The value of Face to Face to increase innovation and collaboration

While reading the Steve Jobs biography one important concept jumped out at me that is often overlooked in the digital age.  Quite simply, the ability to innovate and collaborate is exponentially more when we meet and talk face to face.  This runs very contrary to the efficiency we are promised with email, skype and other multimedia communication methods.

Steve was a rebel in many of his management practices and the one that is most transformational to way we do business is to set people up to meet and talk by keeping smart people in close proximity of each other.  At Pixar he made sure the building had a central atrium and even designed it to only have two bathrooms so that everyone would be forced throughout the day to travel in the same direction and encourage chance encounters.  The plans for the new Cupertino headquarters is similarly a circle design and all in one building to house 12,000 employees rather than the campus design you often see.  In fact Microsoft has a separate 4 story building for there human resources where they presumably would have very little contact outside of their department.  Ironically, a Harvard professor studied Microsoft and reported that the best way to encourage collaboration was to put people in close proximity to each other and to make them the same hierarchal level as a Vice President is most likely to email another Vice President or people in the same location regardless of whether the organizational structure is a pyramid or matrix.

How can you measure this?  Within a time management framework, I have proposed to one of my departments that they create goals based on their current time allocation to have more face to face meetings by documenting the percent of time in each of these buckets:

Listen (Face to Face)

1.       Internal

a.       Interdepartmental__%

b.      Daily Departmental__%

2.       External

a.       Current Business Needs__%

b.      Innovation (New Ideas)__%

Communicate (Face to Face)

1.       Internal

a.       Reactive (I heard you)__%

b.      Proactive (Would this work?)__%

c.       Departmental Performance Management__%

2.       External

a.       Expectations aligned to Initiatives/Goals__%

b.      Performance Management__%

Self Awareness

1.       Personal/Professional Development and Training__%

2.       Time to Think__%

Other

1.       Email__%

2.       Phone Calls__%

3.       Analysis__%

It is important to note that there is nothing wrong with spending time on analysis, or training and time to think is critical, but this time management model will tell you more about the productivity of your direct reports than the effort they expend or the hours they spend at work.  Please let me know if you find this a helpful tool as their is no one "correct" allocation of time but rather an awareness of opportunity to be more productive in the time you spend at work.