You’ve got a backlog of emails to reply to and reports to complete, but you can’t stop thinking about your upcoming travel and proceed to Google places of interest. One thing leads to another, but you peer over to your right, only to find your co-worker looking exceptionally focused, swaying you back into work.
Yeap, a study published in Harvard Business Review attests that the person seated right next to you in the workplace has a direct impact on your productivity and quality of work. The spillover effect, as the researchers have called it, suggests that at least 10% of your direct seat mate’s productivity influences your own work.
Hence, when he’s relentlessly going at the keyboard, it will rub off on you too. With that said, if he spends his whole day going through various memes and cracking up unexpectedly, this would also affect your work negatively. After all, it’s so easy to get distracted.
The lesson here: Choose who you sit next to in the workplace very wisely..
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