Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It.

“There’s credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation,” said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. “But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever.”
“All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality,” he said.
The notion that spontaneous interactions in the office would spur creative thinking was a driving force behind one of the first open-plan office buildings, the Johnson Wax headquarters, designed in the 1930s by Frank Lloyd Wright. By the 1990s, Silicon Valley companies began offering snack stations and on-site haircuts to foster impromptu gatherings. Companies began paying disproportionately more to those who were at the office more than 40 hours a week.
Yet Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn’t find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.
At the same time, technology — like Zoom, Slack and Google Docs — has made idea generation as effective online, researchers said. Judith Olson, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the effect of distance on teamwork for three decades. Distance matters much less now, she said: “Because of the technology these days, we’re actually inching closer and closer to replicating the office.”
Creative work can be done by leaving video chat on while working so people can share thoughts as they arise or working at the same time on a Google Doc. Also, writing down ideas and notes from conversations, so others can refer to them and weigh in.
In-office work is essential for some innovation jobs, like those that involve physical objects, and beneficial for some people, like newly hired employees and those seeking mentors. Yet some creative professionals, like architects and designers, have been surprised at how effective remote work has been during the pandemic, while scientists and academic researchers have long worked on projects with colleagues in other places.
Requiring people to be in the office can drive out innovation, some researchers and executives said, because for many people, in-person office jobs were never a great fit. They include many women, racial minorities and people with caregiving responsibilities or disabilities. Also, people who are shy; who need to live far from the office; who are productive at odd hours; or who were excluded from golf games or happy hours.

Remote work, though, can enable ideas to bubble up from people with different backgrounds. Online, people who are not comfortable speaking up in an in-person meeting may feel more able to weigh in. Brainstorming sessions using apps like Slack can surface many more perspectives by including people who wouldn’t have been invited to a meeting, like interns or employees in other departments.
“When everyone has the same small box on the screen, everyone has an equal seat at the table, literally,” said Barbara Messing, employee experience officer at Roblox, the online gaming company, which is staying remote two days a week, and letting people work wherever they want two months a year.
Also, remote companies can hire from a more diverse group — people for whom long hours in the office wouldn’t have worked, or people who live elsewhere: “If you only recruit within a 20-mile distance, you ain’t getting diversity,” said John Sullivan, an H.R. consultant.
There are risks in allowing some remote work — if some people are in the office, those who aren’t may be penalized. There are also benefits for creativity to seeing colleagues in person; brainstorming ideas and collaborating on projects requires trust, rooted in personal relationships.
That’s why some experts have suggested a new idea for the office: not as a headquarters people go to daily or weekly, but as a place people go sometimes, for group hangouts. Companies like Ford, Salesforce and Zillow are doing versions of this, and reconfiguring their offices with more hangout spaces and fewer rows of desks.
“One of our big fears is that if we don’t get this right, we create this two-tier employee reality — who’s in the room, who’s not, who’s playing the politics, who’s not,” Mr. Spaulding at Zillow said. “We believe humans want to connect and collaborate.

But do you need to do that five days a week, or can you do that once every three months?”