Monday, July 11, 2016

Rearranging Desk to Change Behavior

Recently a coworker made the suggestion that while we talk a lot on our team we could do better.  Sometimes don’t pair as much as we could and end up working in silos.

So he took a look at desk arrangements that were suggested for pairing and proposed arranging our desks in a square.  The purpose be to help with conversations with the people on either side of you.  We talked about it some and there was some concerns with foot room and if we’d be looking at each other, but in the end we all felt it would be worth trying.

So we moved our desks to this:

One of the other things we wanted to explore is a way to pair without needing to bring my laptop and chair around the desks and throw away our ergonomics.  I’d used screenhero in the past, which allowed for sharing the mice and keyboard on shared screens.  Turns out join.me, which is provided for us by our company, has that exact feature.  So we’re hoping to pair using this as a way to help increase communication even while we’re in the same room.

We’re still new to this arrangement, but so far I’ve noticed a distinct improvement in my ability to hear everyone else.



We've made use of join.me a couple times, but getting into isn't as quick or seamless as we'd like.