Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Innovation and Productivity

The head of Yahoo is making the news because she's telling her employees to come to work; they can't work from home.  Apparently there's research showing there's more innovation when employees meet face-to-face, have casual interactions, etc. (I don't remember which company, Bell Labs, Apple, who, which designed its building to maximize such interactions. On the other hand working from home increases employee satisfaction, enables you to hire better employees, maximizes productivity, etc.

My only contribution: face time and casual conversation is important.  That's also a reason for meetings, national conferences or just meetings in the FSA context.  Perhaps my best contribution to FSA was when I overheard Solomon Ramirez talk about his work with DFU (an early System/36 utility software package) when we were all imbibing after a national meeting.

[update: see article on Google's building]

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