At the WorkTech New York 2019 conference this year, the final speaker of the day was brought in to challenge the status quo of how a room of real estate professionals think about real estate. He made the argument that since the advent of the cubicle the workplace has gotten progressively “sadder.” It’s an argument that the room rejected in the moment, but the longer I have dwelled on it, the more I cannot just reject it out of hand.
As real estate professionals, our job is to provide a workplace environment to support our respective businesses. Those businesses are composed of people with wide-ranging preferences around how they work, collaborate, create, think, relax, and grow. By definition, there cannot be one right answer to how space should be designed and delivered. Everything comes down to a valuation of trade-offs.
So let’s start with what kind of trade-offs we need to evaluate. The basics start with:
Privacy versus flexibility
Private offices are often held up as the gold standard of the workplace. Traditionally, having your own office meant you had reached a certain level in the company or worked on sensitive (important) information. For the purposes of the trade-off conversation, hypothetically we could provide offices for everyone in the workplace. Individually, they would be able to then work however they choose as an individual as they would control their whole environment. However, the company would lose flexibility as it costs a lot more to deliver private offices (both in square footage and capital expense). Private offices also encourage greater amounts of individual time and less team collaboration. The biggest push over the past 4 decades has been valuing flexibility more and more.
Focus versus collaboration
Similarly to the privacy versus flexibility conversation, focus is about being able to control your immediate environment whereas collaboration looks to create increasing moments of random interaction. High wall cubicles actually increase focus in the same way that private offices do. The recent move for more desks to have low panels means that you cannot disappear to heads down work easily. It also increases the background noise level of the office as there are fewer acoustical elements to stop sound. Over time, collaboration has been increasingly valued to get non-traditional people groups to work together.
Assigned versus unassigned space
One of the most contentious moves recently has been the depersonalization of the office. Moving to unassigned seating means that personal pictures, papers, and decorations are eliminated. People do not tend to sit at desks where pictures of someone else’s children are hung. The trade-off is that businesses do not want to provide more real estate than is actually in use. With the rise of work-from-anywhere, the increase in unused office space became more noticeable. However, when people feel less personally attached to the office they become less likely to come in, perpetuating the cycle.
Technology level
A significant variable in the changing workplace environment has been the constant improvement in employee technology. As enterprises have moved from typewriters to desktops to laptops to now a diverse array of options, the rise in work types has risen proportionally. As technology improves, the need for a defined, fixed workstation decreases. It would be impossible to design a unique workstation for every employee’s personal level of technology. As technology increases, the variety possible in the workplace becomes a challenge to keep up with.
Organizational flatness
Over time, private offices became a status symbol within organizations. Employees that reached a certain level were given a private office. Put in time, get more space. However, as organizations strive to have flatter hierarchies, the private office becomes a point of contention. If you are trying to flatten the organization, you naturally move away from private offices unless you are going to give everyone an office.
Economic changes over time
One thing that is true, is that the world as we know it changes. In the 1970s, there were no personal computers. Knowledge workers had private offices and leverage a typing pool for reports. Moving to the 1980s and 1990s, desktop computers entered the office until eventually every employee had one. In the 2000s, laptops and Blackberries were introduced. The 2010s have seen every employee with a laptop and smartphone that are not tied to a location at all. Add to these macro-changes to technology, the general economy has been increasing the proportion of workers in an office type environment versus a retail/warehouse/manufacturing environment. Without a reduction in the amount of space provided to each office employee, the amount of space required today would be significantly higher than it currently is.
What kind of culture are you looking to create?
All of these trade-offs can be summarized into a statement around the kind of culture you are looking to create. If you are specifically trying to build employee loyalty, you probably shouldn’t take away assigned seats. If you are trying to have employees engaged with the organization anytime, anywhere as appropriate, you should probably increase flexibility.
Technology has enabled organizations to take extremely diverse views on how real estate is delivered. These diverse views then translate into a generalized reduction in total real estate provided per person. It doesn’t help that companies like WeWork have risen to prominence with a disruptive approach to real estate that emphasizes flexibility and collaboration (even across organizations). Their template has been utilized as a starting point (both rightly and wrongly) by countless real estate strategies.
There is no right or wrong way to design for workplace experience. Every year introduces new variables into the equation that make it even more difficult to balance. First, understand who you want to be as a company. Second, examine the real estate components that best support that culture. Thirdly, develop a real estate program that moves you in that direction. It won’t happen in a year or even five years. But incremental progress is always the goal.