Just 8 months after denouncing Marissa Mayer’s decision to bring Yahoo employees on site, HP is following suit. The goal is to increase engagement and collaboration, but at the end of the day, will it work?
Maybe.
The foundation for engagement and collaboration is dialogue. Employees need to be able to easily share information in order to execute, and share ideas in order to innovate. Physical proximity is one way to try and facilitate dialogue, but proximity only works if it’s paired with access.
That’s why, when she took over as CEO, Meg Whitman tore down the barbed wire fence around HP’s executive parking lot and moved the company’s leaders out of private offices and into cubicles. It may be part of the reason Facebook is building their company town. In order for people to engage and collaborate, they need to feel they can talk to their peers—and just placing them in the same campus or building doesn’t guarantee that will happen.
Access is about culture, not location. We’ve worked with a number of clients whose workspaces were always totally full—and always completely silent. That’s not necessarily bad. For these clients, keeping employees focused on highly individual tasks may have been critical. But, if an organization wants to enhance teamwork and enthusiasm, creating a cultural environment that encourages free exchange is critical.
While being in the same place at the same time can help, it’s not absolutely required to build a culture that fosters dialogue. Email, web conferencing and social media tools provide virtually unlimited opportunities to share. Incredibly strong relationships develop every day around online discussion forums, where the free and frank discussions can be eye-opening. That said, management matters. When employees work remotely, it’s important to ensure engagement by measuring productivity and to promote collaboration by rewarding it.
It’ll take time to tell if HP’s new policy will have the desired effect, and the results are likely to be anecdotal at first. But hey, if Karpluss, Levitt and Warshel can work together well enough out of Harvard, Stanford and USC to win the Nobel prize for chemistry, then maybe HP has a shot.
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