How new coffee machines (and office design) raised revenues by $200 million

Spaces have a huge impact on our psyche. The office is a space where many of us spend a majority of our working time. It makes sense that they should be perfectly optimized to make us bring our best to work. But are they?

Past work has shown that the effectiveness of office design can be assessed in terms of density, social nature, and proximity of people.¹ To improve on these metrics, offices are increasingly  networked, shared, and multipurposed spaces that redefine boundaries and improve overall performance. 

Recognizing this, a pharmaceuticals company used physical design change to nudge employees toward increased communication.¹ They found that when their salespeople increased interactions with co-workers from other teams by 10%, also known as increased exploration, their sales also grew by 10%. Capitalizing on this, the pharmaceuticals company replaced their small and frequent coffee machines with fewer, larger ones. This resulted in increased co-worker exploration and a sales increase by 20%, or $200 million, by the following quarter.