The Work Foundation

First published in 2002 by
The Work Foundation
Peter Runge House
3 Carlton House Terrace
London
SW1Y 5DG

C The Work Foundation 2002

CONTENTS

Tables and figures

Introduction

Chapter 1: Now and then
A short history of the office
What’s space got to do it?

Chapter 2: Unsolved problems
The reality gap
Uncharted territory

Chapter 3: The space we’re in
Why we work where we work
The invisible firm

Chapter 4: What we want (and what we do to get it)
Favourite places
What goes on there
Not what, how

Chapter 5: Do as I say, not as I do
Don’t I just love being in control?
Long shadows
It’s like a jungle out there

Chapter 6: Space sovereignty
Handing over the reins
Ways to do it

Conclusion

Glossary

References

INTRODUCTION

"Space is the place".

Sun Ra

The average desk is occupied for only 45 per cent of office hours. But the office is far from dead: we still spend most of our lives at work, and most of that time in one place. For most companies, solid working space is still vital to business success.

In fact, the years since the early 1990s have seen something of a golden age in office design. On the back of economic expansion, the ICT revolution and the dotcom boom, designers and architects have constructed a wave of exciting, innovative spaces. The workplace has been reinvented as arena for ideas exchange, drop-in point for mobile workers and forum for professional and social interaction. Moving into a new HQ, or facelifting the old one, is now a recognised technique for changing corporate image and energising organisational culture.

With leaner times ahead, this is a good point to take stock. What has been learnt, and how could things be done better next time?

Looking closer, the shine starts to come off. There has been innovation without dissemination. With their plug-in points and intelligent wallpaper, their ponds, swings, lawns and High Streets, their Zen Zones and touchdown areas, the cathedrals of the cutting-edge remain the preserve of a select few. Flexible working patterns and spaces might be widely discussed, but they are not widely available.

Most people work in very average spaces, where the workplace is simply where work happens and where managers keep an eye on us. It’s dumb space: at best, bland, neat and cheap. Space management is about control, autocracy and enforcement. The evolution of space is under-resourced, chaotic and unplanned – particularly in the small firms that dominate the UK economy.

Worse, research shows that new forms of working space can save money and increase profitability. But in practice, new ways of working don’t always deliver the promised benefits.

All of which leaves three urgent issues. First, there is often a mismatch between the types of workspace employees need, and what employers give them. Second, even sophisticated ways of organising working space don’t always work in practice. Third, the message of good workplace design and management hasn’t reached most employers – and more importantly, hasn’t touched most employees. There’s a disconnection between the workspace sector and business at large.

So how do we, the workers respond to all this? Most of us appear satisfied with our working space. But that happiness doesn’t come easy. To get it, we are forced to reclaim the office to get control of it. Employees, users of space, are constantly modifying, adapting, tinkering with space, bending the rules to make it fit. We all do this, in good spaces or bad. Sometimes this is fairly innocuous – 75 per cent of office workers admit to marking company stationery with their own names – at other times it spills over into open hostility and resistance to company rules.
All of this take place within a much larger nexus of political, economic and social forces. To fully understand how space is managed and controlled, we need to look at the dynamics of the firm. Working space is the site of tensions between the formal, visible elements and informal, invisible elements at play within company walls.

Not enough is known about much of these issues. This paper – which focuses on the office – tries to fill some of these gaps in. It presents major new survey and qualitative data commissioned for this research. It explores what we don’t know, sets out a framework for looking at the physical working environment, and outlines new space strategies.

This paper also aims to disseminate. We want to spread the gospel of good practice and bridge the communication gap between workspace experts and the business community at large. We want smart space for the many, not the few. This has to come through user involvement and more democratic management. We dub this ‘space sovereignty’.

Space matters. Badly-designed or managed workplaces damage staff physical and mental wellbeing. Without well-grounded strategies for the workplace, companies can lose money while relationships with employees decay. Others run economy-class outfits with little concern for worker welfare. For more and more firms, properly designed and managed workspace works best in the long run.

This will not be straightforward to achieve. It means legacy-busting: overturning decades of conventional thinking about working space, and persuading those at the top of the company to share power over space with the workforce at large. For reformers, there is a long road ahead.

However, it is vital the message is heard. The workplace is one of the few tangible assets that can be used to influence intangibles. People, culture and space are central to organisational change. They are the main tools in a much larger project – to reorganise and improve the whole of working life. So far, this isn’t really happening. This paper aims to change that: to help ensure the workplace actually works.

