Want to be more productive? Sit next to someone who is

To increase worker performance, employers often invest in a number of things, from rewards and incentives to education and training. These traditional approaches develop employees’ skills and enrich their work experience. But we discovered a surprisingly simple way to increase productivity, one that was low-cost and had an immediate impact: better office seating arrangements.

Research we conducted suggests that who an employee sits next to affects how they perform — and grouping the right types of co-workers together can improve productivity and work quality.

We analyzed two years’ worth of data on more than 2,000 employees of a large technology company with several locations in the U.S. and Europe. We created unique identifiers for each worker and analyzed their performance data.

For every performance measure, we looked at “spillover,” a measure of the impact that office neighbors had on an employee’s performance at various physical proximities.

We saw that neighbors have a significant impact on an employee’s performance, and it can be either positive or negative. In terms of magnitude, we found that approximately 10% of a worker’s performance spills over to her neighbors. Replacing an average performer with one who is twice as productive results in her neighboring workers increasing their own productivity by about 10%, on average.

In our sample, where groups of workers were clustered together, we found that the best seating arrangements had productive and quality employees sitting beside each other because each helped the other improve. There was a spillover effect on both workers’ areas of weakness:

A quality worker tried to match the speed of a productive worker, while the productive worker tried to improve work quality.

Toxic workers in our sample were employees who ended up being terminated for reasons related to toxic behavior, which included misconduct, workplace violence, drug or alcohol abuse, sexual harassment, falsification of documents, fraud and other violations of company policy. Toxic workers negatively influenced their neighbors’ performance.

If toxic employees were near each other, it increased the probability that one of them would be terminated by 27%. But in contrast to productivity and quality spillover, any type of worker seemed susceptible to toxic spillover.

Our study leads us to believe that better spatial management of workers can enhance individual and team performance. But managers need to first look at employees’ performance and see where they would want spillover to occur. We estimate that a strategic seating chart could bring in $1 million in annual profit from greater productivity for an organization of 2,000 workers.

Once an organization identifies which spillovers exist, management can plan the space of the organization to produce better outcomes. In this way, physical space, which companies can manage relatively inexpensively, can be an important business resource.