When I envision the workplace of the future, it looks a lot like my couch, only with several soft-serve ice-cream machines attached and a rather handsome (though not more handsome than I am) robot doing my work.
Call me a dreamer if you wish, but don’t mock the exercise of pondering the ideal workspace. If we, the workers, don’t imagine and describe the surroundings that best serve our needs, then someone in charge will undoubtedly decide what’s best, build it and plop us in place.
That’s what has happened throughout history, a fact fascinatingly detailed in a new book by Nikil Saval called “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.” Tracing back to the 1850s and the publication of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Herman Melville’s classic tale of a once-industrious office clerk who suddenly would “prefer not to” do anything, the book carries us through all manner of changes in the form and function of office spaces.
We now exist in an era that offers a bit of everything, from traditional “cubicle farms” to high-concept tech spaces that contain nap rooms and layouts designed to create unexpected interactions among workers. And for many, the traditional office is simply vanishing, replaced by a laptop and a smartphone set up in a kitchen nook or any given coffee shop.
The layout and design of office spaces have been researched in painstaking detail, so I asked Saval, who is also editor of a literary journal called n+1, if he thinks the issue gets over-analyzed.
“I don’t actually think that we over-analyze it so much as we often are asking the wrong sorts of questions, or we don’t think more deeply about the workplace,” Saval said. “There are a lot of discussions that don’t question the basic foundations of the workplace. They ask how often people are at their desks, they’re very design heavy or they’re about schedules.”
In other words, the thinking behind office designs and arrangements rarely takes into account the views of the people who actually inhabit the space. In his book, Saval talks about how office layouts during the dot-com boom were often conceived by outside designers, with design being “the enemy of culture.”
“Despite the revolutionary air at the end of the millennium, it was impossible to ask whether the office workers themselves should be consulted, whether they had ideas about how a workplace should be run. Under this rubric, the last people who knew anything about anything were the knowledge workers.”
It seems many believed that by tearing down cubicle walls, adjusting the width of corridors and cleverly arranging meeting rooms, a culture would blossom on its own. That didn’t happen.
Workers weren’t so much a part of the design as they were consenting — in some cases, begrudging — users of whatever space they were given.
Saval argues that’s a significant mistake: “These things need to be decided in concert. The people who are actually doing the work are often the people who know best how to do their work best. In the U.S., there’s this long history that the perspective of being outside the workplace is the best perspective.”
He said that when the open office plan, which laid the groundwork for the office cubicle farm, first came to Europe in the 1960s, it didn’t last, largely because “people had sort of a say over the design.”
“The same things they identified then — that open offices are distracting, that you don’t need to collaborate that much — these are things that now social psychologists are discovering again,” Saval said.
Based on studies he reviewed, most workers prefer closed-door offices, and they like cubicle arrangements the least: “I don’t think it’s an issue that workers don’t communicate their ideas; it’s that there’s not even a vehicle for them to communicate them.”
This is a flaw that should be addressed. Companies put considerable time and effort into both the aesthetics of their offices and the design, with an eye for maximizing efficiency. Why not consult the actual people you’re trying to make more efficient?
I’d encourage everyone to give this subject some thought, to daydream a bit and not be afraid to offer opinions to bosses and managers. Our workspaces will keep changing, and having a voice in that can only help.
I asked Saval how he envisions the workplace of the future.
“The office is leaving the office building,” he said. “It seems likely that the office is in your pocket, the office is at your cafe, it’s in the airport. That puts a lot of pressure on offices themselves to justify their space. The workplace then becomes more about transacting culture. That’s chiefly how people are beginning to see offices, as places for meetings and places for collaboration. The work that you need to do is often better done elsewhere.”
I’m pretty sure that means I’ll be able to put a couple of soft-serve ice-cream machines on my expense account under “office supplies.”
I can’t wait for the future to arrive.
TALK TO REX: Ask workplace questions — anonymously or by name — and share stories with Rex Huppke at IJustWorkHere@tribune.com, follow him on Twitter via @RexWorksHere and find more at chicagotribune.com/ijustworkhere
