Premeditated Thought

Open Plan Office Arguments, Revisited

The debate over whether open plan offices beat private offices or cubicles has been reunited in the computer industry.  Well-respected companies are experimenting with open plans to spur creativity and innovation.  A recent New York Times Article (You Won't Find Me in My Office, I'm Working) reports

Technology companies are eliminating assigned space for open floor plans. Cisco Systems, Google and Sun Microsystems have already knocked down partitions. This month, Intel began testing alternative floor plans at three locations — creating open work areas with clusters of armchairs, library-style tables with laptop plugs, electronic white boards where inspired doodles can be transferred to e-mail, and a variety of conference rooms when privacy is needed.

It is not just the high-tech firms that are becoming cozier. The creative industries — such as advertising and design — are embracing the approach, too. At ?What If! (yes, that is really the name, punctuation and all) an “innovations company” (that seems to mean marketing) with a Manhattan outpost, employees never sit in the same place two days in a row. This is known as “hot desking,” said Nina Powell, the managing director of the United States office, and the purpose is to give workers a perspective that changes with the task.

When the work requires collaboration and interaction, she said, the communal tables are the place to be. When the work is more introspective, there are cafe-style booths providing quiet and privacy.

I first visited this debate in February of this year (Private Offices, Bullpens Or Cubes).  I remain a passionate hater of cubicles and cubicle culture.  Going to an office with cubicles is stifling.  My office's maze of cubes, with each row sparsely populated and indistinguishable from the next, conjures up the most deadening suburban subdivision. 

Lost in the debate is what kind of office a person will be happy in.  Despite well-reasoned calls for private offices by many workers (you can see some intelligent discussion of the merits of the private office in Anne Zelenka's WebWorker Daily blog posting and reader's comments), I suspect open plans  re-invigorate work places.  Work is an inherently social activity.  When the social aspect of work is removed, I would just as soon work from home.

When I worked in an open office at a tech startup, I was able to find my own personal space when I needed to - not by moving from my desk, but by focusing on my work.  Other people used headphones for the same purpose.  Personally, I find email and instant messaging as distracting as anything that happens in an open office. 

I know not many people agree with me.  Companies, faced with the trade-off of workers' preference for private space vs. high costs of private offices choose the middle ground. The result is cubicle culture.

Private Offices, Bullpens, or Cubes?

Ever wonder about office design's role creating an effective organization?  I've been an advocate of an open office layout ever since working in one at a software startup in 2001.  This preference has grown despite my occasional sitings of bear, wild-turkey, geese, and fall foliage from my windowed private office.  (Yes, I can also see route 78 when the trees are bare.)

A possible office move led me to think about this a little more seroiusly recently, and I went to the web to see what research was out there.  My company's standard calls for internal private offices for managers and cubicles for most other people.  The bulk of people in my office are information workers.

My research first led me to Thomas Davenport's Why Office Design Matters, which is excerpted from  Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers:

Knowledge workers prefer closed offices, but seem to communicate better in open ones. Of course there is great variation among open and closed office types, but the most extensive research in the area (from Cornell professors Frank Becker and William Sims) suggests that while most knowledge workers prefer closed offices because they are better able to concentrate, they communicate informally and build trust and social capital more easily in more open office environments (even high-walled cubicles, they say, restrict interpersonal communications). They note: "Our research, done with employees in job functions ranging from software development to marketing and business development, indicates that the more open the 'open' plan office environment, the more conducive it is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are critical elements of the work process." Becker and Sims are undeniably experts on this topic, but I feel that, like many corporate executives, they downplay the need for concentration and quiet when knowledge work is done in office environments.

I hear the last point, that private offices foster concentrated work, from many of my colleagues.  But given that many of them now telecommute (is that word outdated already?) a siginifcant portion of their time, I wonder if Becker and Sims emphasis on workplace communication is even more apropos.

In 2001, Becker and Sims published Offices that Work: Balancing Communication, Flexibility, and Cost.  The research focused on software development firms and was far-reaching.  I focused on the private-office vs. shared office vs. bullpen (open office) vs. cubicle debate.  The various choices were rated on several factors.  For individual factors, they looked at auditory and visual privacy, satisfaction, productivity, concentration, and isolation.  For team factors, they considered learning from colleagues, problem solving, sponteneous conversations, initiating conversations, and team communication and collaboration.

Cubicles are frequently seen as providing a happy medium between bullpens and private/shared offices.  Instead, the research found that "cubicles are generally the worst performers on every measure."  While workers preferred closed offices, bullpens provided better team environments.

Becker and Sims also discuss how passion influences one's view of private offices:

As we have worked in the different study sites over the past two years another factor has surfaced that influences the data, and the implications for finding practical solutions to pressing organizational dilemmas. That factor is the difference between employees who are passionate about their work, who are inspired and inspire others, and those for whom the work is just a job.

