What Happens to Communication When Part of a Team Is Relocated?

The move distanced some clinicians from the center’s radiation-treatment planning room, which housed specialized hardware and software and was the go-to space for interdisciplinary teams to congregate and plan treatments for cancer patients.

“This room was a very vibrant, interdisciplinary space,” says Jillian Chown, an associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.

In a recent study, Chown, Christopher Liu of the University of Oregon, and a set of clinicians and staff from the cancer center investigated how the center’s expansion and subsequent relocation was affecting its clinicians’ workflow. With part of the team now located farther away from the planning room, the researchers wondered how the clinicians might respond. Chown and Liu were surprised by what they found.

Not only did clinicians who moved to another building use the treatment-planning room less often, but so did the clinicians who stayed in the main building, even though they had easy access to the room. Instead of planning treatments together in the room as they used to, the radiation teams increasingly turned to email communication.

The results highlight an often-unintended consequence of growing an organization: fewer face-to-face interactions.

“Organizations that are growing or moving can create disruption among their employee interactions,” says Chown, who studies how healthcare organizations adapt to changes. “It can affect both communication and collaboration, and this research shows that organizations need to be prepared for those consequences.”

A consequence of separating teams

To study the effect that relocating staff had on the team, Chown and Liu worked with hospital staff to collect information on 232 healthcare providers’ email patterns and badge-swiping data for the two months before and four months after the relocation.

“We thought it was a particularly interesting situation where some clinicians had to move but had clear requirements to come back to the main hospital building,” Chown says. “We wanted to know how the move ultimately affected the nature of interaction among these teams.”

The change was noticeable. Before the move, members of the radiation oncology team visited the treatment-planning room an average of 2.96 times per week.

But after the move, that dropped to 1.1 visits per week. Use of the treatment room went down for everyone and most of all for those who moved to the new building.

“We definitely expected that the people who moved away would use it less, but we did not expect that everybody would use it less,” Chown says. Yet it made sense: if the room was designed for three team members to congregate and plan treatments, and one team member was not able to come, it would not be as effective for the other two members to meet without that person.

The consequence, Chown says, is that “suddenly, you’re not having people collaborate in the same way that they used to.”

Instead, clinicians shifted much of their treatment planning to email. Chown and Liu examined 53,592 unique email pairs among the clinicians, categorized by department and building location. They found that, after the relocation, email exchanges increased among clinicians who now worked in different buildings by 1 percent—a small but statistically significant increase. And email exchanges increased by 1.8 percent across all email pairs.

“Email rates definitely went up for everyone,” Chown says. “It appeared that the treatment planning may have moved from in the room to email.”

Anecdotally, it seemed like clinicians continued to use the treatment-planning room for the most complicated cases, Chown found. “Those were instances where people were still showing up,” she says.

Understanding which work can be done remotely versus in person

In surveys, the hospital found that patient satisfaction did not decrease after the relocation. But the researchers believe it will be important for the hospital to study how the change in treatment planning will affect long-term patient outcomes.

The study also offers clear implications for leaders outside of a healthcare setting. For one, don’t just focus on the direct impact of scaling; make sure to consider the potential unintended consequences as well.

“It is important to be thoughtful about how you grow and design your organizations, in terms of where offices and teams are, because it has such a big impact on how people interact,” Chown says.

In the post-pandemic world, where remote work has become more common, it is often left up to the workers themselves to figure out which work can be done remotely, Chown says.

“In this study, it appeared that the clinicians were making the right call by still coming together on the most complicated cases,” she says. “But that’s what leaders need to be aware of—when it is most necessary for employees to collaborate in person.”