Workplace design may seem somewhat faddish and obscure,
yet it is because, as a field of research, it is still relatively
new and no hard and fast rules apply to it. It is increasingly
becoming apparent that, in terms of retention and productivity,
companies can’t afford not to pay attention to their office
design. As Malcolm Gladwell, writer for The New Yorker, states:
To thrive, an office space must have a diversity of uses – it
must have the workplace equivalent of houses and apartments and
shops and industry.
Office structure effects the function of five critical work issues:
innovation, communication, decision-making, work process, and learning.
The placement of workers is particularly important, for it is the
social networks that arise between people that create innovation
and diverse solutions to problems.
Getting people in an office to ‘bump into’ people
from other departments is not an easy task, and it is office design
that often determines the effectiveness of how people communicate
at work. Thomas Allen, a researcher at MIT in the sixties and seventies,
conducted a decade-long study on the way engineers communicate.
His findings, which are often cited today, revealed that two people
will communicate less the greater the distance between their desks
increases. Workers are four times as likely to communicate with
a coworkers who sits six feet away from them as they are with someone
sixty feet away. And people seated more than seventy-five feet
apart communicate at a rate of zero.
Innovation often occurs from a social encounter, and ideas can
arise just as readily out of a casual conversation as they do from
a formal meeting. The traditional picture of an office consisting
of row and row upon cubicle, with workers quietly and industrially
working at their desks is not a picture of a workplace environment
functioning as it should. Numerous studies are revealing how some
of the greatest ideas occur from contact between members of different
groups within the same company. Therefore, the design of an office
needs to invite social interaction between people who normally
wouldn’t go out of their way to communicate with each other.
In Thinking for Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results
from Knowledge Workers, author Thomas H. Davenport has surmised
a list of what is generally agreed upon to be true in regard
to office design and productivity of knowledge workers (ie. Those
working in IT, Research and Development, Marketing, Business
Development and design). Davenport’s findings reveal that
knowledge workers tend to communicate better in offices with
open floor plans rather than closed individualized office spaces.
The nature of an office worker’s job implies collaboration,
and they need meeting and conference rooms to facilitate this.
Technology – from video conferencing to webcasts – can
play a role in this, yet old-fashioned face to face interaction
is still the quickest mode to transfer information.
When Pittsburgh-based Communications Company Agner Moyer Smith
(AMS) moved offices, their interior designer suggested they use
Furniture Manufacturer Steelcase’s Community-based Planning
Skills (CbP). Using techniques developed by social anthropologists,
a design team “lived” in the space to see how work
at AMS got done. By mapping a company’s informal social networks,
the team identified who the go-to people in the company were, how
decisions were made, and the way information moved throughout the
company via the social network. I.e. Who talks to whom and how
ideas are transferred.
One aspect revealed in this was that the social networks at AMS
were very strong, however, not necessarily productive or innovative.
As people tend to gravitate towards other people similar to them,
tightly knit networks can often create a lack of diversity and
are isolating to those who are different or who appear to not fit
in.
The final design for the AMS office consisted of 16,000 square
feet along a continuous corridor, the ‘Main Street,” and
workstations categorized into
“
neighbourhoods,” with different groups being placed together
according to discipline. The workstations were designed to support
a more diverse range of work needs, from solo concentration work
to available space for impromptu meetings, and the ratio of individual
to team space
increased from 30% to 55%.
Ten months after AMS moved into the new space, the results spoke
for themselves. Within the new design of the office, collaboration
and innovation increased by 14% and the effectiveness of work processes
increased 37%.
Part III will focus on the work of Dr. Karen Stephenson, the anthropologist
and business professor whose theories CbP base their design principles
around.
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