The gym and the pitch – or why we should fight with our coworkers

If we have kitchens in our homes, why do we go to restaurants? If we have TVs in our homes, why do we go to the cinema? And if we have workspaces in our homes, why would we go to an office?

We asked this last question to 16,000 office workers in our latest Global Workplace Survey, and we learned that across generations, we want the office to feel like a hospitality experience. Gen Zs, Millennials and Gen X all agreed that they wanted their office to feel like a coffee shop or boutique hotel.

But across generations and living situations, people value the office as a place to focus, to work with teams and to get things done. These three groups noted that the top reasons for coming to the office are to focus on getting the job done, sit with their team and socialise with colleagues, alongside participating in scheduled in-person team meetings.

In other words, what makes an office special is that it is a unique platform to accomplish our work, alone and with others, and achieve our goals. So, maybe we should learn from another environment designed to help us achieve our goals: the gym.

The gym

If you don’t love going to the gym, you’re not alone. In Angela Duckworth’s research on grit, she spoke with Olympic athletes, spelling bee champions and chess grand masters and it is remarkably common for these masters of their craft to dislike the deliberate practice that got them there. Yet they persist through the day-to-day grind because they are focused on longer-term goals.

A workplace that is designed, like a gym, for deliberate practice and achievement is first a place to showcase greatness, whether it is an award-winning deliverable or a masterful product pitch. Our environment should inspire us to set stretch goals, a place we walk past every day and think: “Someday, I’ll be as good as that.”

Then our workplace must provide environments to concentrate on our skills: places of focused attention, free from distractions. Tellingly, our workplace survey showed that high-performing workplaces were three times more likely to provide access to spaces for focused concentration than low-performing workplaces.

Finally, what makes a gym so effective is our coach, our personal trainer, our mentor who observes our progress and tells us what we could be doing better. Research indicates that this kind of feedback and mentorship is much more likely to happen in person than virtually. Consider the findings by Emanuel, Harrington and Pallais in ‘The power of proximity to co-workers: training for tomorrow or productivity today?’ working paper, which found that: “Proximity increases on-the-job training. Engineers working in the same building as all their teammates received 22% more online feedback than engineers with distant teammates.” It also noted that: “Proximity boosts [employees’] long-run development [and] increases on-the-job training.”

The workplace can bring huge value to its users by creating an environment for coaching, concentration and deliberate practice, but few achievements these days are individual and very few problems can be solved alone. At some point, we need to leave the gym and step onto the pitch.

The pitch

The workplace, like the football pitch, is common ground for people from different generations, abilities and ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds to come together around shared values and passions. In fact, 77% of respondents to our workplace survey formed friendships with people of other races and ethnicities in the workplace and 88% formed friendships with people of other ages.

But then, the hard work starts: all those diverse players with their different skill sets must learn to operate as a single unit despite their individual differences. To do this, they have to argue with each other. This constructive disagreement, while difficult, is critical to team formation and cohesion. In his book ‘Think again: the power of knowing what you don’t know’, Adam Grant argues: “Task conflict has been linked to higher creativity and smarter choices. There’s evidence that when teams experience moderate task conflict, they generate more ideas… innovate more… and make better decisions.”

Or as Leonard and Straus assert in ‘Putting Your Company’s Whole Brain to Work’: “If you want an innovative organization, you need to hire, work with and promote people who make you uncomfortable.”

Finally, the pitch is the arena of play, where we test our capabilities against ourselves or our competitors. I ask myself, what is our game day? What is that moment when we need to be at peak performance and how are we drilling for it?

Our workplace survey showed that we want our workplaces to feel like a boutique hotel, but act like a gym and a pitch. Grinding at the gym and arguing on the pitch are both difficult. But perhaps that is what makes them so important. Maybe we value the office because it is a place where we can do hard things – and learning to do hard things is currently more important than ever.

It is entirely possible these days to surround ourselves with friends, neighbours and acquaintances who all grew up the same way, vote for the same people, worship in the same institutions, eat the same cuisine and consume the same media. In fact, the workplace may be the last place in our society where we form relationships with people unlike ourselves. In an increasingly polarised world, perhaps the ability to disagree constructively and find common ground – a skill we learn in the workplace – is one of the most important of our time.