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Last month I went to the office for the first time in over a year. It was a joy to see mates and novelty not making my own lunch. But after a while I wanted to go home, because I had to do some work.
Office buildings were designed for people to work on. Our quick-build home “offices” (mine is a small desk in the corner of the bedroom) no. Still, I think I’m not the only one who can do some elements of my work more effectively from home, which tells us something important about 21st century office design.
I am not a refusenik office. In fact, I’m a fan. There is a a lot of evidence to demonstrate the importance of peers meeting in person. Without the office, we don’t run into colleagues we haven’t seen in a long time when we have a cup of tea or overhear conversations that spark new ideas or plans to collaborate. I realize I miss colleagues I’ve never worked with directly.
Research suggests there is value in these “weak ties”: relationships between people who do not work together but who know each other over time. Awkward attempts to recreate these moments during the lock (a application posts questions to Slack to encourage “serendipitous” conversations such as, “Which movie can you quote the most?”) They just show the impossibility they have to force.
Over the past few decades, offices have been redesigned taking into account the value of interaction. The walls of the cubicle were constantly shrinking. Eventually, they disappeared altogether in favor of large open spaces. He idea was to encourage more transparency, innovation and communication. It was also a great way to save money by making people come together stronger. Data of the British Council of Offices show that the average amount of space per workstation has decreased since 2008.
But in search of more interactive spaces, we lost sight of the actual functioning of the human brain. Research shows that noise volumes in open-plan offices can cause high levels of epinephrine, the hormone that helps us fight, run, or freeze, rather than focusing on our work. To listen “half conversations”When classmates are on the phone, it can be distracted because our brains are trying to fill the other half.
The lack of private space in many offices makes us be uncomfortable too. Lena Nyholm and Mia Ohrn, Swedish interior design strategists who want to inject neuroscience into office design, they say even decoration is important. Our brains respond better to blues and greens, says Nyholm, because they involve a fertile landscape with a lot of food. But many offices have white walls, black chairs, hard edges and few floors. “When we look with these eyes at the workplace, it looks like it’s winter: the brain is stressed, there’s no food here, no heat.”
In fact, problems with open-plan offices could undermine the benefits they were supposed to offer. Ethan Bernstein, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, studied two large American companies that switched to open-plan designs. He used portable tracking devices and email data to measure how workers ’interactions changed. In both cases, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly, while email and instant messaging increased.
“Instead of provoking an increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture seemed to trigger a natural human response to social withdrawal,” he concluded. In another to study, found that intermittent and not constant social influence produced the best performance among people trying to solve problems together.
The pandemic gives us a chance to start again. We need to get to know each other, collaborate, shoot the breeze and enjoy the hustle and bustle, but many of us also need access to quiet corners to do some elements of our work well. It will probably take a trial and error to find the right balance.
Matthew Davis, an associate professor at the University of Leeds who studies post-Covid office design, says some entrepreneurs are turning their offices into flexible spaces for “collaboration” assuming people do their desk work aimed at house. He says employers are wondering, “How do we get the space to encourage more casual encounters and more social activity?”
It is too early to know if this will work in practice. Would it be weird to put a slot for “serendipitous conversations in the office” in the newspaper? Davis also warns that these new hypersocial office designs can “inadvertently exclude” some employees if they don’t have space to work from home.
Still, employers have reason to experiment. The office is not dead yet. If we recognize his weaknesses and play to his strengths, he could have a new life.
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