Over at PSFK, Jeff Squires notes:
… the growing
trend of professionals stepping out of their cubicle to get work done. The idea
is that nobody actually gets anything done at their desk – the constant
distractions and mundane routines of sitting at one’s desk often prevent any
creative or introspective actions from surfacing. This frustrating aspect of
traditional office life is driving people to seek out “white space” – a term
that implies a place set apart, physically and mentally where the work actually
gets done. “White Space” is subjective – it’s different for everyone. Some seek out
solitude, while others flock to crowded coffee shops to hunker down and get it
done. The bottom line is, people perform better when they have options. While this may seem glaringly obvious to many, it can be a hard pill for
companies to swallow. However, it seems the technology and creative industries
have taken notice and are taking steps to nourish this Bedouin work style and
still keep employees in the office.
He points to this New York Times article titled ” You Won’t Find Me in the Office.”
Technology companies are eliminating assigned space for open floor plans.
Cisco Systems, Google and Sun Microsystems have already knocked down partitions.
This month, Intel began testing alternative floor plans at three locations —
creating open work areas with clusters of armchairs, library-style tables with
laptop plugs, electronic white boards where inspired doodles can be transferred
to e-mail, and a variety of conerence rooms when privacy is needed. It is not
just the high-tech firms that are becoming cozier.The creative industries — such as advertising and design — are embracing the
approach, too. At ?What If! (yes, that is really the name, punctuation and all)
an “innovations company” (that seems to mean marketing) with a Manhattan
outpost, employees never sit in the same place two days in a row. This is known
as “hot desking,” said Nina Powell, the managing director of the United States
office, and the purpose is to give workers a perspective that changes with the
task. When the work requires collaboration and interaction, she said, the communal
tables are the place to be. When the work is more introspective, there are
cafe-style booths providing quiet and privacy.
Indeed! These are some of the core concepts guiding the design of our new space for the Prosperity Institute – lots of interesting space for interaction, for visitors, for impromptu meetings, for connecting and catching up. And space that creatives and students as well as business and political types feel “at home” in.
In Rise, I said the organizational precursors of the creative company are Edison’s laboratory and Andy Warhol’s factory. The traditional office is a place for control and for gossip and small talk. It is inefficiency and waste taken to a new level. People visit with one another, chit-chat, and get little actual work done. Just watch any episode of “The Office” for crying out loud. With the rise of electronic technology, like the stuff I’m using now, we can get focused work done more effectively at home, on the road, in a coffee shop and other venues than at the office. Ar home I work on the couch – I’ve given up my home office. Right now I’m working on a rattan lounge chair.
The office – or what used to be the office – now becomes a venue for social interaction, for catching up, for discussing joint projects. The social function becomes less about killing time and more important as a way to connect, build relationships and keep up. One trend I’ve noticed in my own work-style is that when I meet with colleagues and collaborators at the office, we spend a lot more time catching up on each other’s lives and bonding so to speak then even talking about our actual work. We then go home and send e-mail to catch up on that.
December 24th, 2007 at 10:58 am
When you flush one of those public toilets, part of the draining water becomes mist and coats the walls of the stall with fecal coliform bacteria. I guess they probably aren’t that harmful, but it is still pretty gross.
December 24th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
This reminds me a lot of what it’s like being a student in college–you grab space in the library or find a favorite nook in one of the buildings and start typing away. It seems like a lot of the bureaucratic elements of office life would have to change to make this a sustainable work situation for a company. A paperless office is a must, because if there are no offices, there are also no places for personal paper files. I’m sure this setup also creates nightmares for office managers because they never would know where to find people to deliver mail, get signatures, etc.
Maybe the creative class revolution needs to encourage a bureaucratic revolution as well!
December 24th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
The business of using face-to-face in the office for personal chats and email for work communications makes a lot of sense. Most of the time, if you are personally acquainted with your correspondee, written memos are efficient. You write when you choose, they read and respond as they choose, and you have an easily filed record of the interchange.
However, a close working relationship usually needs a bit of real social interaction. Our human hardware and software need a wide spectrum of sensory data to assess another person. Can you trust them? Did they understand what you said (and vice versa)? Body posture, facial expression, tone of voice…. OK, maybe you could get all of these on a webcam, but I’ve just read a news story about how people can recognize a friend from a stranger on the basis of personal SMELL. Test subjects in an MRI were exposed to the smells of people they knew, as well as those of strangers. Personal human odors skip the brain’s usual pathways for smell-monitoring and classification; they trigger a short-cut route through a more primitive part of the brain. The smell of a stranger alerts you to a source of possible danger. You become more generally alert, without being consciously aware of it. If SMELL can do this to us, what else might we learn from face-to-face without being consciously aware of it?
That social chat in the office isn’t just emotionally rewarding (a subject for another day); I think it lubricates the later exchange of written words. At the very least, it probably will curb your urge to send a ‘flame’.
December 28th, 2007 at 1:17 am
You are a little late. In the mid-to-late 90’s the advertising agency Chiat Day tired this in both their LA and NY offices – no assigned offices, hot-desking etc. It was an expensive, unmitigated disaster and quality creative people fled the firm, nearly killing it. Why? It was completely anonymous. People would commit to meetings in public spaces and have to call each other’s mobile phones to figure out who they were meeting. Nobody knew where to find anyone from day to day, and nobody ever felt like they had a place in the firm. Really, nobody. And the lucky few who had assigned offices (accounting and the most senior) were resented with a vengeance.
There is a lot of real data coming out that successful businesses need a combination of real offices where you can close the door and concentrate, and public areas where either groups can work, or people can encounter each other randomly and strike up conversations in some mix of public and private. ‘White space’ serves a function where people have no privacy (e.g. cubicles). The rest turns out to be trend and nonsense (surprise!). Let’s get over the fashion and start creating real spaces for real, complex people. Sorry if it costs some money, but we are worth it.