Eat This Way for Workforce Productivity

 

How you eat affects workforce performance.
Don’t roll your eyes, this is proven practice. Let me explain. 

If you’re like me, you are always looking for a way to get more out of your project workforce, especially if it does not require a survey, participation by a team from HR, or a long training class – any significant extra effort really.

You may also have experienced problems between project work groups where they just did not communicate with each other well or they did not plan their schedule well together or where some other collaboration problem existed. How do you get these people to fix whatever problem is there without micromanaging or having some kind of facilitation meeting or therapy session? 

Recent studies have made clear the importance of face-to-face interactions, especially “unstructured” interactions, my term for informal meetings when there is no agenda.  For example, this article describes several studies with these results:

• A Bank of America worker tracking study that found that work teams that interact with each other often are more productive.

• Productivity rose at least 10% when a bank call center switched from solo breaks to group breaks.

• A technology company switched to larger lunch tables when they found that people were more productive when they sat at tables designed for 12 instead of smaller tables. 

A University of Michigan study on researchers (yes, researchers studying other researchers!) found that the more “zonal overlap” scientists had in their daily walks within and between buildings, the more collaboration there would be. They even calculated that for every 100 feet of zonal overlap there was 20% more collaboration.

So we have plenty of evidence from a broad spectrum of organizations and worker categories that collaboration is linked to unstructured interactions. So how can we as project managers put this information into practice to help us make our project workforces collaborate better without doing too much work?

• Have them eat lunch together.

• While you are at it, have them take breaks together.

OK, so these are simplistic options. In the next post, coming in a few days, I’ll give you a list of tactics based on increasing collaboration through routine interaction.