Space Meets Status

Designing Workplace Performance

Jacqueline Vischer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415701051
• eBook ISBN: 9781135993450
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Showing how worker productivity and stress levels are affected by factors such as lighting, ventilation, temperature, noise and layout, this book demonstrates how the technical aspects of human comfort do not always tally with users' perceptions and behaviour. With vivid examples and case studies to illustrate how space is a corporate resource rather than simply overhead, Vischer reveals how companies can improve their ability to make design decisions on how best to accommodate their employees in a high quality workspace.

Chapter 1
Kingdom, castle, office

Are we losing ground at work?

A major change is taking place in the way we think about the buildings in which people work. The office is not what it used to be. Managers lucky enough to get private offices find themselves away from the windows, in rooms with glass walls so that people passing by look in. People who have studied for years to become technical experts and professionals in their fields find themselves in small, box-like enclosures that all look alike. Everyone can see what they do and they can hear everyone sneeze. No matter how nice-looking and functional the workspace, it is not likely to be a private office, and the chances are it does not have a window. Senior executives find themselves moved out of their large corner offices into an ‘open office concept’ in some kind of experiment to show solidarity with the troops – oh, and where did the secretary go?

What do all these changes mean? And where is it all leading? Does anyone like it? Does it help or hurt productivity? Until recently, the office was a private enclosed space or room in which employees carried out their work in relative isolation – with the degree of isolation increasing with seniority in the company. Office size and location in the building, as well as furnishings and desk accessories, communicated the status of the employee in the company. Historically, employees at relatively unimportant levels in the organization did not have a room, they only had a desk and chair; and it was only as they moved up to more senior and responsible positions that a room was

1.1 Cartoonists tell us how people feel about cubicles

allocated to them. It follows then that as they became more successful they were moved into larger rooms until – as president of the company and chairman of the board – their office was a suite on the top floor of the building, with its own bathroom, the boardroom close by, a reserved parking space under the building, and a view!

But this is not happening nowadays. The last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first have seen the typical workspace change from an enclosed room with a window opening on to a corridor and bordered on both sides by other similar rooms, to a sleek combination of work surfaces, file cabinets, shelves and partitions known as the ‘open-plan’. The much-touted space efficiency and flexibility of open-plan configurations have brought about their own problems for users, resulting in a widespread practice of dismissively referring to the open-plan concept as ‘cubes’, ‘cubicleland’ and ‘cube farm’.¹

Office furniture manufacturers thrive as increasing numbers of companies of all sizes and types take down walls and invest in desktops attached to partitions that carry wiring laid out in uniform ways across the large open floors of modern office buildings. The people who occupy ‘cubes’ seem to tolerate rather than to like them. Popular newspaper cartoons regularly poke fun at the uniformity, monotony and small dimensions of ‘systems’ furniture – not only Dilbert, who is famous for his lunatic views of office cubicles, but also New Yorker cartoons and national strips such as Sally Forth. For the vast majority of white-collar workers working in this kind of office, the cubicle is a sort of inside joke, meaning ‘this is not really who we are’.

The losing/gaining ground dilemma

If the bland expanse of standard, grayish-beige partitions topped by uniform fluorescent light fixtures in rigid rows are not who we are, then why are millions of office, knowledge, and professional workers spending half to a third of their time in this kind of workspace? Senior managers, while sitting comfortably in their airy corner offices, as well as office furniture manufacturers and design professionals, pronounce on the emergence of ‘design trends’ that include the shrinking dimensions of individual office space, the increasing power of communications technology, more dynamic interactive team space, more collaborative work and greater worker mobility. But, in another reality, most people find cubicles too small, too uniform, demeaning of their status and training, and not as dynamic or high-tech as their manufacturers promised. Were someone to offer it to them, most office workers would find a windowed corner office more dynamic and enjoyable. So, why the rush to give everyone cubicles?

Corporate accountants across North America and the world argue that getting more people on a floor reduces occupancy costs, increasing shareholder value by reducing company overhead. In addition, they point out that building operating costs are reduced because moving furniture around is easier than tearing down and rebuilding walls when people and groups need to be moved. And finally, the purchase of office furniture has tax advantages that constructing rooms for offices does not. The force of these economic arguments obliges companies to move more people into a smaller number of square feet while at the same time claiming to provide a more dynamic and interactive work environment. Meanwhile, employees in corporations resist the widespread installation of open-plan workstations, considering such moves, at the very least, with distrust and disappointment: the open-plan concept is seldom welcomed with open arms. Traditional companies, or companies with traditional senior management teams or a traditionalist clientele, like law firms, banks and universities, have tended to keep to the old models. The private enclosed offices are along the windows, and the few open-plan workstations (cubicles) are occupied by ‘lower-ranking staff’, including secretaries, clerical staff and back office operations.

