Page 115 - WHERE WE WORK - Schlegelmilch

Reconfiguring workplaces
across the employees. Through their coping strategies, the dimensions of the workplace configuration changed such that they facilitated work relationships again. Shared centrality was achieved as the employees shifted towards the new centers. Also, information about coworker's whereabouts (locational transparency) became less opaque as the number of likely locations was reduced, and they developed the practice to ask about other's work locations. Finally, the employee's accessibility of workplaces (negotiated legitimacy) became more diverse along with the new workplaces as part of the configurations.
Limits of reconfiguring efforts. Despite the employees’ ability to reconfigure around new centers, two areas proved difficult: chance encounters (physical place) and personal connection (digital space). First, we found that the shared office building facilitated a seemingly trivial behavior that turned out to be crucial for the way of working at TechSub: chance encounters, which are brief, unexpected face-to-face interactions (Irving et al., 2019). When TechSub closed the shared office, this behavior was lost. As one employee put it,
“The temporary ‘no office’ period required us to communicate and work differently. [...] We missed the ‘now-that-I-see-you’-effect.” (P07, employee, low tenure). At TechSub – a “coffee organization” (P20, employee, low tenure)
Chance encounters often happened while drinking coffee and created important moments to interact for work coordination or checking in with each other personally. The lack of chance encounters was most noticeable for the mid-layer relationships, where they were an important mechanism to maintain relationships. One of our respondents compared how having a shared office compared to the distributed work phase,
“You don't forget that [check-ins], but when you have to call, and they are in a meeting, the effectiveness was reduced because, let's say, just when you were getting coffee and waiting in line together, we actually worked a lot already." (P24, middle manager, high tenure)
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