stoweboyd:

Short piece from last year on work that Alexander Pentland is doing at MIT. One project maps how people interact at work:

Andy Greenberg, Mining Human Behavior At MIT

Pentland’s lab put sociometers on 80 employees at a Bank of America call center in Rhode Island. The inconspicuous badges used Bluetooth and infrared signals to measure which co-workers the test subjects talked to every minute for a month and, later, another period of six weeks. After the first month the MIT researchers could see that individuals who talked to more co-workers 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.

So the call center tried its own experiment. Instead of staggering employees’ coffee breaks as it had previously, it aligned their breaks to allow more chatter. The result, Bank of America told MIT a few months later: productivity gains worth about $15 million a year.

Let people form their own denser social networks and — surprise — happiness, knowledge, and better performance follows.

Throw away the manuals, fire the managers, get out of the way: let people figure out how to invent their own work, cooperatively.