When decisions are made to change the space people work in, specifically to shrink it, standardize it and open it up, the symbolic importance workers attach to office size, position and furnishings is suddenly and jarringly thrown into question. Financially-driven corporate decisions to demonstrably increase efficiency have little to do with how employees work, or with their needs and expectations regarding the space they work in – does smaller, more open and more uniform workspace increase employee effectiveness?² Shrinking offices means losing ground for most employees, not just in terms of physical space but also in terms of status. The dilemma of the new office design trends is simply this: while companies downsize and standardize workspace to increase efficiency and reduce reconfiguration costs, their employees fear they are losing territory, status and control and, depending on the type of work they do, may be working less effectively. Thus, in a worst case scenario, both workers and their employers are losing ground: workers physically and employers in terms of workers’ productivity. In a best case scenario, managing the transformation of workspace constructively allows office workers to gain back lost ground in terms of territory, status and control while companies gain ground from meeting their objectives of reduced occupancy costs.

This book addresses this dilemma by exploring the implicit deal between employee and employer that gives workspace its symbolic power. To fully understand the power of workspace symbolism, we need to analyze the organization’s relationship to its accommodation, that is, the long-term impact of decisions that organizations make about the workspace they occupy, which in effect generate the usually implicit terms of the employer–employee deal. This deal, or implicit agreement, is called the sociospatial contract. The most critical of the unexamined assumptions on which the sociospatial contract is based are territoriality, job performance or productivity and environmental control. The book examines these three critical components of workspace psychology closely. What causes people to feel so attached to what are often small, gloomy, ugly offices? Why is space change so threatening? And how can this revolution in work and the design of space for work be turned to advantage for the corporation? An old adage says, ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’ and, indeed, the office we occupy and identify as our own is our castle at work, and a pox on anyone who tries to take it away!

The basic assumptions of the sociospatial contract become clear when we examine worker territoriality in the office, environmental influences on the performance of tasks at work, and the meaning of environmental control and empowerment. If managers and designers want to understand and manage workspace change so that it becomes a positive force in the organization, they must become aware of how these three forces operate. Only then can companies take advantage of the possibilities offered by redesigning their space to improve organizational structure and work processes. The positive force of workspace transformation converts the threat of losing ground into a gaining ground scenario for all parties.

Space as a social contract

The progression through ever larger workspace as a marker of advancement through the company is evidence of the implicit social contract between employer and employee.³ This contract, never made explicit and rarely acknowledged unless violated, includes space as a key component of the deal that both sides make when an employee joins a company. In addition to salary and benefits, new employees receive certain rewards and recognition in return for contributing their mental and physical energy to the tasks assigned by the employer. The space the company assigns to employees, and the fact that they occupy it in order to perform work for the employer, symbolizes other implicit terms of the contract, for example, the employee’s loyalty, reliability, honesty and productivity. In addition, space is a reward for good performance and a symbol of an employee’s status in the organization. The sociospatial contract exists between all employees and the companies they work for. The employer promises to exchange physical space, along with pay and other benefits, for the work the employee has been hired to do. Workspace is a symbol of a contractual agreement between employers and their employees that is implicitly understood and rarely questioned. It is a powerful mechanism for communicating the meaning of work, and its symbolism underpins the importance of territory in the workplace.

As a society we are in the midst of a sea change in the meaning of work: it is going on around us and we have not yet emerged on the other side. While economic reasons are often cited for changing space, there are also solid technological and social reasons for thinking differently about workspace. But while work and workspace is changing, the terms of the sociospatial contract are not. As new concepts of work and workspace emerge, are the terms of the contract still valid? Is the implicit contractual understanding adjusting to changes in society? Change is not only evident in the proliferation of standardized open-plan layouts. Other workspace concepts are even more radical with respect to the traditional notion of an office as a place to work. Companies are experimenting with non-territorial approaches, such as shared desks or ‘hot desking’, mobile or remote officing, and various forms of telecommuting and telework. Some companies go through a stage of having no offices at all, using communications technology and their laptops as ‘virtual offices’. We know little about how these non-territorial alternatives affect employees in both traditional and non-traditional jobs whose image of workspace might still be a wood-paneled corner office with oak furniture and leather chairs, and perhaps a secretary sitting outside the door.

Traditional workspace design, which we might call ‘bureaucracy’ after the sociologist Max Weber, is oriented to providing a place for each individual in the company. One might say ‘a place for everyone and everyone in his place’. This symbolism of the individual office, desk or workstation transmits values and information. It communicates the fact that the individual has been hired by and works for this organization, and beyond that, the loyalty of the individual to the organization, the commitment to perform as required, and the responsibility of the organization to look after, support, respect and pay the employee. It communicates how important the employees are and with whom they are expected to interact. Most of all, it transmits the fact that the individual is just that: a single, somewhat autonomous cog in a large multifaceted wheel, whose performance is evaluated individually, whose pay level is set individually, whose responsibility to arrive and leave at certain times, to respect rules, and to perform the work assigned is basically their own and no-one else’s. In short, the individual office, desk or workstation is a powerful and deeply rooted symbol of the individual’s and the organization’s mutual rights, responsibilities, expectations and commitment – the sociospatial contract!

At some level and to some degree, contemporary trends towards shared offices and flexitime, hoteling, hot desking and other mobile work styles, not to mention design trends towards replacing walled offices with cubicles, reducing the square footage of in...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Preface
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Kingdom, castle, office
• Chapter 2 The organization– accommodation relationship
• Chapter 3 Territoriality examined
• Chapter 4 Comfort and productivity
• Chapter 5 Environmental improvement
• Chapter 6 The workspace transformation imperative
• APPENDIX
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Index