> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.
What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?
I have seen "meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen", and I do find Zoom calls kind of irritating. I think the real issue is that this tech has exposed the fact that urban planning in the US is awful unless you're in New York City or something similar.
People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense.
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
Looking back though, I think the important thing is not physical proximity, it's conversation without an agenda. If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk: grousing about frustrations, daydreaming about improvements, comparing notes, etc. I think these things are important (not to everyone, I get that some people despise small talk, but to some people). If you only communicate in formal meetings, you can end up with 6 people independently realizing Greg's data lake proposal is doomed to fail, but not speaking up because they each feel like everyone else is on board.
And it hadn't occurred to me before this moment, but the way to get this back without returning to an office seems obvious: pairing and mobbing. That's the only time since I started WFHing that I've had or seen others having these kind of un-directed conversations with coworkers: during downtime in a mob. I need to think about this a bit more...
> If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk
Whats stopping people from scheduling “shoot the shit” of coffee calls though? That’s what I’ve seen many do since the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you describe: people vent, talk about what happened during meetings, etc.
I hate online coffee chats and love workplace conversation. Coffee chats have an overloaded amount of assumptions — conversation should start off personal, last for x minutes, make you feel closer to a teammate.
This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that can be about anything. It can differ based on the person and your relationship.
Our director started scheduling a big group video meeting with all the people that started since 2020 just as a chat room. But he did absolutely 0 planning or conversation guiding or anything outside of "so who wants to talk about something?" and we would just sit there in silence.
It completely feels like the scene from Arrested Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".
Yeah I'm not keen on the organized chats. We did those pre pandemic and I got nothing from them. Casual conversation has to be adhoc, whether it's in person or by call.
Why does it require a lot of planning? I do this, usually it's "bored, coffee break?" "Yep" or I ask a question on slack and the other party says "call?"
My team kept a Webex room open at the start of every morning for just turning up and chatting in; it would generally stay open in the background until everyone had left for meetings. It certainly worked well for us. Sometimes people just worked silently through it, but usually there was lots of chat.
We don't have something like this (except for the bullshitting that usually occurs in the last few minutes of standup) but I'm thinking we should try it.
Not at all the same. Most people will just go back to their own stuff behind the camera. Also, Zoom is EXHAUSTING for a lot of people. You're talking at a monitor, not a person!
If you're allowed the "exhaustion" excuse, then I'm certainly allowed the same excuse for not going into the office! In-person interaction is EXHAUSTING for a lot of people. You're trying to absorb dozens more nonverbal cues at once!
An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether you're in the meeting or at home.
I am a lot more open in honest in person than I am on Slack, because I know everything I say on Slack is logged and can bite me in the ass years down the line.
We have a very strict Slack retention policy, both DM's and messages in user created private channels self destruct in 7 days with no possibility of retrieval. Public channels and designated private channels can have a longer lifetime. And they really are gone, a VP tried to retrieve some 2 week old messages and was unable to.
So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private channel during the week that the messages are alive -- probably less than the chance of the person you're talking about standing around the corner.
I am just the opposite. On slack, I can think through what I want to say to make sure I'm conveying what I intend to convey. In person, I can't do that at all.
How would you know? The very nature of that communication is that it’s private.
How would I know that these conversations happen over Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's or small private channels. And this was commonplace well before the pandemic and WFH started.
Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
It's hard to have a private in-person conversation outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people that you don't want to hear them.
I find it hard to have any conversations at all in an open office setup, just like it's hard to get work done in that environment. Open office setups amplify all of the downsides of working in an office.
> example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
The failure there is that the person is afraid to tell that in the meeting. He or she has to rely on backchannel.
Depends on the environment. If your team is open to casual conversations and comfortable going off topics, then this likely isn't an issue. But, if your team is very metrics focused, you may not see levels of casual conversation that build rapport and build on ideas that come up on conversation. Sometimes a casual conversation is all it needs to hook a random thought into successful action.
I like having casual talks about nothing in particular without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for growth in many aspects.
I’m a Sr. Director. There is nothing but non sense in any claims that say random shout outs as people are breezing between one unnecessary meeting and another are useful. It just doesn’t happen.
The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly.
Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company that can do it should be and any that isn’t should go the way of the dodo.
Probably depends on what kind of problems you're working on. If your problem to solve is "Raise this KPI X percent until Y", then probably yeah, wouldn't matter too much.
But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.
One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their offices in order to facilitate random meetings between people:
> However, almost as many fruitful interactions described in the book can be traced to architectural features. Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate the building were included intentionally, so that chance encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:
> In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to investigate the effects of inter-office communication. They convinced their employees to where sociometric badges for the duration of the experiment and identified three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by about $200 million.
I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way, companies definitely should play around and see what works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.
If I was working in Bell Labs, I promise I'll be in office before the janitor. Thing is most us don't work in Bell Labs.
Ultimately, only the social aspect (building relationships, small talk with coworkers) remains. This should not be completely discounted, but everyone should do an analysis of what they are willing to go through to be in office. A 20-30 minute commute or a slightly longer public transit ride where you are assured of a seat? Sure, office will be worth it. 1+ hour each way in bumper-to-bumper traffic? Might as well WFH.
