The prestigious corner office, a career-capping perk dreamed of by generations of working stiffs, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The office of the future is more egalitarian, collegial and high tech–but skimps on space allotted to individual workers.
Take, for example, TBWA Worldwide, a Los Angeles advertising agency. Carol Madonna, West Coast director of office services for the company, said TBWA’s office has become a small city unto itself, complete with a master plan and a new ethos: equality for all.
The central corridor of TBWA’s Los Angeles office is called Main Street. The city’s center is comprised of an indoor park, complete with landscaping, trees, outdoor furniture and a recreational area featuring an almost full-sized indoor basketball court that becomes a central meeting area when necessary.
Madonna’s semi-private office is called a “nest” and comes equipped with a “hatchling” file credenza that holds personal effects and folding screens to afford her a bit of privacy. Nearby, semi-open cubicles called cliff dwellings are stacked three high. These house the creative staff, who are assigned their berths without regard to rank. Even the company’s CEO has one of the cliff dwellings as his own office.
A similar town-square mentality reigns at the Chicago headquarters of Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers. The firm’s partners and business managers, are smack in the center of the space in semi-enclosed offices, much like city hall is in the center of a town. “It’s a radical departure from your typical office space, where the partners would have corner offices,” said Doug Garofalo, the project’s architect and principal in his own eponymous Chicago firm.
Broad windows border staffers’ desks, so the masses can savor the sunlight and stunning city views. All workstations are the same size (give or take a few inches). And the exclusionary adage “behind closed doors” doesn’t possibly apply because there are no doors in sight–save those on closets, washrooms and a couple of conference rooms.
The road to this presumed utopia has not been an easy one. In fact, ad executive Madonna said in the mid-’90s, her company experimented with “virtual offices,” and she spent three years without any place to call home–no permanent desk, phone or computer.
“It was a disaster,” she said. “You checked in at the concierge desk every morning and got assigned a PC, phone and cubicle, but if you didn’t get in early they’d be out of something you had to carry all your stuff around. One employee lugged everything in a red wagon.”
In the office of the future, people won’t have to lug their stuff around, but they may not be allotted as much personal space as they have gotten used to.
That’s the case with Elaine Raffel. Twenty-five years ago, in her first job out of college as an editor for a trade association, she had a 26th-floor office at Chicago’s IBM Plaza–complete with a killer view, fancy furniture and space to spare.
Through the years, Raffel has changed jobs and climbed the corporate ladder, but her view hasn’t improved. Today she’s a vice president with a luxury retailer and her street-level office in a Dallas suburb overlooks a parking lot. Just two other people can squeeze into the snug room for meetings.
“It’s been downhill as I’ve moved up,” Raffel said, with a laugh.
Raffel’s experience isn’t uncommon. The average office space per person, a figure that includes all the common areas such as lobbies, washrooms, kitchens and copy rooms, dropped from 410 square feet in 1997 to 347 square feet in 2002, noted Don Young, vice president of communications for the Houston-based International Facility Management Association.
And the drop is far more significant for workers’ personal spaces. Standard offices for executives “used to be 250 square feet and now range from 150 to 180 square feet,” said Jaime Velez, design principal at architecture firm SOM Chicago.
Young says that space has gone to create bigger interactive areas for teaming, meeting and recreational activities.
That’s the case at TBWA, the Los Angeles ad agency. In addition to the indoor park, every account team has its own “den,” which is the equivalent of the old-fashioned four-walled conference room.
“We increased common space, because it is so important to the way we work. But it’s flexible common space that can accommodate big or little groups,” Madonna said. “We also reduced personal storage space because we learned that people will fill up the space you give them, so if you don’t give them that much they can’t fill it.”
Architect Velez says rising real estate costs and new technologies are behind the shrinking space. “If you have a substantial number of employees who are out of the office frequently, which often happens in consulting and financial service firms, you start to realize the value lost in rent,” he said.
To economize, “a lot of companies are designing their offices to house only 70 to 80 percent of their staffs and providing hoteling or touch-down spaces for employees instead,” Velez said. As in the TBWA Worldwide experiment, hoteling spaces are permanent workstations that employees reserve in advance through a company concierge, and touch-down spaces are work counters that are more catch-as-catch-can for roaming workers.
Customization is another trend: Companies are tailoring furnishings and technology to suit their needs, often in ways that facilitate team building.
At Thornton-Tomasetti, the workstations developed by Garofalo each sport large steel utility cabinets on wheels that can be moved to other locations so staffers can bring their desks to team meetings with ease.
“There has been a major initiative to produce movable desks, seats and partitions that can be quickly and easily reconfigured as needed,” Young said.
But while open office environments may be great for team building, they’re often lousy for workers who crave privacy. To address this conflict, furniture companies are designing cubicles that can close or open to suit a worker’s needs. Steelcase’s Personal Harbor, for instance, “is like a giant ergonomic phone booth that you can close when you’re making phone calls or need to concentrate and open for meetings with colleagues or visitors,” Young said. “Every company has some kind of product to help create more privacy.”
Down the road, workers’ cubicles may become so customized that they recognize and respond to individuals.
Steelcase and IBM are currently working on a project called BlueSpace. In this prototype, workstations will be able to identify a user and adjust lighting, temperature, audio and monitor settings. They’ll also track workers’ whereabouts, availability and daily schedule and even signal a worker’s status (either free or busy) by physically changing colors, explained Charlie Forslund, a Steelcase research engineer in Grand Rapids, Mich.
So if your cubicle glows red, for instance, co-workers will know to steer clear.
