"The Science of Serendipity in the Workplace"

• Firms are thinking up new ways to encourage interactions among employees who normally don't work with each other. The hope is that these casual face-to-face chats among people with different skills might spark new ideas, lead to new solutions or at the least, increase workplace camaraderie.

• To make those connections happen, some firms are taking a scientific approach—collecting and analyzing data about their teams and mathematically computing the likelihood that employees will meet. In some instances, they are squeezing workers into smaller spaces so they are more likely to bump into each other. In others, they are installing playful prompts, like trivia games, to get workers talking in traditional conversational dead zones, such as elevators.

• Designs for Google Inc.'s...new headquarters, expected to be completed in 2015, set out to maximize casual employee conversations, which the firm says were responsible for innovations such as Gmail and Street View. "We want it to be easy [for] Googlers to collaborate and bump into each other," says a Google spokeswoman.

• But most companies are "still really primitive at this," says Greg Lindsay, a visiting scholar at New York University who studies interactions in the workplace. "They compress people in the same space, put in a coffee machine and just hope that something good happens."

Read the full WSJ story here.