Workplace Design

Most people like to work in a sociable setting, writes Luke Collins.

Back in 1999, employees joining animation studio Pixar were in for a shock upon entering the company’s California headquarters. Designed by Pixar’s founder, the late Steve Jobs himself, the building extends from a massive central atrium with high-top tables, couches and other areas to sit and chat. All corridors—if you can call them that—lead to that airy space, which has a café, mailboxes and initially housed the only bathrooms in the entire building until a staff outcry forced the installation of another pair. Everything about the Pixar building forces you to interact with co-workers, whether you’re arriving for the day, grabbing a coffee, having lunch, or sneaking to the toilet.

“There’s a temptation in our networked age,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson, “to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity.” It may be a stretch to add “workplace design” to the lengthy list of products and sectors where Jobs is rightly regarded as a visionary. But like the iPad, iPod, iTunes and humble computer mouse, he got it right.

We typically notice workplace design when it’s bad: when we find ourselves enclosed in a fabric-walled cubicle, the outside world replaced by a neon tube and a potted plant. Yet while it’s long been clear that our office environment is a major factor in how happy and productive we are, it’s only recently that a more worrying theory has emerged: we may have been working the wrong way for a very, very long time. “It’s one of those things you don’t see when you’re living it,” says Ben Watson, the executive creative director of iconic office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. The good news is that change is afoot. And having endured a period of technological innovation that convinced many that we’d all we be working from home and telecommuting, a fresh balance is being struck between working alone and collaborating with others. And by doing so, we may actually be returning to the original intent of what became the bane of the modern office: the cubicle.

Bob Probst certainly didn’t imagine corporate drones trapped in sardine-sized spaces when he conceived the “Action Office” half a century ago, an era when corporate America’s ideal office comprised an ocean of grey-flannelled professionals seated at identical, orderly rows of desks. In 1958, the founder of Herman Miller, Hugh DuPree, gave Probst carte blanche to rethink workplace design. Probst, a former professor of fine arts at the University of Colorado, had noticed that the successful companies he’d worked for allowed employees to circulate freely. He envisioned the workplace as a large open area in which all employees could freely interact, sectioned off with a mixture of completely enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces. In 1964, Herman Miller unveiled Probst’s vision to escape corporate corridors and boxes: the Action Office. In 1968, he modified it to become completely mobile: partitions and desks and shelves could be moved, allowing offices to be remade overnight.

What Probst never envisioned was the way companies would instead use the Action Office as a means to cram workers into ever-smaller spaces—the dreaded cubicle. “The dark side of this is that not all organisations are intelligent and progressive,” he told Metropolis magazine in 1998, two years before his death. “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.” Herman Miller’s Watson agrees. “No matter what people think now, it certainly wasn’t the original intent of the Action Office to divide workers into individual cubicles,” he says. The intent was for it to be “a very flexible, easily changed workspace that could adapt to different kinds of work,” Watson says—which sounds very much like the latest trend in workplace design.

So it seems that our ideal working environment is coming full circle. After decades of cramming workers into smaller and smaller spaces, the partitions are coming down again. And the catalyst is the very technology that was originally thought to spell the end of working in offices: the Internet. After more than a decade of struggling to maintain productivity and connectivity with co-workers, a generation of employees is recognizing what Apple’s Jobs foresaw: a wifi network can’t replicate actual human interaction.

In fact, we’re increasingly living two working lives. We undertake individual tasks whenever, wherever we have to—checking e-mails from home in the morning, tapping away on laptop computers in coffee shops. Yet research shows that once we are in a workplace, the majority of our time is spent collaborating with others—whether it’s a formal meeting, or chit-chat. That’s why companies are devoting less and less floor space to individual workstations, instead adding group space in all of its varieties, from communal tables to lounge seating to coffee bars. A decade ago, the percentage of corporate real-estate budgets devoted to individual workspaces was as high as 90 percent; today, it’s regularly 50-50. And freelancers and consultants—who only a few years ago relished the opportunity to work remotely—are flocking to shared office spaces.

“I don’t know if it’s a backlash against that ideal of a decade ago that we were all going to go home to work. I just think there wasn’t the understanding of the social nature of what work is,” says Watson. “We all know that from our own personal experience: human interaction is powerful. Who we are as human beings hasn’t changed. The digital workplace means we can get our individual work done at Starbuck’s or at home. But if the actual benefit of work and the productivity happens when knowledge is shared—that’s 70 percent of our productive time—organizations have to create the place where that can happen.”

It seems some countries and employers have always understood that. Cubicles never took off in Europe the way they did in the United States, for example. And when Herman Miller’s director of insight and exploration, Gretchen Gscheidle, sought advice on places to study collaboration, the company’s United Kingdom researchers recommended workplaces in a familiar country. “They said very clearly: ‘You have to go to Australia. There’s something relative to collaboration that they collectively are doing more, better, and with ease’,” Gscheidle says. “We found you had more of those types of collaborative spaces and collaborative events at a higher rate as well. We’re still trying to understand what you’re doing more and better and so forth, but it was palpable.”

Published by AFR BOSS, February 2013.