Where are you a senior director? I just want to know where to never apply for a job.
That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.
And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably invisible to you because you don’t take the time to get to build a relationship with your fellow workers.
Remote work is here to stay. I don’t agree that there is nothing that comes out of casual interactions at a physical workspace. This is where relationship building happens. I firmly believe that it is possible to build strong relationships in a remote or hybrid workplace. It just needs to be done intentionally. And naturally, it takes a different form than casual hallways conversation.
I feel like with a lot of the hardcore anti return to the office people the arguments are disingenuous. People have built their lives (and in some cases moved entirely) based on being able to work remotely 99% of the time, and they refuse to accept there are any disadvantages. I saw Sam Altman say the other day that he didn’t think any of the important companies in the next period of time will be fully remote, and I would agree.
I’ve found that folks who are attached to parts of the business that are focused on growing the business want to be in person more than parts of the business that “punch in/punch out” and don’t take full ownership of their role in the bigger picture.
I’m betting you can imagine who is helpful and who is less so, and further I bet it’s pretty obvious in most cases, which makes the folks who are on the bad end of it defensive.
You are completely detached from reality. Almost all of my conversations happen by running into someone in the hallway, or seeing them in their office with their door open and asking if they have a couple minutes.
I’m honestly curious about where you work that that doesn’t happen.
I spend 8-10 hours with them every work day. More than with anyone else - my partner, kids or "actual friends". I've known them for years - I know how their kids are doing, how they feel on a wide variety of topics, we joke, discuss, brainstorm, even fight. We've solved so many challenges together, I've helped them move, and they helped me fix my garage. We have breakfast and lunch together. We go to each other's birthday parties. We've celebrated childbirths and consoled after deaths of loved ones. Our goals in work, and often in life, are shared.
Why on Earth would I not want any of that, and spend all that time out of my life with people who are not also my friends? What a sad way to look at life.
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work.
If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres more to life (and business) than that.
Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and depressing.
It’s interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways, and it makes life better to know them a little bit.
I've made many lifelong friends from the workplace, but most of those were not made through the course of day-to-day work, but through hanging out after work. Sure, being at an office during the day facilitates that (easy to gather a group of people at the end of the workday to go out for a drink), but that's by no means the only way of doing it.
Personally I find the negatives to required office work far worse than the positive of social opportunities in the office. Maybe I'm too biased to have an objective opinion on this (I'm in my early 40s and already made my office friends after years of being required to be in an office), but I would much rather have the flexibility of remote work, which still allows me to meet up with co-workers after work if we choose to do so. I absolutely agree that there's much more friction and inertia that would make those sort of meetups less frequent. But for me, that's a worthwhile trade-off.
I think businesses that are embracing remote work should still maintain a (smaller) office where employees can come in when they want to or need to, for whatever reason. Sure, this doesn't work when people are geographically distributed all over the place. But that can also be a choice when looking for a job: just as I might look for an employer that's remote-first, others can look for employers with office cultures.
"Revenue driving" is one metric. Another one is, "cost reduction", and still another on is overall zeal for the work.
A good conversation can hit any and all these metrics. And it all adds right up too.
I care about coworkers. When people are able to make it OK, it shows! Tons of small things happen, people helping one another out, feeding off one anothers overall energy, and more really matter!
There needs to be laughter, fun, and the good vibes that come from a group of people who understand one another well enough to appreciate the time they spend together.
A group like that will have plenty of the business conversations too. First and foremost, they will be comfortable enough around one another to have those chats with few worries.
Another thing to keep an eye out on is fear, blame and shame.
Much better to boil it down to choices and outcomes.
Did we make a bad call? Ok, great. The outcome sacked, so how do we avoid that in the future? Easy conversation that should not worry anyone.
Making failure into learning opportunities is another big one. People need to be able to try it whatever it is. And when they can share the experiences and draw own their more seasoned peers, they improve rapidly and feel good about the whole process.
I could go on here, but there are just a ton of human dynamics well worth the bit of time and attention needed to insure everyone is able to participate without having fear, blame and shame front and center.
I'm one of those people who likes to enjoy work--ie, I don't think of work as "just work"--and I want to get to know the people I work with and maybe even make a real friend or two. And yet, I don't ever want to go back to an office. Zoom/Tuple calls are more than sufficient for me for shooting the shit for a bit while on the clock. Otherwise, I prefer to get together outside of office hours if I really want to spend social time with coworkers. I mostly despise forced social interaction on the clock. I do miss whiteboards, but that's about it.
I totally respect people who prefer the office life, I was just trying to offer a perspective as someone who is, like, half-aligned with you :)
Relationships are really important for getting stuff done at work. An irrelevant water cooler conversation that clicks can make someone your future ally. Having a better idea of someone's interests and priorities can make it easier to persuade them when the time comes.
Simply smiling at someone nicely over the coffeepot a few times can make them disposed to help you later. A three minute chat about nothing, and now you have a contact in IT/purchasing/payroll...
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've implemented in companies comes from employees having beers together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things should be".
I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and another person who wasn't really in the conversation overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.
As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire buildings were built with this in mind.
I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.
What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?