Work Life
No matter what kind of work you do, or if you do it alone or together, this is how work gets done. In every workplace around the world you’ll find people engaged in the following 10 activities.
Collaboration, in its most basic form, is the collective process of creation, problem-solving, and achieving a common goal. But how we collaborate—both physically and virtually—varies greatly. Over the course of a year, Herman Miller’s Insight and Exploration team observed various workplaces to analyze how people collaborate and the ways in which their interactions vary over the course of a day, and throughout the life of a project. By differentiating the subtleties of how, when, where, and why people connect—independent of content or industry—the team was able to articulate a universal “anatomy of collaboration.” This research was supplemented with an exploration into individual work behaviors to help distill exactly how knowledge work happens. Senior Researcher Shilpi Kumar notes that, “outlining these collaborative work behaviors will empower designers and decision makers with a greater understanding for how people really work, and will enable more informed choices in regards to office spaces.”