An architect by training, then a professor at Arizona State University, and now a business strategy consultant, Kristine Woolsey studies the impact of the physical environment on human behavior:
Numerous anthropological studies show that group size — the number of individuals who live or work together — is key to peaceful collaboration in all kinds of environments. The ideal group size for forming bonds of trust is around six to eight people, Woolsey said.
A gang of four can be easily dominated by one strong personality; any larger than eight, and they’ll to need to elect a leader. But right in the middle, there’s “a sort of peer pressure in terms of expected social behavior” that leads people to act in the common interest, she said.
Effective open-plan offices, such as the ones Google Inc. has designed in Zurich and Dublin, and the ones offered by NextSpace, a California-based company that rents workspaces to freelancers and small businesses, place employees in hubs of six to eight, with nearby common areas accessible to several groups, Woolsey said. Thus, rather than dividing up a giant workforce into “acres of gray cubes,” the office is instead comprised of small groups nested within larger ones.
[...]
Jeremy Neuner, the CEO of NextSpace, said he’s observed that workers naturally congregate in groups of six to eight. Recently at the company’s Santa Cruz headquarters, as a sort of experiment, a 12-seat conference table was moved into an open area of the office. Sure enough, Neuner said, six to eight people gathered there to work.
“Except when they’re up against a deadline, people are not looking for their own closed-in spaces,” Neuner said.
As Woolsey sees it, the traditional open-plan office is no better at adapting to the way people work than the old cubicle-dotted office.
This ignores two important real-life point:
1) Very often, an individual’s key collaboration partners in a business are not in the same physical location.
2) The same individual may be a member of multiple teams. For example, a graphics artist may be doing work for five different product rollouts at the same time. A programmer or engineer in the same company may at the same time be doing work for three of those rollouts, and a PR person may be attempting to stir up media interest for one of these and also for some non-product-related corporate activity. It is topologically impossible to put all these people in the same workspace.
Welcome to the complete feminzation of office work, where no one is repsonsible for leading or managing anything. Cliques ruled by peer pressure peacefully collaborating endlessly. Producing nothing, of course.
“Except when they’re up against a deadline, people are not looking for their own closed-in spaces,”
I.e. when they need to work.
Sapienti sat.