More than ten years ago, global internet industry leader Google started to adapt their offices around the world. In addition to an endless supply of food and drinks, workspaces include rest areas of different styles and even recreational facilities like slides, handball courts, and soccer fields, as well as recreational vehicles. The purpose of all this is to make employees feel at home and comfortably work and meet.

Facebook started using their new headquarters in California in 2015. The park, spanning two hundred and twenty six thousand square meters, abandons traditional compartments and massively adopts the concept of open design. The twenty eight hundred people working there can directly see each other at work and easily organize meetings. Even founder Mark Zuckerberg shares the same site with other employees.

Apple’s headquarters at Campus 2, which is shaped like a UFO, officially landed in 2017. The circular giant structure, the likes of which were never before built, is sometimes jokingly referred to as a donut. The purpose of its circular design is to increase opportunities for encountering coworkers while employees shuttle between different departments. Apple believes that new ideas are often inspired by coincidental face-to-face communication.

What’s the reason that most rapidly-growing technology companies adapt their workplaces one after another? Is it just for their brand image? Apparently, it’s not that simple. In fact, there’s profound meaning in it. They are devoted to changes in physical space, unconsciously trimming employee sluggishness (or inertia). By doing so, they lead teams to reach a working consensus and eventually converge upon a unique organizational culture, spurring the most practical business efficiency.

You would probably say that your business doesn’t the billions of dollars Apple, Facebook, and Google spent to reshape the workspaces available to their hundreds of thousands of employees. So why is mentioning all of those seemingly unreachable dreams useful? And yet in reality the purpose that drove the three largest technology companies to change their physical spaces is to “improve team communication and collaboration”. Therefore, building a communicated workspace is what every company can and should do.

So-called Management Master of Asia and founder of Panasonic Japan Konosuke Matsushita has a famous saying: “enterprise management means communication in the past, the now, and in the future.” The actual duty of managers is communication no matter how large the enterprise is or how good or bad a time the enterprise is facing. The core of enterprise management is inevitably linked to “communication”.

In 2020 the overall economic situation in Europe appears to be rocky. UBS Group AG anxiously predicts that the global economic growth rate in 2020 will bottom out even lower than during the financial crisis in 2008. Growth had been restrained under the triple influences of Brexit, international trade disputes, and the upcoming end of QE policy. Against all expectations, the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic, COVID-19, has a significant impact on economic activities worldwide and especially in Asia. The pandemic comprehensively influenced the entire world within three months, forcing enterprise management to forge new skills in the crucible of global crisis. Numerous enterprises began to reallocate the duties of teams and adopt the principle of partial office occupancy to reduce the risk of infection among employee clusters. Also, owing to employees working away from offices, companies have started remote collaborative procedures with equipment and tools for remote meetings to respond to this special set of circumstances.

Additionally, the economic recession has an impact on the communicative and collaborative mentality of employees. An attitudinal research by Harvard Business Review, conducted recently on how employees work during economic recession, points out that most employees experience five to ten recessionary periods in the course of their professional lives. Employees are less likely to help others while reacting to news of economic recession, and in turn make it hard for their organizations to survive the recession.

Dr. Nina Sirola of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) indicates that in terms of bank runs, similar to the case of employee distrust, banks ought to pay more attention to customer reactions after the cues of unstable economic conditions appear. Also, banks are required to create policies to prevent unreasonable reactions or situations that bring about negative effects. “Likewise, after exposure to news of an economic downturn, corporations should actively manage the psychology and behaviors of their workforce to motivate helping and cooperation in the workplace following cues of economic downturns, so as to make organizations more resilient in an economic decline.”

No matter how cold and how long the severe winter is, it will eventually come to an end. In the long run, building communicative workspaces to improve work efficiency is an important link in the core of company management, which is in fact not completely related to the economy.

The existential meaning of a communicated workspace directly influences employee meeting routines. When it comes to the question of whether employees like meetings or not, nine out of ten employees will definitely say no. The odd employee out likes meetings because they happen to have urgent need to discuss a topic and therefore called for the meeting in the first place.

Gartner, an international research and advisory company, gathered experiences from 7,261 workers located in the USA, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions in 2019 and researched meeting cultures accordingly. The results show that on average, workers surveyed spend 11.7 hours on meetings every week, accounting for a quarter of their working time. Among them, 9% have meeting for more than twenty hours every week. In general, they remark that the greatest pain of having meetings is overloading, increasing global meetings, mobile meetings, and meetings among different generations of employees.

Such an astonishing pain index suggests that the workspace needs to be improved to ensure smooth communication and shorten the total duration of meetings. In order to have each meeting proceed well, enterprises can start by asking themselves four questions: first, is it ok to have remote meetings and offsite collaboration? Second, during face to face meetings, are there any communicative tools to accelerate the productive process? Third, is there any equipment to assist employees as they work in different types of locations?? Fourth, can workers of every generation accept and use these tools?

And then these questions are applied to the four meeting environments: basic meeting rooms, fragmented spaces, collaborative project room, and executive briefing room, resulting in a comprehensive examination of workspaces.

Observed from another aspect, the core concept of new meetings is “visualization.” With the development of technology, image transmission appears to be easier and more convenient. In recent years, the concept of visualization has gradually emerged in the field of interpersonal communication and information dissemination. Interactive display collaborative meeting systems assist in expressing ideas through imagery. It helps visualize those rigid words and figures required to be transformed and interpreted by brain with direct-viewing, to convey abstract information and to inspire all kinds of thoughts such as analyses, reasoning and decision making etc. It allows the making of static graphics and even animated graphic messages which can be dynamically updated.

“An ideal visualization should not only communicate clearly, but stimulate viewer engagement and attention,” an elaborate remark on Information Visualization from How to make data look sexy, a feature run by CNN. In addition, emerging demands for visualized meetings include video conferences, which are beneficial to remote communication. New interactive display collaborative meeting technology can even support four remote users, making offsite collaboration much easier.

There are many ways to manage a big team. A variety of management rules aim at offering a perspective of improving organization efficiency. The unique development speed of information technology is pushing (or even dragging) numerous enterprises forward. Are you ready to keep up the pace?