HR - Coffee Table chats enhance productivity

In most companies, coffee table conversations and long lunch breaks are considered to be a waste of productive employee time. But good leaders understand, that if properly utilised and channelised, these typical time wasters can be used to enhance organisational productivity. The main objective of any organisation is the co-ordination of the actions of a group of individuals to attain a certain goal. This co-ordination does not happen automatically, but requires some effort since individuals do not collaborate on their own on goals that are outside their immediate purview. Initially, before the arrival of Classical Taylorism, this coordination was achieved through an abundant stock of social capital — a concept typically used in economics that refers to connections within and between social networks . The core idea is that social networks inside organisations, be they a religious group or a cricket club, added a certain amount of value to organisations through the attributes they helped build up, like trust and goodwill, between individuals. These values ensured the co-ordination between individuals though they came from differing backgrounds. Once management became a formal science, thinkers assumed that modern companies progressively would replace social capital based informal co-ordination mechanisms with formal ones like management policies, hierarchies and bureaucratic rules. And as businesses started becoming more complex by the day, thinkers were quick to predict the death of social capital. The fact of the matter is that informal co-ordination based on social capital remains an important part of modern businesses, and arguably becomes more important as the nature of the activity performed by the company becomes more complex and technologically sophisticated. Many complex services are very costly to monitor and are better controlled through internalised professional standards than through formal monitoring mechanisms. A highly educated software engineer often knows much more about his own productivity than his supervisor; more technical information is often shared during coffee table conversations than during formal meetings, and more innovative ideas emerge during those prolonged lunch discussions rather than in closed door brain storming meetings. A number of empirical studies suggest that hightech industries are often dependent on the informal exchange of knowledge, simply because formal exchange would slow down the speed of interchange. Social capital, though informal , remains a very critical element in today’s co-ordination mechanism. After all, it is very commonsensical that people tend to be more productive in an environment which has trust and goodwill embedded in it than something which is tightly hierarchical and formal.