You might want to stand up for this. Researchers recently discovered that standing during meetings boosts excitement around group projects and reduces turf defense.
“Organizations should design office spaces that facilitate non-sedentary work,” said Andrew Knight of the Olin Business School at Washington University. “Our study shows that even a small tweak to a physical space can alter how people work with one another.”
Knight and colleague Mark Baer had participants in the study work together in teams for 30 minutes on the creation of university recruitment videos. The teams worked either in rooms with tables and chairs or ones with tables but no chairs. The participants also wore small sensors on their wrists to measure how their bodies react when they get excited.
The researchers found that teams who stood had greater physiological arousal and were less territorial about their ideas than the sitting teams. Because the standing teams were less territorial, ideas were shared more easily and the end result was higher quality videos.
“Seeing that the physical space in which a group works can alter how people think about their work and how they relate with one another was very exciting,” Knight said.
As leaders, you often have control over office configurations and furniture selection.
“The manipulation that we investigated in this research—in which we simply removed chairs from the room—was relatively small, yet produced meaningful differences in group arousal and group idea territoriality,” Knight and Baer wrote in the study. “Our results suggest that if leaders aspire to enhance collaborative knowledge work, they might consider eschewing the traditional conference room setup of tables and chairs and, instead, clear an open space for people to collaborate with one another.”
(photo credit: Ben Terrett via photopin cc)
