BrnDmp

The influence of a workspace on performance

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about the influence of a workspace on performance. The discussion should build on the ideas set forth in a previous parallax post Planning your Career or the Boundary between Private and Professional life. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

I concluded my post on the boundary between private and professional life with:

life is easy, just do the things you like with nice people

I will take that as a starting point for this post. Second, the title is a bit strange because everybody will acknowledge that if you work in a noisy room which is too hot, a shouting boss with an alcohol problem and a colleague keeping his beloved pet skunk in the office, will of course influence your performance negatively. So I rephrase the title slightly into: how to optimize a workspace for performance. Therefore we first have to define performance.

Performance

First let’s be clear about performance. In this post I will be talking about knowledge worker performance. Not how many bricks you can lay per hour or how many articles you can scan per minute at the cashier. I assume that knowledge worker’s performance is best when you do things you like with nice people.

How then, can we optimize a workspace for performance taking into account we want to do nice things with nice people?

Workspace

Again I would like to stress that I will not be discussing the ergonomics of the workspace. There’s a science for that, figure it out yourself and make yourself physically comfortable.

First make your workspace independent of space and time. Being independent of space and time makes you free and puts you in control. Contemporary technologies make it trivial for knowledge workers to be independent of space. You don’t have to physically be in a corporate office anymore to execute your work. You just connect your laptop via VPN to the company network and you have all your companies IT facilities at hand. Cloud based applications like Google Docs or Mindmeister make real time collaboration over the internet a breeze. You just need a mobile, internet enabled device to plug into your virtual office workspace and of you go.

Being physically independent of space also allows you to take control over your own working hours. Your job shouldn’t dictate you to be at the office from 9 to 17, your job should dictate you to finish that document, deliver that code or visualise that new design. How and when you do that is (should be) irrelevant to your boss.

By not being forced to commute to that gray office through endless traffic jams with it’s terrible coffee (dear bosses of the world: coffee being free doesn’t make it taste better) you can decide when the perfect moment  there is to perform.

Second, optimize the relationship between you and your co-workers. As said, I passionately believe that by doing things with nice people, the actual things you do are really almost irrelevant. Motivation also becomes irrelevant. You will always be motivated to work with nice people, no matter what you do. I’d rather dig graves all day with my good friend then being the first man on Mars with Geert Wilders.

To find good people to work with might be one of the toughest challenges in your life. Intuitively most people know who they like. But there can always be hidden gems. As a rule of thumb I always look at the type and quality of connections between myself and others. That connection might be intellectual, humour, emotional, interests, motivational, political etcetra. So, for example, I find it very frustrating to work with someone who is intellectually on a totally different level. Also, I cannot imagine working with a (hidden) racist, even if she is super smart and very funny. Good people to work with are close to you on lots of levels.

Sometimes you are forced to work with not so nice people (clients, bosses). In that case, try to look for the connection that brings you closest and try to build from there. Also, please note that I do not advocate to try to collect and army of brainless worshippers around you. It is good to differ in opinion and have heated discussions to let fresh ideas emerge. Just make sure the heat is generated for the right reasons.

Freedom!

Well then, the recipe for happiness I proposed in my earlier post has just gotten elaborated with two new ingredients:

1. take control of your professional life by striving to make your workspace independent of space and time

2. try to minimize the distance between you and your beloved co-workers

Today’s technology makes these things quite easy (and cheap) to achieve. Fear, on the other hand, living in the heads of the decision makers, makes sure that for most of us freedom will be an utopia for long to come.