Think your colleagues are wasting time when they chat together? Think again.
There’s an interesting article in Forbes magazine about new research from MIT Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland‘s group at the MIT Media Lab. The researchers studied interactions among call center employees at a Bank of America site — and discovered some quantifiable benefits to conversations with coworkers. Noted Forbes:
“Individuals who talked to more coworkers were getting through calls faster, felt less stressed and had the same approval ratings as their peers. Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers’ e-mailed instructions.”
Professor Sandy Pentland
Equipped with these findings, the call center, Forbes reports, rescheduled employees’ breaks to coincide with one another. The result? Productivity improvements equivalent to approximately $15 million annually.
Not a bad return on informal conversation.
Interested in learning more about Pentland’s research? MIT Sloan Management Review published an adapted excerpt from Pentland’s book Honest Signals in our Fall 2008 issue — and also produced an interview with Pentland in collaboration with The Wall Street Journal.
Posted in: Blog, managing people, MIT, productivity, The New Intelligent Enterprise
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Thankyou for a well written and informative Blog
This is one of those findings that, when you see it, you think, ‘well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.’
Yet of course the first daily instinct among supervisors and most managers is exactly the opposite; to condemn or otherwise disapprove of ‘just idle chit-chat,’ gossip, or whatever.
Thanks for a thoughtful piece of insight into human behavior.
(Does this mean folks will have to admit Twitter is a force for social good?)
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Yes, it’s good to see some recognition of the productivity (and health) benefits of simple communication in the office environment. Thanks for the insights!
Really…of course off chit chat helps out productivity. If you work in a cubical farm, or out in the public eye communication with other employees can cause all kinds of good things to happen…like new work ideas and an increase of job satisfaction SUre MNF is gonna get brought up but most great new ideas are brought about by good communication.