It seems a certain amount of dynamics is relevant, as indicated by the site visits and retreats. I guess you assume the co-located team is static, i.e. no frequent home working or reshuffling with other teams?
I wonder if it’s possible to model the impact of such vibrations and transitions between team formations. For example, the Scaled Agile framework proposes static co-located teams with a higher layer of people continuously transferring information between the teams. The teams retreat into a large event a few times a year. Due to personal circumstances I’d love to know their BS factor.
Teams were typically static for the duration of the studies, although IIRC some were newly formed task-focused teams and would reshuffle after the task was over.
Some studies looked at the effect of WFH in co-located team. I didn’t focus on this because it wasn’t Oliver’s main question, but from some reading and personal experience:
If a team is set up for colocation, you will miss things working from home, which will hurt alignment and social aspects like trust. This scales faster than linearly.
Almost everyone reports increased productivity working from home.
But some of that comes from being less interruptible, which hurts other people’s productivity.
Both duration of team and the expectation of working together in the future do good things to morale, trust, and cooperation.
Based on this, I think that:
Some WFH is good on the margins.
The more access employees have to quiet private spaces at work, the less the marginal gains from WFH (although still some, for things like midday doctors’ appointments or just avoiding the commute). I think most companies exaggerate how much these are available.
“Core Hours” is a good concept for both days and times in office, because it concentrates the time people need to defensively be in the office to avoid missing things.
How Scaled Agile effects morale and trust will be heavily dependent on how people relate to the meta-team. If they view themselves as constantly buffeted between groups of strangers, it will be really bad. If they view the meta-team as their real team, full of people they trust and share a common goal with but don’t happen to be working as closely with at this time, it’s probably a good compromise.
The most relevant paper I read was Chapter 5 of Distributed Work by Hinds and Kiesler. You can find it in my notes by searching for “Chapter 5: The (Currently) Unique Advantages of Collocated Work”
Fascinating.
It seems a certain amount of dynamics is relevant, as indicated by the site visits and retreats. I guess you assume the co-located team is static, i.e. no frequent home working or reshuffling with other teams?
I wonder if it’s possible to model the impact of such vibrations and transitions between team formations. For example, the Scaled Agile framework proposes static co-located teams with a higher layer of people continuously transferring information between the teams. The teams retreat into a large event a few times a year. Due to personal circumstances I’d love to know their BS factor.
Teams were typically static for the duration of the studies, although IIRC some were newly formed task-focused teams and would reshuffle after the task was over.
Some studies looked at the effect of WFH in co-located team. I didn’t focus on this because it wasn’t Oliver’s main question, but from some reading and personal experience:
If a team is set up for colocation, you will miss things working from home, which will hurt alignment and social aspects like trust. This scales faster than linearly.
Almost everyone reports increased productivity working from home.
But some of that comes from being less interruptible, which hurts other people’s productivity.
Both duration of team and the expectation of working together in the future do good things to morale, trust, and cooperation.
Based on this, I think that:
Some WFH is good on the margins.
The more access employees have to quiet private spaces at work, the less the marginal gains from WFH (although still some, for things like midday doctors’ appointments or just avoiding the commute). I think most companies exaggerate how much these are available.
“Core Hours” is a good concept for both days and times in office, because it concentrates the time people need to defensively be in the office to avoid missing things.
How Scaled Agile effects morale and trust will be heavily dependent on how people relate to the meta-team. If they view themselves as constantly buffeted between groups of strangers, it will be really bad. If they view the meta-team as their real team, full of people they trust and share a common goal with but don’t happen to be working as closely with at this time, it’s probably a good compromise.
The most relevant paper I read was Chapter 5 of Distributed Work by Hinds and Kiesler. You can find it in my notes by searching for “Chapter 5: The (Currently) Unique Advantages of Collocated Work”