318. Want to Be More Productive? Sit Next to Someone Who Is

Want to Be More Productive? Sit Next to Someone Who Is By Jason Corsello and Dylan Minor To increase worker performance, employers often invest in a number of things, from rewards and incentives to education and training. These traditional approaches develop employees’ skills and enrich their work experience. But we discovered a surprisingly simple way to increase productivity, one that was low-cost and had immediate impact: better office seating arrangements. Research we conducted suggests that who an employee sits next to affects how they perform — and grouping the right types of coworkers together can improve productivity and work quality. We analyzed two years’ worth of data on more than 2,000 employees of a large technology company with several locations in the U.S. and Europe. (The company is a client of Cornerstone OnDemand, which one of us, Jason, works for.)  ... For every performance measure, we looked at “spillover,” a measure of the impact that office neighbors had on an employee’s performance. Assume a worker has three coworkers: one sits next to her, one sits 25 feet away, and another sits 50 feet away. We looked at the performance of the three coworkers along with their distance from the worker, and through various data modeling techniques we measured the average spillover of their performance on the worker. We saw that neighbors have a significant impact on an employee’s performance, and it can be either positive or negative. In terms of magnitude, we found that approximately 10% of a worker’s performance spills over to her neighbors. Replacing an average performer with one who is twice as productive results in his or her neighboring workers increasing their own productivity by about 10%, on average.