By Ian Ellison
Edition 3 – June 2014 Pages 27-30
Tags: workplace design • productivity • teamwork
At 3pm on 18 November 2013, Oliver Burkeman, prolific Guardian columnist and former Foreign Press Association Young Journalist of the Year, published a blog entitled “Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell”[1].
The post, liberally peppered with cross-references to other damning evidence, was based on a Harvard Business Review report [2] summarising a new paper by Kim and de Dear (2013), two researchers from the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, Australia. Their peer-reviewed paper, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, reanalysed post-occupancy evaluation data from the University of California, Berkeley, numbering almost 43,000 individual responses from over 300 buildings.
Kim and de Dear concluded that the claimed communication benefits of open-plan workspaces were compromised in a number of ways, a premise that has been evidenced time and again. By 3:05pm the first response to Burkeman’s blog was posted. By 1:33pm on 21 November, 257 comments had followed. The overwhelming majority were viscerally negative, condemning open-plan workspaces. Many said they spoke from personal experience.
Open-plan offices, in various forms, have been around since before the industrial revolution. Burkeman’s treatment probably doesn’t surprise any of us. We have witnessed and debated this topic so many times it sometimes feels like Groundhog Day; ‘open-plan’ touches a raw nerve in a far broader debate. For me, it has almost becoming an emotive distraction. But at the core of this issue lies the basis of what we do. We all contribute to the facilities management (FM) and corporate real estate (CRE) industry and profession responsible for producing working environments on behalf of organisations and their users. We claim a wealth of expertise to address organisational workspace challenges.
Depending on organisational desire (and perhaps size of bank account), through workspace redesign we can variously address resource-focused economy and efficiency, outcome-focused effectiveness [3], expression [4] and even environmental contribution [5], whatever these may indeed contextually prove to be.
Changing space and changing culture
For some, our calling card is ‘change your space, change your culture’. And yet, despite expansive empirical and theoretical consideration, workspace opinions remain divided. The efficacy of given workspace solutions remains moot, contested through a range of ambivalent academic, practical and media perspectives. What is fascinating is the pervasive reoccurrence of the same fundamental human concerns about the workspace.
These typically, but not exhaustively, include concerns about privacy and confidentiality versus interaction and communication, concentration versus distraction, open versus closed spatial arrangements, and the interrelationship between workspace and status, irrespective of specific profession (Price & Fortune, 2008). For any doubt regarding their perennial occurrence, Port (1995) documents remarkably similar issues, within context, in the mid-19th century British civil service of imperial London! [6]
Often it doesn’t seem to matter how much evidence or justification we have for the ‘right’ organisational solutions; they just don’t land well with the people they affect. Moreover, those commissioning new spatial solutions, whilst potentially even condemning their existing facilities, may still ‘resist’ our wisdom
Everyone’s an expert when it comes to workspace, right? Sound familiar? Well actually, maybe in one absolutely fundamental respect they are: because everyone is indeed a user, a consumer of the organisational environments provided for them, and all that they afford during the lived, day-to-day experience, for better or for worse.
I regard this situation like Giddens, who back in 1979 observed, “no amount of accumulated data will determine which of two competing theories will be accepted or rejected”(Blaikie, 1993, p.70). Socially constructed, value-laden beliefs play a significant role in this perpetual irresolution.This suggests that as a profession, we need to be aware of far more than perhaps our currently favoured rational, utilitarian, cause-and-effect perspectives when it comes to workplace design. Paradoxically, do we have any awareness of just how much we don’t know?
If I am sure of anything, I am sure of this: our working environment matters. I have witnessed its importance to the mundane, everyday lived-experience, and when proposed changes challenge what people currently may have. It matters to us as users; it matters to the consultant industry that has developed to provide and manage it; it matters to organisations.
It even matters enough for growing mainstream media attention including Channel 4 documentaries and BBC Radio 4 and World Service documentaries. The UK launch of Nikil Saval’s book ‘Cubed:a secret history of the workplace’, a self-declared homage to C.Wright Mills’ iconoclastic 1951 critical sociological study ‘White Collar: The American Middle Classes’, coincides with the 2014 IFMA Workplace Strategy Summit and is reviewed in the Scope section of this issue. There is an interesting parallel to consider. Saval’s perspective, like other skeptics in and around our field, reminds us to step back and appreciate the broader, often historical influences which impact upon our current endeavours, whether we are aware of them or not:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
(Santayana, 1905, The Life of Reason)
Form follows….what, exactly?
The deceptively pervasive architectural dictum concerning form and function has evolved over time. The necessity of pre-industrial ‘function follows form’ became inevitably, ‘function follows precedent’….