How spatial settings affect workplace co-ordination

“Dr Karla Sayegh When people think about joint ways of working, they usually focus on focal co-ordinating: introducing new technology, updating communication processes, designing workflows or clarifying roles to realise a common goal. Yet the effectiveness of joint work goes beyond such social or procedural arrangements. Focal co-ordinating depends heavily on a less visible, embodied underlying layer that the research calls subsidiary co-ordinating: how we sense our physical and social settings, our awareness of unfolding situations and how we interpret our colleagues’ movements and actions and respond instinctively and intuitively. This research is based on a 2-year ethnography of a major teaching hospital relocation in Canada, with a focus on neonatal intensive care. “When we first went into our setting, we expected that the hospital could minimise organisational disruptions from the change in space through better planning, new roles and more training. But when the physical environment changed, the taken-for-granted patterns of sensory and bodily engagement of the staff were severed overnight and no amount of procedural or social fixes could repair these disruptions,” says Karla, Assistant Professor in Organisational Theory and Information Systems at Cambridge Judge, who has examined such subsidiary co-ordinating and identified just how important it is to effective teamwork and achieving desired results. “It turned out that focal co-ordinating depended on these subsidiary elements to function. So imagine an account manager who used to glance across the trading floor to read a colleague’s body language during a client call now sitting in a closed office, missing those silent cues entirely. Or a newspaper editor who once shouted across the newsroom to kill a story before it went to print now having to send emails that could arrive too late. Or a salesperson who used to overhear a teammate’s pitch and absorb competitive intelligence without even trying, becoming suddenly isolated and needing to reinvent the wheel on every deal. This embodied, habitual fabric of organising is built over years of working together in the same setting. And that’s what ultimately needs repairing when the physical space changes.” When we first went into our setting, we expected that the hospital could minimise organisational disruptions from the change in space through better planning, new roles and more training. But when the physical environment changed, the taken-for-granted patterns of sensory and bodily engagement of the staff were severed overnight and no amount of procedural or social fixes could repair these disruptions. Dr Karla Sayegh Distinguishing between focal and subsidiary co-ordination The research co-authored by Karla explores co-ordination and space through a lens of focal-versus-subsidiary co-ordination – showing how spatial disruption “cannot be fully addressed through social or procedural adjustments alone but must involve the reconstruction of embodied subsidiary co-ordinating”. The research draws on noted studies from the 1950s and 1960s that examined focal and subsidiary knowledge, and applied this to the focal and subsidiary facets of co-ordination. It defines focal co-ordinating as the “intentional efforts through which actors align tasks, communicate directives, assign roles, delineate responsibilities and structure workflows”, while defining subsidiary co-ordination as “the embodied, taken-for-granted actions that sustain joint work” and relying on “pre-reflective modes of perception and action through which actors become attuned to one another’s positions, rhythms and movements”. Previous research focused on how professions can resolve differences Karla’s previous research focused on how professions can resolve differences in how they approach work practices following a merger. One previous study co-authored by Karla developed a model that depicts how 2 groups of professionals reconcile work practice differences by converging on whether to rely on abstract knowledge based on scientific evidence or experiential knowledge based on the actual work experience of people involved. A separate study looked at the role that new members of a profession (so-called novice newcomers) can play to help mediate and soften entrenched positions among more established professionals, in part because the novices are deemed less threatening by the other professionals. Those studies moved scholarship beyond previous research that had focused on how different professions (such as engineers and architects) can integrate for a common cause, to examine integration within a given profession where it may have been assumed (not always correctly) that similar training would result in similar ways of doing things. From an open setting to private rooms, with big implications on healthcare co-ordination The spatial study looked again at the NICU, but this time with a focus on the physical layout where health workers operate. Whereas NICU professionals in Montreal had previously operated in a large open room (with a central nursing station) divided into multiple pods of 6 to 8 baby incubators, relocation to a new facility meant a switch to private patient rooms along 4 wide corridors in a way intended to reduce risk of infection and provide a more private setting for parent-child bonding. Yet this spatial shift, says the research, “fundamentally altered how medical staff coordinated care, disrupting sensory access, habitual bodily actions and intercorporeal responsiveness”. There was plenty of training before the relocation to let staff know of the new arrangements, and this prepared them for the new physical layout, but there were still breakdowns in subsidiary co-ordinating in several areas that posed significant risks to patient safety in a neo-natal unit where babies face life-or-death situations on a regular basis. Specifically, the research focuses on disruption and repair efforts, and finds that focal co-ordinating adjustments such as reassigning roles or new uses of technology were insufficient to make such repairs. Instead, there was a need for ‘embodied repairs’ that included a focus on new habitual actions and reallocating ‘who-senses-what’ in certain fast-moving situations. Drawing on air traffic control and other fast-paced work environments The research on babies in acute care draws on other fast-response settings such as air traffic control centres, emergency response centres and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where co-ordination “depends on shared perception of situations, continual interaction, engaging in joint action, and the configuration of artifacts for predictable and easy access”. “The role of the body in coordination – how we sense, how we become jointly aware when working together or how we move in immediate response to one another, is often overlooked in theories of organisational change,” says Karla, whose research cites, in the context of joint action, a 2019 study co-authored by 2 other Cambridge Judge faculty members, Mark de Rond (Professor of Organisational Ethnography) and Jennifer Howard-Grenville (Diageo Professor in Organisation Studies) that focused on how sensemaking can unfold from the body. How disrupted co-ordination can be re-established The research identifies 4 themes from prior research on embodiment that help illustrate how co-ordination that is disrupted can be re-established following a change in a workplace spatial configuration. 