People like Linda Coventry (a pseudonym), the VP of Engineering at one of the study  spin-off firms, or Joyce Smith (a pseudonym), the Director of Marketing at another, were bursting with energy and enthusiasm. They attracted and inspired staff with these qualities. At another of our study firms, one which was an internal corporate web-initiative, the workers were bright and committed. But the embers of passion glowed faintly. These emotional states influence employees’ response to their work environment.

Passionate employees inspired by their job focus on the work, and not the work environment. They focus on how the work environment helps energize them, on the opportunities it offers to learn from others and to benefit from being in a firm that has “great people.” They pay relatively little attention to rank and status, or to office size. For those less passionate about their work, such factors seem to be more important.

Bleeding Edge Office Design

Current Employer: I enjoy working for you.  But I would like to see office design more conducive to collaboration and creativity.

A recent report on NPR by Kaomi Goetz describes how firms inspire creativity and innovation through comfortable, colorful, well-designed workspaces.  Kaomi must have had my office in mind, an office employing software professionals on the bleeding edge of Web 2.0 and Agile Computing.  Luckily enough, I was carrying my spanking new Sony Cybershot, enabling me to capture the color and decor of the bustling office.  I encourage you to listen to NPR's report as you take a visual stroll through an icon of modern office design. 

The first image, taken at 11:30 AM, shortly before lunch break, shows how a thoughtful splash of color in the serendipitous placement of a ladder can spark the imagination.  Employees (or creation engineers, as we call them) are inspired by the color to run into their offices and shut the door so they can immediately work on idea reification.

Some of my design-oriented friends will likely point out that the ladder may shock some more delicate senses.  I would tend to agree.  In order to accomodate more sensitive employees and still add color to the work place, notice how the below hallway carefully utilizes neuron-trigger red in the form of an alarm and a fire extinguisher.

The white walls of the hallway signify the Buddhist concept of "empty mind."  Only in this state is our mind ready to embrace new concepts.

Some of our best thinking, of course, happens around the water cooler.  Our design incorporates a special "chair-less" lounge.   Some theorists believe that comfortable sofas or well-appointed lounges encourage employees to come together in an open environment.  We firmly believe that if our creation engineers stand, they have a head start on running back to the office for idea reification.  Here we see one engineer left standing after such a fortuitous meeting.

At this point, I would also like to call your attention to the ironic fluorescent lighting.  In such a forward-looking office, such retro touches bemuse even the most taciturn employee.

The modern office must be about more than design.  It must offer a place to play, nourishment, and exqusitive concierge service.

Play is encouraged through a whimsical design of uninhabited office cubicles.  The cubicles are designed to minimize communication and sight-lines, which makes it perfect for a pickup game of hide-and-seek or paintball.  (I have a going bet that my boss would never find me if I chose to encamp in a cube.  But my office has a lock, so I've yet to see the point.)

Our office is not yet the perfect model of the future.  We are looking at the feasibility of connecting to the internet via a new technology that makes it feasible to not use any wires at all.  I know it sounds like a magic trick, but stick with me.  I have been in coffee shops where I have been able to work in such a manner, and at first I suspected someone had spiked my coffee, so I went back to try it again a second time, this time carrying my own cup of coffee that I had prepared carefully at home.  Voila!  This emerging technology promises to untether us from planned workspaces, enabling new collaborative spaces.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Location is Destiny

As an east-coast software industry veteran working for companies based in other areas of the country (SCO, Novell, BEA Systems), I have often wondered how my career would have been different had I been at corporate headquarters.  But given my reluctance to relocate, I have settled on a different question: what determines an organizational site's power and influence?  Not everyone can be at corporate headquarters, but we would all like to work at a location that allows our career to prosper.

An individual's power is understood to come from several sources (French and Raven breaks it down to five sources, but sometimes it is summarized as below):

• Positional Power: Legitimate, coercive, and reward power lumped together.  Where you are in the organization, your control of resources, and the ability to reward and punish people.
• Expert Power: What you know and its importance to the organization.
• Referent Power: The power that results from personal characteristics.  This includes relational power, or your personal network.

Using this as a framework, is it possible to a site's power just by summing the power of all the people in the location?   Simply looking at a site as a collection of individuals discounts several key factors:

• Gravitational Power: How often do employees (especially senior management) travel to the site?  Gravitational Power would include sources of power not summarized by a sum of personal power, such as a location's physical location.  For example, it is better to be five miles from headquarters than a plane ride away.
• Structural Power: I would argue that the organizational structure within a site is important to its power.  It is better to have one large organization reporting into senior management than multiple organizations reporting into less senior management.
• Information Power: How much information a site collectively has and how well the site collectively shares this information.   Also, to what extent does the site utilize this collective information as feedback to other sources of power.

I would love to learn about formal studies of site power.  The sources of site power I've identified above are based on my observation of a limited set of companies at which I've worked.  I would love to hear your views on this subject.