CHAPTER 1: NOW AND THEN

Quiet bell-sounds punctured the rubbery office air as typing and duplicating machines chattered to and fro; and underneath and away, like the pounding of engine room pistons, a muffled thumping of deep motor traffic blotted up any edges of silence. A light smell arose from paper, ribbon-ink, pencils, lubricating oil and from the extraordinary metal presence, like the slow thick taste of tin on tongue, of the filing cabinets.

William Sansom

There are two main traditions of office space. The dominant view sees office space as ‘dumb space’. It’s a shell; it’s where work happens. Space should be neat, cheap and bland. It should also help managers keep an eye on workers. Control should stay at the top: space oppresses.

Until very recently, the dissenting minority has struggled to be heard. This group sees the office as ‘smart space’. It argues that the workplace can help us work harder, faster and better. Space should be leveraged to change company culture and working methods. Most of all, working space should be for the many, not the few. Employees should help decide the layout and management of the workplace. It is these progressive views that are now gaining ground.

A short history of the office
The office has been around for longer than you’d think. The earliest recorded instances of offices appear in the Middle Ages – monks used the word ‘bureau’ to describe the workplace. Other early offices developed over time in farmhouses, stores, private houses and palaces alike. Renaissance scholars’ studies have many recognisable features of the private office, for example.

The office as we know it today evolved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the product of both the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the firm. As with all evolutions of office space, a number of technological, organisational, economic and cultural factors are responsible.

Industrialisation moved the focus of economic production from the land towards towns and cities. The scale of production allowed by steam technology and mechanisation created whole new divisions of labour and new types of capitalist workers. Upton Sinclair termed them ‘white collar’: middle management and professionals co-ordinated sourcing and distribution, tracked sales and drew up strategy. Under them, salespeople, clerks and administrators processed orders and dealt with correspondence.

Offices were required to house, monitor and organise these workers. Early design layouts still reflected home environments – the 1849 Sun Life Assurance Company building is a typical instance of this – but these soon changed towards more industrial, forms.

Early 20th century office design took place in a work climate dominated by rationalisation and standardisation. Taylorian efficiency theories, the assembly line and time-and-motion studies helped spawn the modern desk in 1915 (known as the ‘Modern Efficiency Desk’), banishing earlier models and helping paper move more quickly through the office.

The classic office space of this time involved highly standardised interior and furniture design, rows of identical desks, large, plain office spaces (‘bullpens’) for the mass of workers and a small number of private offices for senior staff, guarded by secretaries. After World War II the office experience rigidified still further, as de-mobbed soldiers took military manners into the workplace. The standardised office probably reached its apogee in the early 1960s, with SOM’s Union Carbide Building in New York. The office design embodied a totally rational approach to the corporation, with a rigid planning clearly expressing status through ‘size and location of offices, number of windows in that office, and the refinement of its furnishings … individuality was subordinate to an overall exquisitely detailed expression of utility, efficiency and modernity.’

Most office design of the 1960s and 1970s involved variations on the SOM-style ‘international style’ offices. With few exceptions, the overall focus was on warehousing people, ignoring the individual and applying standardised space and furniture styles. Firms with the budget for design ordered highly detailed, homogenous, hierarchical spaces, put into practice at minimal cost.

By the late 1960s an office counter-culture had emerged. The concept of Burolandschaft, pioneered by the German Quickbourner Group placed great emphasis on interlocking, fluid and organic working spaces with minimal divisions and area markers. The office as site for input/output efficiency was replaced with the concept of working space as nurturing environment. The model did not gain widespread acceptance, fading after numerous complaints about privacy, noise and lack of individual control over space. Its long term influence has been rather greater: today’s open offices and flexible furniture systems began here.

Some Burolandschaft ideas were incorporated into mainstream design, with dire consequences. In 1968, designer Robert Propst invented the cubicle as part of a panel-based office system which aimed to replace the bullpens of the previous decade. While well-intentioned, in practice use of the cubicle soon deteriorated into the classic Dilbert experience – extreme standardisation, anonymity and isolation.

By the late 1980s the computer had become standard issue in large numbers of offices, and office furniture systems became increasingly advanced. The result was a proliferation of highly modular office systems, with staff working in semi-enclosed, cellular spaces. Many of these systems were extremely expensive, however: so companies continued to apply highly standardised solutions with little user choice.

