Are “casual collisions” at work really that valuable?
September 9, 2019
I create experiences that help people live and work better.
This is one of those weeks with a seeming over-abundance of networking opportunities and obligations. On Thursday, I will be attending Adobe’s annual “Adobe For All” summit focused on D&I in our workplace. Since people are flying in from all over the world for this event, several other team meetings and summits have popped up around it. While I’m generally outgoing and confident, I’m also fundamentally an introvert, which means heavy doses of social interaction sap me of energy. So this is all a pretty big lift. Is it worth it?
Turns out the answer is yes. I’ve written before about a term we use in Silicon Valley: “casual collisions.” The accepted lore says that when two employees bump into each other over a company-provided experience such as a meal or a party, they can spark a new idea on the spot, which will lead to innovation and profit for the employer. In lay terms, casual collisions are about serendipity, and they’re the justification for many expensive investments in employee experience.
As a creator of these kinds of (often costly) workplace experiences that are meant to help people live and work better, I’ve always been interested in the mythical value of casual collisions, but never saw any research or data to back it up. So I led my own research project at Adobe in partnership with Ksenia Pachikov of Field+Studio and our own culinary team’s Emilie Zanger to learn more. The results were intriguing: Turns out that while the mythical “spark to riches” encounter isn’t usually how it works (no, Gmail wasn’t created from one magical collision), and in fact, it often takes a series of collisions over time before colleagues pursue a project together, there is still quite a bit of value in casual collisions.
The value generated for both employees and their employers is fourfold: Functional, Personal, Cultural and Financial. Functionally, these unplanned interactions help employees piece together the complex and often opaque matrix of relationships that matter in a large corporate environment. Snippets of conversation overheard in the lunch line can lead to connections made, relationships forged, questions answered, opportunities discovered, and the pace of business quickened.
“Collisions with people outside of my org in the cafe help me understand new & exciting things my colleagues are working on.” - Adobe employee
Personally, reliably bumping into friendly faces when out and about over the course of your day creates a sense of belonging in a large organization. One research participant explicitly noted that “sitting at a communal lunch table helps me feel included.” Casual collisions positively impact the emotional wellbeing of our workforce, the value of which cannot be overstated. This is particularly true for populations that may have the hardest time finding a way “in” at work — think introverts, new hires, employees on geographically distributed teams, and underrepresented minorities. When you couple this finding with the national epidemic of loneliness that I’ve written about before, it’s clear that casual collisions at work have significant social impact. The ROI on this particular value, and the need for more of it, was so clear to us that we started a new program focused on breaking down barriers to social connection. We've installed "join me" signs on tables in our employee cafés that that allow people to visually display their willingness to share space and connect. During the course of our recent pilot over 50% of survey respondents sat with someone unexpected and ~30% of those were with someone they'd never met before.
“Sitting at a communal lunch table helps me feel included.” - Adobe employee
Culturally, chance encounters inspire employees to get involved and give back to the company and their community. We heard countless stories of informal leadership and volunteer opportunities discovered through casual conversations at work. The venue for these kinds of conversations was critical — they didn’t happen in meetings with formal agendas. As one participant in our research noted, an opportunity to lead the local chapter of Adobe’s Asian Employee Network “would never have happened” had he not heard about it through a casual collision. This not only represented a personal opportunity to build and practice leadership skills at work that might impact his internal job growth prospects in the future, it was a direct contribution to a thriving company culture.
But what about the bottom line? Our literature review showed that investments in valuable workplace experiences are a key financial differentiator for employers. Jacob Morgan of HBR found that “top workplace” companies that invest in all aspects of employee experience (cultural, physical, and technological) are four times as profitable as other “top workplaces.” Adobe is one among these elite “experience organizations” in both employee experience and financial performance. While this doesn’t directly point to the financial value of casual collisions, given our other findings about the value of such encounters, it follows logically that investing in and designing workplace experiences that promote casual collisions is an essential part of designing a top workplace.
