Peter Smith

and also with the goal of becoming more productive and collaborative.

And then they were busy implementing a lot of technology tools, which were also enablers to improve collaboration.

And my comment was that they were spending millions of dollars on each of these initiatives and had no ability to establish a baseline and no ability to measure any actual impact or change in the behavior.

We don't profess to measure productivity.

What we can show you is changes in effectiveness and productivity, which is a proxy for a change in productivity.

It came out of the industrial revolution where they were looking at how many widgets can we produce?

And in a knowledge-based environment, productivity is a very difficult thing to measure.

And other than the financial results of a company overall.

So really, if you want to

if you want to do it and we're having some early discussions with some clients that want to start looking at tying change in this measure to performance management.

Well, the practical thing.

So one of the things that we did is the first client was a major bank who was shifting the

thousands of people from traditional office environments to activity-based workspace.

And they were creating spaces with 500 people.

And they wanted to see who should actually share the space with each other with the view of that it would improve the collaborative performance.

So what we then did is we pulled data sets after 100.

Typically, they say at least 100 days in the new space or the new environment before you measure again.

So if you look at the data sets, we'll pull data from everything from email to messaging to web conferencing to documents.

And we use that.

We have algorithms that actually look at the strength of a relationship between people, which is not based just on volume, but also reciprocity.