Would an in-house coffee waiter improve your team productivity?
Imagine someone whose job it is to keep peoples coffee cups full, thereby removing the productivity destroying trips to the kitchen. Would this improve your team productivity?
A company brought in an external consultant to look at how to improve productivity in the software and engineering sections of the company. After two weeks they reported back and recommended the hiring of a "coffee lady" - someone to bring around biscuits, fruit, sandwiches, and hot beverages. This would save the programmers and engineers from making "productivity-sapping visits to the kitchen, water cooler, etc."
The recommendation was implemented, and over the next few months productivity fell. At a loss, a further study was commissioned.
It was found that although time was taken to visit the kitchen and stand by the water cooler, and some of the time "wasted" was spent in talking about football, dates, and other non-work related topics, some of the time was spent explaining a problem, and having a colleague say "I had that problem last week/month/year, and here's how I solved it ..."
The benefits of sharing information far, far outweighed the apparent losses in efficiency. The best thing you can do is increase the interaction, without causing more loss of time at desk. Encourage people to visit the facilities at the same time, provide whiteboards and pens, provide a shared workstation, have doughnuts and sandwiches delivered at predictable times.
Increase the communication within and across teams.
Don't force them to stay at their desks.
This can lead to only one result - more productivity-destroying trips away from the desk!
Will you try to solve this in the same manner?
- I do my tea trips during natural pauses in my work (between tasks, stuck on a problem, waiting for the computer, feeling tired) while the coffee refills would interrupt whatever I'm doing and cause me to lose focus
- Breaks are good for your creativity - when stuck on a problem I regularly get great solutions when I stop "actively" focusing on it and get a cup of tea (or do other small AFK tasks).
- In the office kitchen I bump into users (I develop in-house software) and get immediate feedback, which is often the most valuable kind.
- Getting up from your chair is good for your posture, blood circulation, etc.
All of these make me more productive, not less.
The same goes for working through lunch. I often find myself doing this in order to complete all the work I have on my plate. What I am trying to force myself to do is actually get out of the office and at the very least go for a walk outside. More often than not I am a lot more productive in the afternoons when I take a decent break for lunch. Working straight through lunch is a bad habit to get into.
You also might have to introduce a system to give everyone a catheter since the more coffee you drink the more trips to the restroom you'll be taking.
I'm not joking about this, I really think structured work/play is a valid idea. if I ever get enough staff I'll try it out on all of them. We'll see where it goes...