another on is overall zeal for the work.
A good conversation can hit any and all these metrics. And it all adds right up too.
I care about coworkers. When people are able to make it OK, it shows! Tons of small things happen, people helping one another out, feeding off one anothers overall energy, and more really matter!
There needs to be laughter, fun, and the good vibes that come from a group of people who understand one another well enough to appreciate the time they spend together.
A group like that will have plenty of the business conversations too. First and foremost, they will be comfortable enough around one another to have those chats with few worries.
Another thing to keep an eye out on is fear, blame and shame.
Much better to boil it down to choices and outcomes.
Did we make a bad call? Ok, great. The outcome sacked, so how do we avoid that in the future? Easy conversation that should not worry anyone.
Making failure into learning opportunities is another big one. People need to be able to try it whatever it is. And when they can share the experiences and draw own their more seasoned peers, they improve rapidly and feel good about the whole process.
I could go on here, but there are just a ton of human dynamics well worth the bit of time and attention needed to insure everyone is able to participate without having fear, blame and shame front and center.
I totally respect people who prefer the office life, I was just trying to offer a perspective as someone who is, like, half-aligned with you :)
Personally I find the negatives to required office work far worse than the positive of social opportunities in the office. Maybe I'm too biased to have an objective opinion on this (I'm in my early 40s and already made my office friends after years of being required to be in an office), but I would much rather have the flexibility of remote work, which still allows me to meet up with co-workers after work if we choose to do so. I absolutely agree that there's much more friction and inertia that would make those sort of meetups less frequent. But for me, that's a worthwhile trade-off.
I think businesses that are embracing remote work should still maintain a (smaller) office where employees can come in when they want to or need to, for whatever reason. Sure, this doesn't work when people are geographically distributed all over the place. But that can also be a choice when looking for a job: just as I might look for an employer that's remote-first, others can look for employers with office cultures.
I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
Looking back though, I think the important thing is not physical proximity, it's conversation without an agenda. If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk: grousing about frustrations, daydreaming about improvements, comparing notes, etc. I think these things are important (not to everyone, I get that some people despise small talk, but to some people). If you only communicate in formal meetings, you can end up with 6 people independently realizing Greg's data lake proposal is doomed to fail, but not speaking up because they each feel like everyone else is on board.
And it hadn't occurred to me before this moment, but the way to get this back without returning to an office seems obvious: pairing and mobbing. That's the only time since I started WFHing that I've had or seen others having these kind of un-directed conversations with coworkers: during downtime in a mob. I need to think about this a bit more...
Whats stopping people from scheduling “shoot the shit” of coffee calls though? That’s what I’ve seen many do since the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you describe: people vent, talk about what happened during meetings, etc.
This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that can be about anything. It can differ based on the person and your relationship.
It completely feels like the scene from Arrested Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".
A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether you're in the meeting or at home.
So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private channel during the week that the messages are alive -- probably less than the chance of the person you're talking about standing around the corner.
Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
How would I know that these conversations happen over Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's or small private channels. And this was commonplace well before the pandemic and WFH started.
Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
It's hard to have a private in-person conversation outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people that you don't want to hear them.
I would find it highly suspicious if someone tried to have a backroom convo with me on a digital platform.
The failure there is that the person is afraid to tell that in the meeting. He or she has to rely on backchannel.
Simply smiling at someone nicely over the coffeepot a few times can make them disposed to help you later. A three minute chat about nothing, and now you have a contact in IT/purchasing/payroll...
I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.
What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?