Spot of bother over Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to forbid employees from working remotely, preferring instead to have them “physically together.” It’s true enough that Yahoo!, once the internet’s homepage now—what?—needs a kick in the ass, and also true that the freedom to work remotely can make a certain kind of worker, happier, more productive, etc, although that’s complicated. But from a large corporate culture perspective a large-scale remote workforce computes only if you view individual workers as discrete task completer, and are not interested in the kind of unexpected results—collaborations, accidents, conversations—that happen when you view an organizations as a kind of organism. Even famously successful remote companies like 37signals, once a certain size, moved everyone together. In an only semi-discredited New Yorker article, Jonah Lehrer explores the role proxemics (how people arrange themselves in space) plays in the workplace. Steve Jobs, ironically, knew what was up with this, and it might explain in part why Apple’s new headquarters is as it is.
A few years ago, Isaac Kohane, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, published a study that looked at scientific research conducted by groups in an attempt to determine the effect that physical proximity had on the quality of the research. He analyzed more than thirty-five thousand peer-reviewed papers, mapping the precise location of co-authors. Then he assessed the quality of the research by counting the number of subsequent citations. The task, Kohane says, took a “small army of undergraduates” eighteen months to complete. Once the data was amassed, the correlation became clear: when coauthors were closer together, their papers tended to be of significantly higher quality. The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other; the least cited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart. “If you want people to work together effectively, these findings reinforce the need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions,” Kohane says. “Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the Internet, it’s still so important to create intimate spaces.”
A new generation of laboratory architecture has tried to make chance encounters more likely to take place, and the trend has spread in the business world, too. One fanatical believer in the power of space to enhance the work of groups was Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Jobs records that when Jobs was planning Pixar’s headquarters, in 1999, he had the building arranged around a central atrium, so that Pixar’s diverse staff of artists, writers, and computer scientists would run into each other more often. “We used to joke that the building was Steve’s movie,” Ed Catmull, the president of both Disney Animation and Pixar Animation, says. “He really oversaw everything.”
Jobs soon realized that it wasn’t enough simply to create an airy atrium; he needed to force people to go there. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria, the coffee bar, and the gift shop. Finally, he decided that the atrium should contain the only set of bathrooms in the entire building. (He was later forced to compromise and install a second pair of bathrooms.) “At first, I thought this was the most ridiculous idea,” Darla Anderson, a producer on several Pixar films, told me. “I didn’t want to have to walk all the way to the atrium every time I needed to do something. That’s just a waste of time. But Steve said, ‘Everybody has to run into each other.’ He really believed that the best meetings happened by accident, in the hallway or parking lot. And you know what? He was right. I get more done having a cup of coffee and striking up a conversation or walking to the bathroom and running into unexpected people than I do sitting at my desk.” Brad Bird, the director of “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” says that Jobs “made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.”
If this is a threatened human value—that people together are more creative than people apart—we will have to be deliberate about it if we hope to preserve it, as technology makes remote working not only feasible, and preferable for many, but more affordable. There really are very few lone geniuses. And an entire education (“education”) can now be had alone in your bedroom in front of your computer. I’m sure there are compromises to be struck, but this angle makes Mayer’s decision seem less draconian and pretty smart in a case where good ideas are needed. We are social creatures, after all, and have been building a world together this way for some time.
update: So it seems, according to the same 37signals I cite above, only about 3% of Yahoo’s workforce works remotely. Basic theory probably holds, whether it applies in this case or not; no policy should exist without exceptions. Exceptions should be fair and just. Everything should be more exceptional. Everything should be more fair and just.