CREJ - Building Dialogue - March 2015
Do you have a “real” office? The kind with fixed walls, a ceiling and an actual door? Do you need one, want one, lust after one? If so, why? Is it a status thing? Is it about comfort, privacy, productivity, silence? Or all of the above? In a business world dominated by “open” work places, you’d certainly be in the minority if you did land yourself a private office. In fact, a recent study by the International Facility Management Association noted that approximately 70 percent of current U.S. offices are designed with an open plan of some kind, which may include low partitions, no partitions or “communal” tables or benches. This is not a newsflash for anybody in the office design industry. But could this “trend” possibly signal the eventual extinction of the fixed office? Hardly, even if the data may suggest otherwise. For starters, the cumulative success of open plans is perpetually up for debate, especially lately. The narrative keeps changing as new data unearths confusing or contradictory feedback from primarily open system work places. One reason for this is the dizzying array of commercial furniture products available in today’s marketplace, and how they are employed in any given space. So the term “open plan” is not a one-size-fits-all solution in any event. In general, however, these products are designed to reduce the real estate footprint, lower construction costs and, in theory, boost productivity in office spaces without fixed walls. This is not happening, however, especially not to the satisfaction of business owners who have sharply transitioned to the open office without fully taking the pulse of the company’s culture. (Maybe stripping away all those private offices wasn’t such a great idea after all.) The impact is that office workers in open plans are pushing back and pushing back hard. Does this mean that a significant subgroup of those people lost their private offices after a remodel or move? Absolutely. While we don’t have the hard data to support that just yet, local anecdotal evidence is everywhere we look. One seasoned executive here refused to partake in any design discussions that included a workstation for himself, even though his superior – the company president – agreed to buy into the concept. For the executive, it was a private office or nothing. He got the office – the only one in the space – because it was in the company’s best interest to accommodate him, and keep him. This doesn’t always happen, of course. A senior Denver office broker’s boutique firm was acquired by one of the global giants, which granted perimeter offices only to regional and national directors. Despite his misgivings, he accepted the position and proceeded to tough out life in the bullpen for a whole three days. “It was like a zoo,” he claimed. Seemingly unable to do his job in the open culture, he took his skills elsewhere. Just to be clear, adding huddle rooms, libraries or hybrid zones to an already open or mixed-plan layout is usually not an adequate design alternative to the characteristics of a traditional private office. The private office is a familiar and self-contained entity. It can vary from austere to opulent depending on what you put in it, on it, or against it, but it’s still a “private” office. It has its place and tweaking any one of the current open designs to supplant it likely will not meet the intended expectations of the whole. On the other hand, a fixed office is not for everyone. Most millennials, it’s probably safe to say, would favor a flexible, open environment with spaces leaning toward the “collaborative.” That term, by the way, seems to conjure up images both good and evil from those who must embrace it in the workplace. Moreover, collaboration and privacy do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. The design of the modern law office is ample proof of that, for example. Private offices can play well with most every open system, depending on the design, the products, the culture of the operation and the preferences of its principal players. More collaborative spaces do not definitively lead to increased productivity. That’s been borne out by the results of countless ongoing studies not only here in the U.S., but all over the world. In a Washington Post column late last year, advertising writer Lindsay Kaufman wrote of her own privacy crisis: “I was forced to trade in my private office for a seat at a long, shared table. It felt like my boss had ripped off my clothes and left me standing in my skivvies.” The title of the piece was “Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.” While that might appear a bit too dramatic, it actually probably isn’t. The private office isn’t coming back because it’s always been here, and it’s not going away any time soon. At least not without a fight.