So how do we do it? What makes a well-designed experience? And how can you design for the highest quality casual collisions? If the power of these spontaneous meetings isn’t akin to love-at-first-sight, then what is it? Casual collisions do usually involve an initial “spark,” or moment of conversation and connection, which most often happens at an event. In fact, a large and/or company-sponsored event often fulfills all the conditions of the “meatiest” collisions:
Diversity of People Encountered - If all you do is show up to work, head straight to your desk, order delivery and head home, the types of people you see will rarely change. But head down to a party and you are much more likely to bump into Amit from finance or Jill from engineering, even if you are in HR.
Duration of the Encounter - Ever have a casual collision with someone in the bathroom? They happen all the time, although we really would prefer they didn’t (as if this wasn’t obvious, we now have the research to back that up). If they do happen, they usually don’t last too long. But if you’re on a lunch break or at an event, chances are you have the mindset and time for a more lengthy conversation.
Divergence of Topics Discussed - Your typical agenda-driven business meeting in a conference room may have a few minutes of small talk (depending on the culture), but quickly moves on to the business at hand. When eating, drinking or socializing, you are more vulnerable and thus more likely to let your guard down and discuss topics that may be unexpected or personal.
If involving diverse people is important to experiences that yield the most value, then it becomes critical to make many different kinds of people feel welcome and included at any event. For example, one sure-fire way to exclude some people is to make alcohol THE sole focus of the event. Beer bashes send the signal that all who don’t drink beer shouldn’t bother to show up. But an employee happy hour with a guest speaker one week, board games another; regular beer, wine, mocktails or similar; and light snacks, will continue to attract a diverse employee base. Better yet, crowdsource ideas for a great event from your own staff. The environment and quality of the food and beverage experience can make a difference too. You don’t always need to spend a lot of money, but depending on the goals of the event, spending a little more on hospitality can help more people feel welcome, encourage them to stay longer, and therefore lead to more quality conversations.
Again, the goal of designing experiences that foster casual collisions is not to inspire a series of magical encounters that immediately lead to major innovations. Instead, our research showed that the connections and ideas that initial collisions generate tend to be reinforced in subsequent weeks/months/years through casual bump-ins at lunch, in wellness centers, and even on forums like Slack. After enough of these bump-ins, some connections will eventually be intentionally explored through scheduled meetings and collaborations.
This makes the experiential design of each of these "bump-in" spots critical as well. Meals are essentially akin to a daily event opportunity so food experiences should follow the same ethos of great event design mentioned above. Warm hospitality, high quality food and being welcoming to all (think about menu diversity to attract more than just the majority palate) will all drive higher participation, leading to more collisions. Defining what other aspects of design will foster collisions and designing these into our workplace is a next step for the global workplace experience team that I am a part of. Stay tuned to hear what we learn and implement there.
Back to the Adobe for All event I described (plus the satellite meetings it has inspired), and the question I posed at the beginning: Is all that time together with my colleagues worth it? Clearly, the answer is yes. While this kind of highly orchestrated event may yield interactions that are more intentional than serendipitous, they are still casual, and they still require that individuals to show up and remain open to the unexpected turn of conversation. I’m excited to have the chance for casual collisions in the coming week, and I’m hoping my more introverted colleagues who may be wondering about the value of all this togetherness might now feel the same way. My own events team is producing the kickoff party at the start of the Adobe For All event, so I can count on a thoughtfully designed experience that will allow me to focus on connecting. So many other partners have put an incredible effort into the activities of the summits I’ll be attending. But the experience design, no matter how masterful, can only take you so far. At the end of the day, we as individuals need to bring our best selves to these experiences, and remain open to the unexpected conversations and relationships they might inspire. In other words, we need to be more planful in seeking out these unplanned encounters. For those introverts reading this who may be convinced but are still looking for resources to make the most of it all, check out my former colleague Karen Wickre’s incredible book “Taking the Work out of Networking” for some hot tips.
Have your own story about a casual collision that bore fruit in your life? If you never paid attention before, I dare you not to notice them now. You’ve probably had at least one in the last 24 hours. Please share in the comments!
