Collaborative Work Environments

By Amanda Orgeron

At Southern Farm Bureau Life, our journey to collaborative workspaces began, as many do, with a challenging technology project and a critical deadline.  Our IT staff had observed the successes of other technology organizations using “Scrum” environments, where small cross-functional teams co-located, working in two-week “sprints” to deliver software features.  We converted a break room into an open workspace with a conference table, a few PCs around the room, and a conference phone, and the team went to work.

Based on the successes of that first team, we built additional scrum and collaborative work rooms – in breakrooms, conference rooms, and empty offices.  Teams gave their rooms creative nicknames – we have a Tunnel, a Summit, two Think Tanks, a Lab, an Escape room, and some Caves.  Over time, they installed pub lights and basketball goals, and brought in nerf guns and fidget spinners.  Team members began having their milestone and social celebrations in these scrum rooms – breakfast to celebrate a successful release, or a birthday cake to observe a team member’s big day.  

But there was a lot besides birthday parties and nerf wars going on behind the scenes.  Leaders of co-located teams had more tools at their disposal to develop what Google has identified as the “five keys to a successful team.” Communication and focus improved.  High performers were visible, and low performers were held to higher standards by the clarity and camaraderie of this collaborative environment.

To put metrics to that observation, we analyzed our December 2018 Gallup Employee Engagement survey results.  Our collaborative workspace (scrum) employees scored 90% engaged, compared to 73% for non-scrum employees.  In particular, scores were higher around recognition, teamwork, sense of mission/purpose, opportunity to develop, and social wellbeing (the “best friend at work” question).  The power of this metric is that engaged employees work with more passion, innovate more effectively, and produce higher quality work.  We had found the secret sauce!

Over time, we began to translate some of these habits outside of IT development teams.  Departments began having daily standup meetings in their previously unused common areas.  Managers set up common work areas for internal projects where employees work side-by-side solving problems.

And then one day we began to see a few clouds on the horizon.  A particularly difficult set of projects had teams working overtime in some of these collaborative rooms.  Some of our introverted team members began to struggle with face-to-face time, noise, and distractions.  Cross-matrixed team members loved being part of spin-up teams but began to feel isolated from their co-workers back in the departmental silos.  Managers struggled to give feedback on team performance when team members were working in another area, or on another floor in our building.

The real test came in March of this year, when the first positive COVID-19 case was reported in our state.  Suddenly, “social distancing” became part of our vocabulary, as we shuttered our scrum rooms and began transitioning employees to work remotely.  We faced a new challenge: How do we maintain the benefits of collaborative workspaces, and keep our employees from coming within ten feet of each other?

As you’d expect, we turned to technology to leverage collaborative workspaces in a virtual environment.  We replaced daily “standup” meetings with daily conference calls, complete with dogs barking in the background and kids fighting over TV remotes (in reality, this “local color” was no more distracting than nerf guns and basketball hoops in scrum rooms).  We waved to each other’s children over video conference.  We replaced watercooler jokes with memes shared on team message boards (tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and others).  We shared pics of ourselves working with pets in our laps and in baseball caps and t-shirts.  We experimented with virtual whiteboards and video chat.  We continued to leverage shared visual tools like Kanban boards to manage work, and other practices we had developed in our co-located environments.  

We learned to be deliberate, but flexible, about our approach to this new way of working.  We faced it with a sense of adventure and an eye to innovation.  As of this writing, we don’t know if this will be our new normal for a few weeks or a few months – but we do know that we still have customers to serve, and we have teams to lead and staff to care about, and our ability to collaborate effectively is more important now than ever.  And when we finally return to our beloved scrum rooms, we will do so with new tools at our disposal for our introverts and matrixed team members and remote workers and others who may need be physically separate but are ready and willing to collaborate in this shared workspace environment.