In Praise of Face Time

Almost all work these days is distributed — people interact with one other to make sales and process orders from different locations, for instance. To keep everyone up-to-date, particularly across departments and functions, employees use electronic tools (e-mail, voice mail, conference calls, instant messaging, and social media). In our virtual world, working face-to-face is increasingly rare.

Does being together physically matter anymore in today’s increasingly virtual world of work?

Consider Constellation Energy, a $14 billion dollar provider of power, natural gas, and energy products and services based in Baltimore. Constellation has developed an Innovation Center, an unconventional permanent facility within its headquarters. People come from different locations to the Innovation Center for “ideation” (brainstorming), decision-making, and planning. For example, one team that came to the Innovation Center worked on a merger after an acquisition; hundreds of thousands of dollars were saved from moving a data center. By having groups from headquarters and the acquired company come together in one place, they were able to break down barriers and begin to work together effectively.

These activities require the kind of cross-organizational collaboration that is unnatural and difficult to sustain. The Innovation Center helps people break down boundaries and encourages openness, frankness, and honesty. It helps align different groups around shared goals.

What’s distinctive about having a physical innovation center? According to Howard Tiersky, President of consulting firm Moving Interactive, which helped set up Constellation’s Innovation Center:

• It’s an emblem. It demonstrates a commitment to innovation. It sends a message.
• When you have a facility, you’re apt to use it more, to do more innovation. More of your organization is exposed to that process.
• The facility helps make sure time together is well used. Management disciplines and behaviors are built into the facility, and these behaviors define a culture and are a way to change a culture. It has introduced playfulness, willingness to take risks, and a collaborative style. It’s a positive virus. It has affected the way that people work beyond the walls. For example, in the sessions we use a “picture the future” exercise: it’s 2014 and the Harvard Business Review is writing an article about how successful we’ve been, and we brainstorm about what we need to do now to achieve that picture. People have taken this “picture the future” exercise outside of the Innovation Center and used in their planning activities.”

In a similar way, some companies have implemented “daily huddles” and “rounding” as ways to bring everyone together face-to-face to review operations, share information, and solve problems. Consider McLeod Health, a community hospital in Florence, South Carolina, with 400 physicians, 1,400 nurses, 4,700 employees, and 616 beds. Early improvement work at McLeod focused on clinical effectiveness, things like pneumonia and congestive heart failure. They met their goals and achieved national recognition. But according to Marie Segars, who is a senior vice president of McLeod, responsible for the day-to-day operations, there was still something missing:

It only got us 95% of the way there. That last 5% was stuff that gets in the way, such as poor handoffs. My interest is the secrets to sustainability. In my work, that’s the hardest part. If you take your eye off, there is sliding back. How do you stabilize and make daily improvement? It can’t be divorced from the day-to-day work. It includes visual management — boards that track performance on key measures so people know that you’re still paying attention.
We meet every morning at 8:30 outside my office and review my board in administration. The board has things like census target, daily admissions, month-to-date average, year-to-date versus target, how many days since last cardiac code outside of an Intensive Care Unit, how many days without a hospital diversion. Our Patient Satisfaction target this year is to be above the 95th percentile in 24 or more measures and no more than six measures below the 50th percentile. We go over the metrics in about 4 minutes, and then the VPs do “patient rounding” — they go out to the departments to look for the things we’ve discussed. For example, one nursing unit is working on discharge folders, and the executives can check the status on their board and then go to the patient to see whether every patient has a discharge folder in order. Each executive visits two patients. It includes all the administrative VPs, the CFO, chief medical officer, and the chief nursing officer. We then report back to the staffing area we visited on what is working and what isn’t working. We’re usually done by 9:05. We’ve been doing it for seven years. The staff was cautious at first. Now they love it.

As Constellation Energy and McLeod Health show, face-to-face interactions still have an important role to play in driving performance in our increasingly virtual world. But you need to carve out some time to get out of your office, to work across departments and hierarchies with the people doing the work.

Question: How are you using face-to-face interactions in our increasingly virtual world?

This article first appeared on the Harvard Business Review and has been lightly edited.