This is the autocratic office: the dominant themes are standardisation, efficiency, group solutions and corporate control of staff. It has a long history. Managers have seen keeping control as good business practice since the earliest days of the office. The earliest factories and mills sprang up to take advantage of new economies of scale, and to make monitoring production simple – controlling labour through concentrating it in one space.

Throughout the last century, however, there have been important exceptions to this. For Budd, progressive offices have, until very recently, been ‘blips … a quiet, constant protest’ against the overwhelming mood of standardisation, cost reduction and worker control.

The first progressive office appeared, not in the last few years, but in 1906. Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Larkin Soap Company integrated new architecture with forward-looking management, mechanical production systems and a range of leisure facilities – including a YWCA, library and music lounge.

Hertzberger’s Central Beheer Building in the Netherlands, constructed in the 1970s, is another important example of flexible, democratic space. The space banned markers of status, with simple furniture the staff could rearrange according to taste; the culture of the space was empowering, and both individual and group control of work and space were highly encouraged. Many of these themes were echoed by Stone and Luchetti in 1985. Their seminal article ‘Your Office is Where You Are’ blasted cubicles and single-space solutions, arguing for flexible, multi-functional spaces and a working culture of trust and mutual responsibility.

A new decade
These ideas found their champions in the 1990s. Work by the pioneers of the ‘Alternative Officing’ school – notably Francis Duffy, Fritz Steele and Franz Becker – mixes architecture, research and environmental psychology. It develops new concepts for working space based on the interaction between people, space and working culture. At the same time, wireless technology and the internet have allowed the workplace to be physically transformed, and staff to move much more freely, in the office and away from it. Around 25 per cent of the workforce, mostly in higher occupational groups, now carry out some of their work at home and use ICT to keep in touch with clients and colleagues. The average office desk is occupied for only 45 per cent of office hours – the rest of the time the worker will be in meetings, visiting clients, on holiday, training or sick.

Other pressures have added to the mix. As employers recognise the importance of intangible assets, designers have been looking for ways to spark ideas exchange and spontaneous communication through space. Perhaps more importantly, in an age of rising property prices, especially in large urban areas, many firms have been looking for ways to cut down on office space costs.

Three key dynamics are at work here. First, some workers now have multiple workplaces and nomadic workstyles outside the office; second, there is a move towards flexible workstyles within the office; third, for many workers the office is being reconfigured as forum for ideas exchange, community space, team space, drop-in point for mobile workers – or catalyst for wider cultural and organisational change.

Many designers and architects have developed new models of working space that aim to empower workers, creating interaction and cross-fertilisation of ideas. These models are often based around traditional communities: neighbourhoods, streets or villages. Social connection, professional interaction and multitasking are prioritised: rather than comprising conventional ‘cells’ and ‘hives’, the office becomes a forum or ‘club’, with extra ‘den’ spaces for quiet working alone. Working space is designed to increase flow of staff; ‘magnet facilities’ like photocopiers and drinks machines are set up in public areas and accessways to stimulate chance interaction. These spaces are usually combined with hotdesking and other hotelling solutions – flexible space systems where staff use workspace as and when needed, allowing employers to provide less of it in the first place.

Other firms have take the idea of office as hotel to heart, renting space on a short term basis. The ‘instant office’ sector has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly in the South East through companies like Regus and Business Exchange. Providers lay on serviced offices which can be set up in hours for clients’ requirements.

If people, work, culture and space are all interconnected, as Alternative Officing advocates suggest, then the workplace can be used as a tool for organisational development and change. This idea has been enthusiastically adopted by a number of firms using new working space to kickstart new ways of working and cement new corporate cultures. Companies are trying out new systems, and many are working well (see box).

