Kelly talks to economists Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel, whose research makes a convincing case why being in person is better for our health, business success and ability to be creative and innovation. Their new book is called: “In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth.” 

You begin the book looking at how Apple structured their physical office space to take advantage of human to human interaction. 

“There’s this amazing study that suggests that by default, our radius of awareness in the office is about the size of a basketball court. Anyone outside of that, it’s basically as if they don’t exist. And so, what you really need is good incentives to get people up out of their chairs and walk around and create those random collisions, moments for interaction between people who wouldn’t always necessarily naturally come into contact with one another. A really beautiful example of this is when Steve Jobs was designing Pixar’s headquarters in the early 2000s. He thought about what would be a good incentive to get people up out of their desks. His incentive of choice was the bathroom. I’m currently very pregnant, and I can attest that that is a very effective incentive. I would go a very long distance to find a bathroom. And that’s in fact what people at Pixar did. They got up out of their desk; they had to snake through various hallways to get to the central atrium where all the bathrooms were. And on the way, they might talk to people who they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily come into contact with and have those random sparks that can come up with new ideas, come up with new jokes, come up with the right way to illustrate the scene.” 

And this is in contrast to how we operate in online spaces. 

“Indeed, that’s exactly what you do find in other studies: that when people are together in person, they end up having a lot more creative ideas and a lot more ideas overall. There’s one amazing study where they had pods of people who were trying to come up with ideas for their company. And some of them were meeting over Zoom and some of them were in person. And the ones that were over Zoom thought that they were being just as productive. But it turns out that when other people rated how creative their ideas were, they actually had fewer creative ideas. And so that sort of connection in person really is essential for creativity.” 

This is even harder on the younger employees entering the workforce now if they have to be remote, right? 

“Our research shows that when you’re looking at the younger people, they really benefit from mentorship. And when you don’t have that mentor sitting right next to you, it’s harder to ask those questions. And so, you see their productivity is usually not going up. But I think there’s also a subtlety, which is that those are almost always measuring how many things you can check off your to-do list as opposed to the quality of that work. And when you look at the quality, particularly of these junior workers’ output, it’s really not improving. And that’s partly because they’re not getting the mentorship that they needed.”