It's time for companies to forget about giant offices

It is generally accepted that when a company grows and employs more employees, it must move to a larger office. But is it so in our day?

More recently, almost all companies have followed this path, says VentureBeat. And the giant of electronic commerce Amazon, which employs over 500 thousand people (7 times more than Google, and 23 times more than Facebook), even build a second headquarters, which will employ about 50 thousand people, employees. But to collect a bunch of workers in one place - does not mean to provide interaction between them.

Curiously, Jeff Bezos himself in his work tries to follow the "rule of two pizzas", which states that there should be so many people in the team that they can be fed with two pizzas. And this is the reason.

There is a mass of evidence that small teams are indeed more effective. For example, the British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar proved that a person can maintain personal relationships with no more than 150 people - this number was even called the "Dunbar number". And according to Stephen Sinofsky, who was responsible for Microsoft for Windows development and marketing, as soon as the company's office starts to be located on two or more floors, the team's interaction immediately collapses.

Meanwhile, there is a way out of the situation. Modern technologies make it possible to communicate without problems to people located on different continents - many companies are already building their structure around individual small groups. For example, this is how the Chilean IT company Doist acts.

Even at an early stage of development, the founders of Doist realized that they could not find all the necessary employees in Chile, and began to look for them abroad. Today the company employs 60 people who live in 27 countries of the world - all these people meet live only once a year, at special meetings of the team.

Automattic, which developed WordPress, also closed its office in San Francisco and transferred all employees to a remote job. So do many other technology companies from the Silicon Valley.

Of course, remote work does not suit every company - a lot of them really need offices. But this does not mean that it is necessary to collect all the staff together, occupying entire buildings - it is much more effective to split the team into small teams, guided by the "rule of two pizzas" and not forgetting the number of Dunbar. The same Amazon instead of a giant anthill for 50 thousand people could open across the country 500 offices for 100 employees in each, and the retailer's business would only benefit from this.

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