1 Aesthetic experience Aesthetic experience, or how people perceive and engage with their workplace environment. Previous research had shown that changes in the spatial setting alters visual, auditory and other sensory experiences, and thus shapes how actors interpret situations and co-ordinate their actions. 2 The body schema The ‘body schema’, or how the body habitually acts in a certain familiar spatial setting. “When space changes, highly developed body schemas may be vulnerable to unexpected disruption: just as an experienced city driver struggles when navigating off-road terrain, experienced workers are likely to struggle to recalibrate their bodily interactions.” 3 Situational awareness Situational awareness, or the capacity to remain focused on events as they unfold and adapt in real time, which relies on perception of both the environment and the activities of others. “In fast-paced settings, actors maintain situational awareness by monitoring subtle cues in their surroundings, enabling them to anticipate actions and adjust their participation accordingly”, but this shared awareness weakens when space is reconfigured, say the authors. 4 Intercorporeality Intercorporeality, or how people understand each others’ actions through an awareness of their own bodies – because in certain activities actions by our bodies enable others to “anticipate and respond to one another without the need for explicit verbal communication”. The study focused on a leading Canadian children’s hospital that moved to a new $3 billion tertiary care campus, and specifically on the 52-bed NICU, which provides care for preterm babies and those born at full term but with complications or illness that require surgery or other complex medical treatment – both of which require constant monitoring and navigation of multiple challenges. Data for the research included more than 370 hours of shadowing NICU staff and 192 hours of observations, more than 150 formal or informal interviews, 725 photos and more than 230 media articles about the new hospital and relocation. Interviews illustrate the issue of new spatial arrangements As an example of how the new spatial arrangement affected working practices: In the old NICU, the open pod arrangements “allowed caregivers to sustain awareness of all the pod’s babies even while completing their own tasks”, so if a colleague stepped away other caregivers monitored the entire pod. “We keep an eye and ear out for one another’s babies all the time because we can do it easily while doing our own work. You can hear or see them all in the room,” said one nurse interviewed by the authors. In the new space, by contrast, gaps in coverage easily resulted, such as in this situation: “Nurse X calls out to Nurse Y and motions for her to watch her babies: ‘I just need a glucometer, I’ll go quickly!’ At that moment Nurse Y is already on the move in the opposite direction; she says to X, ‘I’m going this way!’ Regardless of the attempted communication, they both disappear, leaving the babies effectively unattended.” Say the authors: “In the old space, an evolving situation would be perceived and understood, often non-verbally, by multiple caregivers within visual and auditory range, prompting an immediate and shared helping response. This reliance on the pre-reflective knowing of a situation to mount a joint response was disrupted in the new space. Caregivers could no longer perceive who was nearby, whether they were available to help, or whether they needed help themselves.” Regarding knowledge sharing, a similar shift occurred with the new spatial setup, because caregivers were “now tethered to alcoves or inside their assigned rooms”, thus hindering informal interactions where knowledge is shared. As one caregiver said about the new space: “I am always walking around the unit working to get information. From one coordinator station to another and then to the birthing center in the other wing to check in on the status of a fragile admission. In the old space, I just knew what was going on by walking into the big open room, and the resus (resuscitation) room was a stone’s throw away.” Different ways to restore subsidiary – The research, after chronicling the disruption in subsidiary co-ordination caused by the spatial shift, introduces 4 dimensions of what the authors call embodied repair, that helped to restore such subsidiary co-ordination. 1 Reconfiguring sensory access Reconfiguring sensory access, through modifying the new space or deploying artifacts in ways that re-establish lost perception. One novel technique involved placing rolled-up towels in the door to allow sound to travel across rooms even though this fell afoul of the new space’s privacy and hygiene designs. 2 Establishing new habitual actions Establishing new habitual actions, such as repeated reminders not to leave babies unattended and to yell for help when needed. 3 Reallocating who-senses-what Reallocating who-senses-what. Caregivers in the old NICU all had roughly the same access to information, whereas the new space required a different approach. “The repair to subsidiary coordinating entailed the move away from previously interiorised distribution of sensing responsibilities and replacing it with a novel basis for ‘who-senses-what,’” say the authors. 4 Reorienting intercorporeal action Reorienting intercorporeal action, by discarding old ways of engaging with fast-moving situations and developing new ways of action that, over time, became habitual in a way that allowed a new way of subsidiary co-ordinating. Organisational implications for other workplaces Karla and her colleague say the findings go beyond NICUs to carry implications for practitioners in other sectors where spatial configurations may change, and it poses questions to managers who shift from enclosed offices to open-plan or shared workspaces without proper regard to coordination. “These adaptations expose a blind spot in many space change initiatives: the tendency to treat space as a neutral backdrop for work, rather than as a constitutive element of coordination itself. Thus, our study suggests that the success of space redesign initiatives is largely reliant on recognising and designing for the subsidiary, somatic dimension of everyday work.” Featured faculty Karla Sayegh Assistant Professor in Organisational Theory and Information Systems View Karla's profile Featured research Faraj, S. and Sayegh, K. (2026) “Spacing bodies: the interplay between focal and subsidiary coordinating.” Academy of Management Journal (DOI: 10.5465/amj.2024.0300) (published online Mar 2026) Related articles AI and technology How the structure of online reviews shapes their helpfulness The usefulness of online product reviews depends not only on what is said, but on how the information is structured. Research co-authored at Cambridge Judge Business School shows that the sequencing of positive and negative points plays a central role in how readers interpret reviews. This suggests that better-designed review forms – ones that guide how feedback is organised – could significantly improve their value for decision-making. 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