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Reconfiguring workplaces
configurations had a remarkable impact on the employee’s relationships with coworkers. To cope with the impact on the peripheral and mid-layer relationships, employees adapted by reconfiguring, as we explain next.
3.5.4 Coping by reconfiguring
To cope with the diluting impact of removing the corporate office from their workplace configuration, employees aimed to restore the conditions that facilitated connecting with their more removed coworkers. Specifically, after TechSub removed the corporate office as a center of the employees’ workplace configurations, the employees coped by reconfiguring around other centers, of a physical and digital nature (Table 3.6). In their coping efforts, employees encountered limits: chance encounters and situational richness (Table 3.7).
Reconfiguring. First, we found that employees shifted towards new physical centers. Once the corporate office did not represent the physical center of the workplace configuration anymore, employees' homes became central to how the employees organized. The availability of co-working spaces across the country enabled this, as an employee shared,
“I live in the center of [city] and there were a number of [co-working spaces] where you could go and my colleagues only wanted to go to the locations where parking was available because they all have a car. [...] However, people my age, or a younger group, they all live in the center of [city], so suddenly I saw them more often because they wanted to go to the same locations [of the co-working space].” (P15, employee, low tenure)
The quote illustrates how employees defined new physical centers of their workplace configurations. As the new center was not linked to formal work connections (but could coincide), it enabled employees to meet new colleagues. This suggests that workplace configurations need to be high on shared centrality of a physical center to enable peripheral relationships. Core and mid-layer relationships also require high shared
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