Knowledge workers are getting increasingly important for business but being an entirely new breed of workers organizations all over the world are struggling to find ways for improving the effectiveness of their knowledge workers. The kinds of work knowledge workers do are diverse and amorphous which creates challenges in accessing their productivity and finding ways to improve them. The authors have been researching this matter since 2006 studying knowledge workers in several organizations. Based on their observation that knowledge workers spend half of their time interacting with others, they have identified five ways in which these interactions can be constrained, they are physical, technical, contextual, social or cultural, and temporal.   

Source: McKinsey