Improving team communication - Or on teams and snacks
Amit Rathore has an interesting method of increasing office communication:
Our office is so quiet the air conditioning often annoys me, but thats only in the moments when I don't have my headphones on...Here's a quick and easy way to improve team communication on a local team. On one side of the room, place a table. Place a supply of snacks - candy, cakes, drinks and coffee, fruits etc. Replenish this every time levels diminish. That's it.
People will gather around it to grab snacks and they will talk. People will talk as they eat, they'll throw candy wrappers at each other and they'll gel. The level of trust will go up and as people make the transition from colleagues to even friends, aided by the banter and the food, the level of noise in the room will increase somewhat (usually a good sign) and the team will become more effective.
Pretty much everyone in the office has headphones on, and most "communication" is over an office IRC server (or MSN/GTalk for those who boycott the channel). As with Amit we have a table (albeit in the center of the room) which gets the occasional packet of bisquits or muffins and yes - headphones tend to come off and the odd bit of vocal communication occurs whilst munching, but soon enough the headphones are donned once more and the office returns to the low rumble of the air-con and distant server room.
The flaw here is that we don't have a replenishable supply of food, and as much as that might aid to increase our communication, it'd probably serve more to increase the girth of our bellies (which reminds me - I need to return to Weight Watchers).
I find it somewhat ironic that with all the hype around Web 2.0 as a disruptive technology that it serves to increase the use of non-disruptive communication such as IRC and IM; we can continue to listen to our music and our podcasts whilst perusing log files and answering short enquiries from coworkers without drastically shifting our brains from our current workflow.
Yet part of me screams out for a partially disruptive day - after awhile the lack of verbal communication is surreal and down right disturbing - we go to the table to get some food and return to our desks; put on our headphones; crank up the tunes; then finally comment over IRC to the guy sitting 3ft away that there's muffins on the table (obviously, his desk faces away from the table and didn't notice food being applied).
I'm reminded of The Joel Test which calls for hallway usability testing:
Unfortunately for us - we have no hallways...A hallway usability test is where you grab the next person that passes by in the hallway and force them to try to use the code you just wrote. If you do this to five people, you will learn 95% of what there is to learn about usability problems in your code.
So whats a poor minion to do? We have no budget for an endless supply of munchies, and I swear I think I'm the only one who thinks regular meetings are a good idea.
Sometimes I think we could learn a thing or two from dysfunctional families - at least they still have arguments...