Page 110 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Reconfiguring workplaces
“Everyone has to take off their shoes, and then you see ... it's really small, stupid things but then you see each other's socks! And then everyone wears really weird socks and then ... it creates another dimension of being human." (P20, employee, low tenure)
Second, the mid-layer relationships were diluted and most affected by the difficulty of (not) knowing where coworkers were (locational transparency). This was the case because by closing the corporate office, employees could work at many potential locations, and the information about other’s whereabouts was not readily available. An employee shared his frustration when trying to find coworkers that he knew in other parts of the company: “When I needed someone from another division, then I never really knew where that person was. I still don't know exactly [in the new office], but I know that the person is inside the building." (P03, employee, medium tenure). Even though employees had established relationships in the past, and it was typical for employees to have one's calendar accessible to coworkers, the work locations were much less so. This opacity was an obstacle to maintaining relationships with colleagues from previous projects and, in turn, future collaborations (also evident in Table 3.5) Thereby, our respondents perceived the information about other worker's whereabouts to be opaquer (less locational transparency) upon removing the shared office from the workplace configuration. Thus, TechSub's shared office did not necessarily reduce the possible locations (it was still a big office) but instead brought one location to the foreground.
In addition, the mid-layer relationships were also affected by the lack of shared centrality, which one manager explained as such, “They [other teams] met but then you weren’t there [at the same physical] location.” (P12, middle manager, male, high tenure). We learned that planned interactions were with coworkers from current projects (core) whereas unplanned interactions were more focused on people that were in the mid-layer of relationships. The following quote illustrates the difference that shared centrality had for planned and unplanned interactions, of which the latter facilitated maintaining mid-layer relationships: “For me, everything that was not planned but where you have a lot of interaction with people, that’s what
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