Twelve top spaces

• Another.com has a lawn as part of its ‘New York Cityscape’ in its Kentish Town offices
• Arthur Andersen’s offices in the Strand feature ‘Zen Zones’, and meeting rooms in different colours to reflect the different modes of thought required at the time
• Using lifts is discouraged in Leo Burnett’s Sydney offices; instead, a nine metre slide connects the first and third floors
• Thomas Cook’s call centre in Falkirk has a stream running through the office with real palm trees, plus a ‘sensorama’ with tropical sounds and smells
• Staff at Deckchair.com work in deckchairs during the day
• Digital Corporation’s Helsinki HQ includes water fountains, a sauna, and a four-person garden swing for small meetings
• Electronic Arts’ lakeside European HQ in Surrey features a gym, library, general store, sports court and barbecue area slung around a fully glazed central street
• Business development agency The Fourth Room has offices designed like a house. Staff have breakfast together and a family lunch is held weekly
• Frank PR in Kentish Town has a bright red reconditioned ambulance (christened ‘Britney’ by staff) as the centrepiece of its new offices
• The KI Building in Tokyo has an air-conditioning system designed to simulate light breezes. Perfume is pumped into the atmosphere at different times of day – citrus for mornings and after lunch, floral notes for mid afternoons. Specially designed music is played during the day to stimulate alpha and beta brainwaves
• Housing 210 MPs and their staff, Portcullis House is the UK’s most expensive office building. It features a network of ‘collegiate’ spaces – cloisters, courtyards and alleys – plus £150,000 of specially imported fig trees
• To spark creativity, Oregon ad agency Wieden and Kennedy shares its office space with a Portland contemporary arts collective
• Squirrel Design Associates produce the Ardis, a fully wired-up garden shed (or ‘office pod’) for home-working entrepreneurs. A similar ‘Work Yurt’ self-assembly kit is also available.

At the same time, if the process takes place in public, or if the resulting space is unusual or eccentric, all kinds of useful exposure is generated for the firm. Employers have not been shy about this either.

Even think tanks are getting in on the act. The Mezzanine in London’s South Bank houses around a dozen units in an open-plan setting designed specifically to spark new thinking across ideological lines. In practice this may not always happen – insiders note that the most right-wing outfits are carefully located across a sealed corridor where ‘we never hear or see them’.

What’s space got to do with it?
Why has it taken so long for progressive workplaces to be accepted? Early studies on the workplace suggested it had little or no effect on individual performance, group efficiency or organisational effectiveness. The benefits of progressive, smart spaces have only recently become apparent.

The seminal Hawthorne Experiments in the 1920s were almost entirely responsible for this. The tests aimed to establish whether or not the physical environment had any effect on worker task performance. They appeared to show that changes in the physical environment made no difference apart from an initial novelty effect. The implication was that psychological needs and a sense of belonging were more important than space alone. Some time after this, Hertzberg’s 1966 study on job satisfaction placed the workplace as a ‘hygiene factor’, which might cause dissatisfaction but had no positive impact on productivity once basic needs were met.

The first of these studies is now widely questioned: for one thing, many of the Hawthorne Tests found no Hawthorne effect. The second has been superseded by new evidence, suggesting physical aspects of the environment do affect task performance. Air quality and extremes of temperature pose particular problems, as does noise, both through the distraction it causes and through ‘masking’, where important sounds are obscured by the unimportant.

This means that poorly designed workplaces can affect how well people do their jobs, and in some cases actually make people ill. There are obvious risks from handling or coming into contact with toxic substances at work, or from breathing poor air – all aspects of Building Related Illness. Furthermore, researchers estimate that between a third and a half of all new and reconditioned buildings are afflicted with Sick Building Syndrome (SBS). SBS manifests itself as physical and mental discomfort – symptoms include rashes, allergic reactions, tiredness and flu-like symptoms – but there is no clear sign of a disease. Symptoms disappear when not at work, suggesting psychological factors play a strong part.

Space can also affect the balance sheet in a good way. Leaman and Bordass estimate that design, management and use of space can account for up to 15 per cent of an organisation’s turnover. The killer variables are physical and psychological. They include first, personal control of heating, cooling, light, noise and ventilation; second, responsiveness of facilities management to problems with workspace; third, building depth, or distance from window to wall; and fourth, size of workgroup, or whether too many workers are clustered together.

Much of the 1990s literature focuses on the soft benefits of new ways of working, showing, for example, that working space also affects productivity through levels of communication and interaction. Research by Space Syntax indicates that around 80% of all work-related conversations are sparked by one person passing another’s desk:

‘when you are working in a concentrated way you are unavailable. As soon as you get up to go to a meeting, or the photocopier or whatever, you become available.’

