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Despite all the advantages of virtual working and teleworking most people would agree we still need to physically meet our colleagues to some extent. The most likely place for these meetings to happen is a ‘bricks and mortar’ office.

The bad news is that most offices are total disasters from the viewpoint of inspiring great work.

The Guardian reviews Alan de Botton’s latest book The Architecture of Happiness.

De Botton describes how a new survey reveals that 30% of workers in the UK are depressed by the architecture of their offices.

He concludes:

“In an age when one has to harness workers' emotional sympathies rather than merely their physical strengths, an ugly office comes to seem like a false economy indeed. Housing an organisation in a beautiful office could be the ultimate form of hard-headed common sense.”

The only other point to add is to make sure the virtual architecture for teamwork is beautiful too!

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Bioteams Books Reviews

Organisational teams: thin slice for responsiveness

January 22, 2007 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

Humans and animals do not need complete information to act; they can operate on various clues provided there is a sufficient context. Organizational teams can also use this thin slicing technique in conjunction with short messaging to enhance their performance. Malcolm Gladwell’s introspective book Blink digs deep into the abyss of human cognition to illustrate the human ability to think at a subconscious level. The idea of thin slicing is used where one is introduced to only a few snippets of information which lead to a series of conclusions based on moments of rapid cognition – an ability claimed to be intrinsically dormant in most humans. By bioteams guest author Max Bhanabhai.

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