The Proximity Of Seats Is Close To &Nbsp; The Importance Of Office Seats.

　　 Feng Shui is important, but next time you decide to redesign it. Office When it comes to layout, you may consider asking an economist. This is because a surprising set of new data has been published to enable economists to track something once completely air like: the flow of information in office physical space. This group of data comes from Google (Google) - where else can it be?

　　 The data came from Google's so-called "internal prediction market" test. Predicting presidential election is the most famous application of "predicting market". If Barack Obama (Barack Obama) trades at 35 cents in the Democratic nomination market, that is, gamblers are willing to pay 35 cents to buy a corresponding contract, and only if Obama wins the nomination, gamblers will win 1 dollars with the contract. In this case, the market forecast for Obama's nomination is 35%.

Forecast market They are not perfect, but they are usually more reliable than other forecasting methods. Therefore, some companies began to pilot the market, asking their employees to bet on sales and income as an alternative to the company's own management forecasts. Because in management, people who make predictions usually emphasize bad news, because this is in line with his vested interests.

Google is not the first to eat crabs. According to Google economist Bo Cowgill and Eric Zitzewitz and Justin Wolfers (Eric Zterwitz Wolfers), other companies that pioneered such tests include Arcelor Mittal (ArcelorMittal), Chrysler (Chrysler), Eli Lilly (Eli Lilly), General Electric (GE) and HP (Google).

　　 The forecast market seems to be working very well. But this is not the most interesting conclusion drawn by Kaugil and his collaborators. By observing what markets Google employees are trading in, such as guessing the number of users that Gmail services will attract at the end of a quarter, and buying or selling in the transaction, Kaugil and others know very well which employees have information. And, through observation There are other people who have done similar deals. Three economists can know who has similar information at a similar time.

If this is an ordinary company, researchers may associate these information with the organizational chart for analysis, so the conclusion may be something of a commonplace. But this is Google. Kaugil, Mr. T and Wolfers know exactly the seats of every employee (Google's office is an open structure). They know which employees belong to the same e-mail contact group, such as playing poker together. Through investigation, they obtained a list of friends of each employee. They know which employees work for their superiors, what projects they do, and where they go to college. The only information missing from the three economists is the names of these employees, because that has been deleted from the database.

The results of the analysis are remarkable. Employees in specific groups have significant correlation in transaction behavior. But they can not be explained by common interests or social relations. Having the same direct supervisor is only a small part of the information flow.

It turns out that the layout of the office is the key: people close to seats often know the same thing, and this is proved by forecasting the same transaction in the market. Social relations and professional proximity have limited effect on information flow: the proximity of visible space is almost the only reason.

Organisational behaviorists now know that people tend to interact more with people sitting near themselves, but they never know if this is just a social need. Now we know that real information is flowing.

　　 People have been telling us that distance is dead because of cheap and ubiquitous information technology. But if we expect a company to prove it, then the company is obviously Google. This research shows that sitting in the right place is as important as ever.