It follows that the more staff can be made accessible to each other through space design, the more useful they could find each other, and the faster, smarter and more cohesively they could work together. A study of IBM mobile employees – working at home, on customer sites and in flexible office space – found that nearly 52 per cent felt this helped them to work more effectively. Around 66 per cent felt more satisfied with their jobs. Employees in Scottish Enterprise’s ‘Workplace of the Future’ project report up to 50 per cent higher productivity. In professional knowledge sectors, a workplace that can bring people together in this way should be worth its weight in desks. Firms in these sectors are losing out if their space is not working as hard as they are.

New ways of working also create significant hard benefits, through reducing total space used and recycling older building stock. Getting rid of conventional office space can save a great deal of money. A company like AT&T, which occupies around 10m square feet of space at £17-21 per square foot, can reduce its total space by 20-30 per cent through flexible working practices – a saving of £28-73m per year. British Airways’ flagship Waterside project aims to save £15m a year in property costs.

Working space cannot be considered as simply the place where work takes place. Rather, it is linked to other aspects of the firm, particularly people, work type and company culture. The benefits of new space, therefore, come about when new ways of working are introduced with the space – in other words, the company reorganises itself around new space, rather than simply installing it and continuing as usual. Overall, innovative working space:

• Can help staff work faster, harder smarter – and be happier in their work;
• Enables greater flexibility in how the organisation works;
• Is an asset to be leveraged in recruiting and retaining talent;
• Displays the public face of the firm and reinforces brand value;
• Is cheaper than the status quo in the long term. Doing nothing has costs too, later chapters show.

Much of the critical research on how to put space change into practice has been done by Becker and colleagues at Cornell University. They argue that the following are key when implementing new, flexible or non-territorial space types:

• Developing an ‘integrated workplace strategy’, where all employees have access to a range of work settings for their various tasks;
• Properly worked-out, long term programmes of change management, focusing on corporate and organisational culture;
• Senior-level champions to motivate and set an example;
• Two-way conversations with employees, with scope for involvement in determining the detail of change;
• Tracking the rumour mill and correcting misinformation;
• Ensuring change management is well-resourced, not considered secondary to change itself.

The case for new types of working space seems overwhelming. There’s only one problem: why do so few of us actually work this way?
CHAPTER 2: UNSOLVED PROBLEMS

I looked into the reception room … The same stuff I had had the year before, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.

Raymond Chandler

Office space has changed radically – for a few people. For most of us, new ideas haven’t filtered through to our workplaces and to the minds of our managers. There’s been innovation without dissemination. Why?

The reality gap
Physical work space is changing far more slowly than work itself – particularly in professional and knowledge work sectors, where radical time flexibility and non-linear work design is becoming the norm. Design professionals understand this. DEGW’s Tony Thompson points out that:

‘A comparison of the vanguard Lloyd Wright Building with the basic configuration, layout and use of an office building of the late 1980s shows surprising levels of similarity … the office premises of the 1990s are all too often responding to needs of the early part of the century: the need to centralise, secure and discipline on a full-time daily basis a clerical labour force given limited means of communicating and managing.’

There is a gulf between what designers and architects recommend, and what employers do. For a start, only a few office spaces are custom-built. Over 75 per cent of office moves are simply to larger offices; around 60 per cent of change consists of modification or adaptation to suit organisational needs.

Tanis and Duffy, in a survey of over 5,000 workers in leading edge UK and US companies, find that over 58 per cent of respondents use high interaction or high autonomy modes of working (or both during the same working day). 63 per cent predicted they would be working this way in the near future (between 2001-2003). In other words, almost two-thirds of knowledge professionals require the ‘den’ and ‘club’ type spaces outlined previously. Around 63 per cent of current global office space is not fit for purpose – it is, or will soon be redundant.

Employees bear the brunt of this. One of the first studies to ask office workers their views on working space has uncovered a large, unhappy minority. More office workers seem dissatisfied with their working space than with their jobs as a whole: 23 per cent to 12 per cent. Around a fifth of UK offices fail to provide an adequate work environment. In around a quarter, employees ‘have serious complaints about various environmental factors’, and in about a third of spaces, employers face at least 13 obstacles to effective working. Bad space is a serious problem.

Why has this happened? First, money. Most office design and facilities management is based on cost-minimisation, not on what work is going to be done in the building. Second, perceived simplicity. Underlying the cost control impulse is an instinctive preference for simple, measurable notions of efficiency. New models of working space suggest complex, expensive-sounding and intangible synergies. Third, size. Small firms with limited resources dominate the UK economy. Their owners are likely to have neither the time nor the resources to change space from scratch. The typical pattern of evolution, in other words, is chaotic, adaptive and mostly unplanned.

