Episode 148 - Shake Up the Seating | Smarter By The Minute

Episode 148 - Shake Up the Seating

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Five years ago I lead a team-building seminar for a division of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. They had the whole 10th floor to themselves, however the elevator lobby that cleaved the space into two became known as “The Wall” and people who worked on the east side of the wall felt superior to those on the west side. The office had polarized based on where people sat. The rivalry forced the focus to shift to “us versus them” instead of “we together.” In the seminar, of course, we brought that into the open and candidly discussed what was occurring.

I wish I had thought up the solution Bolt, Inc. came up with when faced with a similar challenge. In the October 2000 issue of Fast Company magazine, writer Matt Villard’s article called “Shake Up Your Seating Plan” explains that in 18 months the company exploded from 15 close-knit employees to 175. The atmosphere of cross-functional partnering for the good of the company was about to be sacrificed for traditional departmentalization on multiple floors.

The team-enhancing solution they devised is ingeniously simple. They call it a “hive mind” seating system. To mix it up, the workspaces of accountants, sales reps, programmers, founders and others are interspersed. That is, they sit amongst each other. This applies to about 80% of the New York office and the results are:
1. Nearly everyone knows each other by first name.
2. There’s a better understanding of what people do.
3. Brainstorming is deeper.
4. The organization’s goals are paramount and that takes people beyond the department’s goals. It also sweeps aside the pettiness of “my department is better than your department.”

Their results sound like smart teamwork to me.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Episode 148 - Shake Up the Seating

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