Enforce or leave it as it is?
What if you prepare a seating plan in your team that's perfect, in your opinion, and then you see employees changing their assigned seats? They may have a better idea of what their tasks require and how to work effectively together.
Would you try to enforce the original, formal seating plan, or would you encourage organic chaos, based on the preferences and interpretations of your people? Unplanned and informal interactions bring advantages. They compensate for the blind spots which bureaucratic structures often have.
The interactions that are structured and demanded by a formal structure can work as guidelines for the evolution of social networks in the organization, and these structures don’t have to be based on any superior knowledge about who is to interact with whom.
Physical spaces, org charts, meeting schedules and other instruments can be still used to structure interactions among employees and teams, though they can't be too strict.
Don’t prohibit natural tendencies
Formal structures in an organization are based on many assumptions about who, how and with whom employees should interact so that the organization functions effectively. These assumptions are grounded in org charts, incentive schemes and also physical layouts in offices at the headquarters. The aim of organizational design is to facilitate what the company believes to be productive behavior.
The study presented on the INSEAD business school website suggests that lightly enforced, completely random structures, are better than none. That's important for companies in innovative fields such as tech, and everywhere else where optimal collaboration design is elusive.
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