If team meetings at your office are little more than a collection of bored workers slumped in their chairs furtively checking their phones, maybe the problem isn’t the workers; it’s the chairs.
New research has found that workers who need to collaborate and come up with fresh ideas will stay engaged and work better together if they stand throughout the meeting.
The study from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis asked volunteers to work in teams and spend 30 minutes developing and recording a university recruitment video.
The teams worked either in a room that had chairs arranged around a table or in a room with no chairs. All together, there were 214 volunteers working in groups of four or so.
After making the videos, research assistants rated the quality of their final product.
Research assistants (who were not told the purpose of the study) were also asked to evaluate how the teams worked together and whether team members were “attentive to one another through active listening, reframing of ideas, and/or building off of one another’s ideas.”
The volunteers themselves wore sensors around their wrists to gauge their excitement levels. They also rated how they felt during the process and how territorial fellow team members were about their ideas during the exercise.
The researchers found that those who stood during the meeting showed elevated levels of excitement around creative group processes. The research assistants also graded their videos higher.
As well, the volunteers themselves reported they shared information better with their colleagues when the stood compared to those who sat.
The authors explain that during brainstorming sessions, workers often become territorial with their ideas and try to protect them from being modified by others.
A typical meeting room, they say, encourages that tendency because each person in the room owns and claims an individual workspace -- their chair and their place at the table. But when workers stand, they can no longer compartmentalize themselves and instead have to share the space that the group collectively occupies.
“The physical work pattern encouraged by a non-sedentary space may trigger a less individually oriented mind-set and reduce feelings of individual ownership over ideas compared to the physical work pattern of a sedentary space, in which each individual group member occupies his or her own space in the room,” they write.
The researchers say their study shows that even a small tweak to a physical space can alter how people work with one another. They suggest that removing chairs could be a low-cost way to redesign an office space and encourage more idea-sharing.
And, as a bonus, encouraging workers to sit less would also help address the health effects of sitting in one place for too long.
The paper will be featured in an upcoming issue of Praxis, the research journal of the Washington University‘s Olin Business School.
