Grazing the California sky at a height of over 360 feet, coastal Redwoods stand taller than any other living thing on the planet.
Now imagine for a moment how deep the roots of such monstrosities extend into the ground. Probably 200? 300? Maybe 400 feet?
Try closer to 60 or 70 inches.
It’s true, the secret to remaining upright as the world’s tallest organism has nothing to do with a Redwood’s individual roots. Instead, it’s the roots of the Redwood next to it that help each tree maintain balance.
Those roots, while only 5-6 feet deep, extend around 100 feet in each direction, intertwining with others to form a network of Redwoods that’s nearly untoppable by any force of nature.
The lesson?
Collaboration is powerful. And today’s workplaces are just beginning to scratch its surface.
Collaboration is powerful and today’s workplaces are just beginning to scratch its surface.
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The future of work
Twenty years ago, to be productive, the prevailing belief was that you needed to occupy the same space as your entire team. Today, that’s not the case.
Work is no longer about “we’re doing it this way, here and now, because this is how it’s always been done.” Today businesses are rethinking traditional ideas surrounding productivity, focusing more on letting employees accomplish tasks when and where it’s best for them.
Whether it’s an open air office or the couch at home, a stand-up meeting or a virtual one, these are the systems and ideas shaping the future of today’s collaborative workplace.
The office is no longer the hub of productivity
In 2014, the Harvard Business Review published an interview that revealed the secret to higher employee productivity:
Let people work from home.
In a study that halved the staff of a call center and allowed one group to work from home for 9 months while requiring the other to remain in the office, Nicholas Bloom and James Liang found that remote workers were not only more productive, but they were happier and less likely to quit.
“The results we saw at Ctrip blew me away,” said Bloom. He elaborated:
“We found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction.”