A lazy Saturday morning, Mama_Rah and the kids are away, so I thought i would take the opportunity to share a little something with you that I do very early on with my clients. Not sure if you are aware, but I work as a business trainer / English teacher for non-English clients so while there is an element of the need to teach people, among other things, the 3rd Conditional and Type 1 and Type 2 Mixed Conditionals (go ahead look them up) I get to do a lot of business related stuff too..

Now to the matter at hand. Firstly, I start with an article reproduced in full below - please note I did not write this, but I justify its inclusion because of the conclusions I draw at the end of and the implications for the post-Covid world.

The Article - Hard Sell around the Photocopier

Sociologists have long recognised that businesses of less than 200 individuals can operate through a free flow of information among the members. Once their size exceeds this figure however, some kind of hierarchical structure or line management system is necessary to prevent total chaos resulting from failures of communication. Imposing structures of this kind has its costs: information can only flow along certain channels because only certain individuals contact each other regularly; moreover, the lack of personalised contacts means that individuals lack that sense of personal commitment that makes the world of small groups go round. Favours are only done when there is a clear quid pro quo, an immediate return to the giver, rather than being a matter of communal obligation. Large organisations are less flexible.

One solution to this problem would of course be to structure large organisations into smaller units of a size that can act as a cohesive group. By allowing these groups to build reciprocal alliances with each other, larger organisations can be built up. However, merely having groups of, say, 150 will never in itself be a panacea to the problems of the organisation. Something else is needed: the people involved must be able to build direct personal relationships. To allow free flow of information they have to be able to interact in a casual way. Maintaining to formal a structure of relationships inevitably inhibits the way the system works.

The importance of this was drawn to my attention a couple of years ago by a TV producer. The production unit for which she worked produced all the educational output for a particular TV station. Whether by chance or by design, it so happened that there were almost exactly 150 people in the unit. The whole process worked very smoothly as an organisation for many years until they were moved into purpose-built accommodation. Then for no apparent reason, everything started to fall apart. The work seemed to be more difficult to do, not to say less satisfying.

It was some time before they worked out what the problem was. It turned out that, when the architects were designing the new building, they decided that the coffee room where everyone ate their sandwiches at lunch time was an unnecessary luxury and so they dispensed with it. The logic seemed to be that if people were encouraged to eat their sandwiches at their desks, then they were more likely to get on with their work and less likely to idle their time away. And with that, they inadvertently destroyed the intimate social networks that empowered the whole organisation. What had apparently been happening was that, as people gathered informally over their sandwiches in the coffee room, useful snippets of information were being casually exchanged. Someone had a problem they could not solve, and began to discuss it over lunch with a friend from another section. The person knew just the person to ask. Or someone overhearing the conversation would have a suggestion, or would go away and happen to bump into someone who knew the answer a day or so later; a quick phone call and the problem was resolved. Or a casual comment sparked an idea for new programme.

It was these kinds of chance encounter in the coffee room, idle chatter around the photocopier, that made the difference between a successful one and a less successful one.

From Grooming Gossip and the Evolution of Language by Robert Dunbar

Source: Market Leader Upper-Intermediate Course Book (2001) p.8

And now the direction I lead my clients in to maximise their learning...

Summary

• Groups become less effective when they reach a size of approximately 200. Up to this point, such groups can rely on a free flow of information; a situation where everybody has direct contact with everybody else. We can bear this out through personal experience. Think back to when you were at school or college or even your workplace. You almost certainly knew everybody in your class / team and most probably everybody in your year group / department (even if you weren't friends or directly working with them), but depending on the size of the organisation, unless you are particularly exceptional, the boundary of who you know doesn't stretch much beyond that.
• A solution is to break the organisation down into smaller component parts, but this presents its own problems. 1) Information can only travel along certain channels. 2) A lack of commitment due to a lack of personalised connections 3) Favours are only done if there is an immediate return 4) Increased inflexibility
• In the case study, based at a TV station, everything went wrong when the staff, 150 or so, moved into purpose built accommodation, without a coffee room and they were encouraged to eat at their workstations. Those small informal networks were severed and as a consequence communication became less effective and the work much harder to do.

Key Outcomes.

• It is essential to enable staff to interact in a casual way, as it not only builds relationships, but it creates an environment where ideas can be cross-pollinated, shared and improved. Look at your organisation. Do your people have an opportunity to do this? Does it seem like time-wasting. Of course it is necessary to ensure that staff don't overdo their time away from their tasks, but at the same time a quick coffee break during the working day with a colleague (and especially one from a different team or department) is a worthy investment as it may well lead to the more effective delivery of solutions at a later date.
• Relationships are built in the casual and not the formal. Let me illustrate. I have a particularly good relationship with a client who is a very senior manager, at local level, of a large international company (GDPR - I can't be any more specific) and I started working with her pre-Covid and we have an excellent working relationship. Much of the groundwork for this was done in those pre-Covid days when I would go to meet her in the office twice a week. On Tuesday mornings we would share the lift up to the conference room and on Wednesday afternoons I would meet her by the reception on the same floor as the conference rooms. Chat would be informal, small talk if you like, during those moments in the lift or walking along the corridors because once we were sitting down in the conference room it was time to get down to business, which by definition is more formal and subject focused and less to do with relationship building.
• The post-Covid corporate environment has challenged this. People often work at home now (although some companies now want people back in the office) or at most go to the office just a couple of times a month. This has created an exaggerated version of what happened at the TV station in the case study in that much of that informal or casual interaction is endangered and in some cases has become extinct. People work away at their work station at home and only sign in on Teams or Zoom when attending a meeting. Such meetings often get straight down to business. While some companies have tried to mitigate this by increasing the number of integration meetings or even creating informal spaces on online meeting platforms it only provides a partial solution to the problem. In worst case scenarios people can become demoralised and feel isolated as they endeavour to do their jobs on their own. This may well only be a perception and not the reality, but it becomes the employees reality as it is subjective and real to them whatever the truth maybe.

Conclusion

We have to ensure that whatever the working environment, that people are given opportunity to build relationships and act in a casual way and that while we have to ensure that employees don't abuse this, we have to be careful not to micro-manage this and become solely focused on task management and task completion.

Hope it has been a good and informative read. As always, safe and stay well my friends.