The Virtual Office

One of the difficulties encountered in an all-remote work group is that it has no office hall in which to conduct business. In most companies chance hallway meetings play a big part in getting things done: maybe the boss takes a couple days to respond to email or phone, but one can always grab her as she runs down the hall. In a virtual office, the lack of this communication mechanism can seriously disrupt a team's effectiveness unless steps are taken to address the underlying needs.

On the other hand, there are plenty of downsides to physically-adjacent offices and real hallway meetings. For one thing, workers end up getting stuck in many purely social conversations: "how're your kids", "it's snowing like a son-of-a-gun", or "you coming to my party tonight?"

It's true that some level of person-to-person social contact is necessary to add a human texture to the workplace, and to build esprit de corps, but at the typical office there is far more social contact than the workers need or even desire. In this environment it is easy to have social contact and relatively hard to work. With conversations going on outside one's cubicle or the inevitable human tendency to put off a tough task for a few minutes by strolling over to see how things are going with someone else, one's productivity is significantly diminished.

Another unfortunate aspect of physical hallway meetings are that they are disruptive to other team members who are trying to get some work done; in a typical cubicle environment it's hard to tune out unrelated conversation going on just outside one's office. This can be a problem even in some offices with doors, because many companies have an "open door" policy (either officially or unofficially) and closing one's door on a frequent basis is considered impolite. See DeMarco & Lister's great book, Peopleware, for more on common problems in physical offices.

Virtual Office Architecture

The best of all possible worlds would be an environment in which workers communicate whenever they need to, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Throw in a sprinkling of pure social contact and you have the recipe for a perfect working environment that makes the workers productive and happy.

It may seem strange to analyze and engineer people's interactions in this way, but this is what architects do every day; they design buildings so that the sorts of interpersonal interactions that need to take place can happen in a natural way. A virtual office architect must have the same awarenesses.

Where a building architect works with rooms, walls, and hallways to adjust people's physical interaction patterns, a virtual office architect works with phone and email policies and systems to adjust virtual interaction patterns. The basic building blocks the virtual office architect works with are:

• Two-way phone calls;
• Three-or-more-way calls;
• Two-way emails;
• Daily status reports;
• Other group emails;
• Groupware products;
• Faxes;
• Voicemail;
• Overnight deliveries.
• Equipment requirements.
• File transfers.

Just as building architects must know what they are trying to achieve before they can properly design an office, so must virtual office architects. Our goals are:

• To promote productivity by making different kinds of needed interactions easy;
• To foster some amount of social interaction;
• To keep interruptions to a minimum. In particular we want to avoid disrupting workers' mental "flow", when they're concentrating on something.

Each of the links building blocks listed above has a link to a discussion of the considerations involved in using that component in a virtual office.