A short talk by Mike Lyons about how different physical work environments (remote, co-located, cubicle farms, open-plan, breakout spaces) affect team collaboration and shared understanding. The speaker gives anecdotes (e.g., program board, video tablet for remote participants) and emphasizes removing physical barriers and using visible information to improve inclusion and communication.
Many people work remotely today. Work from home, work from home, office, things of that nature. Quite, quite popular. Still, there are plenty of folks who work in an office, in an office space or co located. And then there's even others that work a combination of work from home, work from an office space, maybe a commuter type office. And then there's global and distributed teams. There's all sorts of ways of working that teams need to figure out how to work and how to collaborate and share knowledge together. But when you think about working within an office space or within some sort of co located area, there can be sort of physical barriers that can be introduced that can inhibit our goal of getting to shared understanding. Again, think for example, this idea of a cubicle or, or a cubicle farm, cube farms we call them in the US Just long rows of cubicles, sometimes with very high partitions. And that can lead to this sort of physical separation of team members. Now listen, I get, I get full. Well, there are moments when we need our sort of time alone to do our work. Clearly software development for sure, keys our hands on the keyboard and do the coding. Absolutely. And cubicle, cubicles can be great for that. You know, I worked at a place once where we actually had a little extension tape that would go across the door to the cubicle. And that was a sign that, hey, like, don't disturb me, I'm, I'm busy working. Absolutely. There are times where we need that and, and, and there are times where we need to collaborate broadly with, with multiple team members. And so, you know, think about going into a conference room, working around sort of a conference room table. That's a, that's a way to do that. Did you know that the inventor of the cubicle eventually ended up apologizing to the world for his creation? Robert Probst in the 1960s was responsible for innovation and research at Herman Miller in Denver, Colorado. And he came up with essentially the office cubicle. Much to his dismay. Over the years, industries and corporations began to abuse the office cubicle. And Probst had spent years apologizing for creating the monster of the office cubicle. Who knew? And even in the cubicle farm, there are plenty of ways to, to make communications better. I was on a team, for example, and we were in each individual cubes. However, there, there were breakout spaces where we had large monitors on the wall and we could gather in front of that, pull up our, our application lifecycle management tool and talk about the work that, the stories that we're working on. And there were of course, conference Rooms that we could schedule and use and get together as teams. The point isn't to say that every workspace needs to be a cubicle farm or an open space concept. Now I don't, I don't know that there's an exact right answer for every situation, but whatever your situation, let's remember to get back to those principles around communication and understanding how important it is that we get to shared understanding. Really, that's, that's what this is all about. Even at the organization I was telling you about with the cubicle farms, we still had a large display of all the stories we were working on across the eight different teams. We called it a program board. It's really an information radiator, a visible information radiator where anybody could walk by and see it. And it was in a shared hallway space that people could walk by. It wasn't intrusive or anything like that. But at any point anybody could walk by and see that. So was it again, even, even in the cubicle space, you still can make information widely available for people to see. Another way you might see is sort of in the workplace is this idea of, of work pods or open space, open floor plan type concepts. These are fairly popular. I think there's a ditch on that side of the road too where you get sort of this. We just all sort of pile into the warehouse and pull out our laptops and start working on card tables. I don't know, that might not, that might be a little bit too far in the other direction. So where's the balance between cubicle, high wall cubicle, sort of uncomfortable cubes and too far too open, I wonder. And we're trying to figure this out. As an industry, we're testing different things. The key takeaway for us is how do we get to shared understanding quickly and how do we remove any physical barriers that would prevent us from doing that? And in the workplace and for distributed agile teams, there are some techniques that we can use to get to that shared understanding. One example that comes to mind for me is I worked on a team once. We had some team members in another country, geographically separated, time zone differences, and we had them on a video conference on a tablet device and we invited them into the meetings because we were co located as a group doing a large release plan session and we were at the whiteboard and sort of moving sticky notes around and they were on the tablet device and one of our team members was able to hold the tablet and sort of show the team member what we're working on. On the board and we could see them and they could see us. A little bit more inclusive than just sort of being on the telephone, which would have been a very classic way to do it. Certainly more inclusive than, you know, emailing documents later and hoping that she read them. We want to find ways to improve our collaboration, given any physical boundaries there are. So that's one way you might do that.
