The electronic water cooler

The recent decision by the new Yahoo CEO to rein in telecommuting in favor of “all hands on deck” in corporate headquarters has unleashed a national conversation about the business strategy of telecommuting. Are group creativity and innovation better inspired by face-to-face interactions than by modern electronic connections?

Twenty years after the Web moved from interconnecting high-energy physics labs to being an essential tool of commerce, high-bandwidth connectivity has certainly made it easier for employees to carry on many tasks that once required their presence in the workplace. Such remote activity has obvious advantages to child-rearing parents and commuters in congested areas. But do the advantages of this relatively newfound connectivity compensate for the loss of physical interaction in the workplace?

It should be noted that even in the workplace, people favor electronic communications over talking in person because of their ease. I have often urged neighboring colleagues to forgo email and walk down the hall to have a face-to-face conversation.

In response to a thoughtful 2 March editorial published in the New York Times on this controversy, a letter to the editor was published by Norman Axelrod (scroll down to the third letter), a former Bell Labs employee, who touted his institution’s iconic reputation as a hotbed of innovation—in part because of its working environment at both its Murray Hill and Holmdel, New Jersey, locations.

The environment fostered frequent encounters of staff in hallways, resource centers such as libraries, and especially the lunchroom. When you talk to a former Bell Labs employee or read last year’s superb Bell Labs history book authored by Jon Gertner and aptly called The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation , you can understand that management considered real estate to be a major part of the grand design in creating a culture for personal interaction. Bell Labs’ unmatched creativity also stemmed from the hiring of a broad array of scientists, engineers, and technicians that spanned the whole range of skills needed to develop communication technologies—a practice that became a tradition for most of the 20th century. Moreover, the AT&T-managed monopoly with the US government allowed for stable, long-term funding of Bell Labs until the court-ordered breakup of the Bell system in 1984. The Bell Labs real estate was designed to encourage and enable the interdisciplinary staff to mix both formally for the task at hand and informally to take advantage of a serendipitous meeting of the minds.

I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with many Bell Labs colleagues over my 40-year career, and have come to admire and envy what they experienced. I have also seen where similar cross connections of creative people have encouraged innovative behavior. I worked for two modest-sized Department of Energy national labs, and each required a highly interdisciplinary staff. The communal lunchrooms at those two labs gave birth to more good ideas than the sum total of motivational courses to which we subjected our staffs. I had the pleasure of working for the founding director of Jefferson Lab, Hermann Grunder, who supplied every lunch table with a pencil and notepad to make sure a good thought didn’t lose its fidelity on a napkin.

One of my jobs at Jefferson Lab was fostering collaborations between the laboratory and neighboring research universities. I quickly became aware of the geographical disadvantages of modern universities, where academic departments are often enshrined in separate buildings. As I made my campus visits, I encountered two independent groups at one university doing laser-induced chemistry studies; they were separated by a street and two departmental bureaucracies. Had they talked to each other, both groups could have strengthened their efforts. They could have boosted their power collectively—but didn’t. At a second campus, I found a trio of scientists—one an experimentalist, one a device builder, and one a modeler—all working on nanocrystalline diamond, but none of the three had ever talked to the others about collaborating and combining their obvious strengths.

My personal experience in the sciences and engineering compels a strong bias for staff colocation—not only for the obvious tasks of designing, building, and testing machines from small instruments to gargantuan particle accelerators, but also for the day-to-day chance collaboration that creates a serendipitous solution to a shared problem. I don’t see that being replaced by a virtual presence on a handheld device or laptop screen. Now, I might change my mind when my laser buddies usher in a full three-dimensional holographic presence—but how will we share a cup of the same caffeinated conversation starter?

Fred Dylla is the executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics.