Graham King

Solvitas perambulum

Co-located teams are a business risk

behaviour remote
Summary
Early in my career, I observed two ex-military officers who wisely took separate flights to avoid simultaneous injury but underestimated the risk of shared offices where they eventually got sick at the same time. This highlighted the danger of having valuable team members in close proximity, increasing the likelihood of spreading illness. The concept of a team's "bus number" should instead consider the more frequent impact of sickness rather than rare events. Building resilient companies requires addressing the real threats to productivity, such as illness, and structuring environments to mitigate these risks. Consider how many team members can be lost to illness and for how long to ensure continuity.

Early in my career, I worked for a company run by two ex-military officers. When they attended a distant meeting, they would take separate flights, because surely the company would not survive if they were both hurt in a crash. They never got injured in a plane, but they did get sick at the same time (the company survived). Shared offices turned out more dangerous than shared aeroplanes.

There’s a risk to placing your most valuable people within sneezing distance of each other.

You probably know and talk of your team’s “bus number”, but sickness strikes far more often than buses. We’ve all seen co-located teams drop one by one, and you’ve probably wished a sick colleague had stayed home rather than share his germs with you.

The biggest risk to humanity in the next 50 years is an influenza outbreak, according to Vaclav Smil in Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years. Influenza doesn’t spread through IRC.

If we’re to build resilient companies, we need to think about what actually takes us away from our work, and structure our environment to mitigate that.

How many people can you afford to lose to sickness? For how long?