Page 162 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

General discussion
home, or a combination of both. The analysis of the survey data showed that accessing information about work and their colleagues (transparency) in the workplace enables workers to share more ideas but this effect was dampened by working remotely.
This indicates that workplace transparency plays a role in effective interaction, which I earlier described as the challenge in sedentary settings. Furthermore, the importance of a shared physical place for interaction is also reflected in the findings of chapter 3 where worker’s peripheral relationships suffered without it and workers reconfigured their workplace configurations to remedy this. Furthermore, the findings in the study on nomadic workers also emphasizes that despite working fully mobile and remote, they need to – temporarily – share a workplace with other workers in order to stay productive. Future research could zoom in and compare the effect of different office designs on idea sharing and implementation within a network.
5.2 Implications for research on workplaces
After zooming in on the key findings for each degree of spatiality of work settings separately, I consolidate the findings in the present section (for an overview see Table 5.2). I put forward three overall key implications for scholars who are studying the physical workplaces in digital work. The main research question, as stated in the introduction, is as follows:
What are the theoretical and practical implications of the physical workplace for digital workers?
Hereafter, I will discuss the contributions to theory and practice in detail.
5.2.1 The opportunity of a spatiality lens
Although the literature on the topic of digital work is growing (Barley et al., 2017; Colbert et al., 2016; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002; MacDuffie,
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