Much of the ‘workplace sector’ itself has some way to go. Price notes that ‘the link [of working space] to organisational culture, widely made in the knowledge management arena, is only beginning to be appreciated in the workplace design arena … the property professions as a whole still struggle.’ More importantly, the simple approach is probably shared by a majority of employers in the UK. Myerson suggests that while most firms accept ideas of good practice in theory, they are far less willing or able to adopt such ideas in practice. Other commentators are less optimistic. Wilson argues that organisations tend to view working space in one of five ways:

• as the place where work occurs: there is minimal effect on organisational performance;
• as a symbol of prestige: the outside matters most;
• as an expression of concern for the workforce;
• as an efficiency tool: money is spent where there’s a tangible return;
• as an inspirational force, with functional and symbolic roles: the workplace reflects the wider culture of the organisation.

Firms get the message – up to a point. Only companies in the last category come close to seeing the potential of working space. Many in other categories might appear to embrace change, but for the wrong reasons.

This suggests a fourth factor. The widespread failure of firms to adopt new models of working space and new models of working also reflects the persistence of conventional models of work organisation. People, culture and space do connect, but not always in the right way. Traditional models of managerial command and control tend to imply traditional modes or organising working space – or in some cases, new models of working space managed along conventional command and control lines. This explains the company with the prestigious lobby hiding shabby offices for staff; or the firm with cutting-edge spaces and a subterranean post-room. These models of working life, with their obsessions with control, status and hierarchy are depressingly prevalent in UK workplaces.

The result: innovative working space doesn’t always deliver the expected benefits. Companies with new spatial arrangements sometimes report higher costs and staff turnover, decreased morale, slower product development, lower productivity and profitability. As Price notes:

‘The point is made that the rhetoric … frequently obscures an intention that is much more focussed on cost.’

There may also be a fifth factor. We all seem happy enough to buy conventional models of working space. One commentator suggests that:

‘the work environment model of the 1960s is still with us, and it remains potent today … the dream of a corner office, of achieving status and the rest is as pervasive as it was forty years ago.’

This is a puzzle. If two thirds of offices are unfit, why do only a fifth of office workers feel their space is inadequate? And why do more of them feel dissatisfied with their space than their jobs? The great majority of office workers appear satisfied with their physical working environment, but we know that much of this space is below par or poor. In other words, it seems very likely we’re adapting, modifying, tweaking and subverting our working space on a grand scale, to make that space fit our needs.

Uncharted territory
We need a much richer understanding of people, space and organisation. There are three places in particular where we need to dig deeper.

(1) The futures of work. Different types of work are evolving at different speeds, as are the spaces in which they take place. However, much of the best research and ideas in Alternative Officing involve a narrow understanding of work that focuses on professional knowledge sectors. This is useful economic shorthand for the working space sector, but it says very little to many employers outside current markets. For example, Holtham distinguishes what he calls ‘three types of work’ taking place in the office of the future: (i) information work: processing of information in teams; (ii) knowledge work: sharing; (iii) knowledge work: creation.

This typology is valuable, but misses out a great deal: particularly, administration, customer service and sales work, all of which are growth sectors, all of which can take place in office environments, such as call centres (and all of which require gathering and manipulating ‘knowledge’). The real driver of the new economy is routine service employment. Much of the UK workforce continues to be employed in essentially hive-like spaces, which tend to be ignored by the design profession. The occasional cutting-edge call centre, such as Egg’s space in Derby is the exception that proves the rule.

(2) The user perspective. There’s a wealth of work on working space, but a serious lack of understanding of the user’s point of view. There is very little research on what users of space want from space and how they tend to behave in it. It is critical to know. Focusing on space without focusing on users and their moods is not enough: the most productive workers are not necessarily the happiest in their space, but those who find the greatest satisfaction in their work as a whole.

By ignoring the user, space becomes dumb space. Design and management can be almost simple-minded. Myerson points out that ‘although IT and human resource management programmes have commanded board-level time and resources, the third element in the holy trinity of organisational change – the physical work setting – has often been delegated … or overlooked altogether.’ Or as one of our interviewees remarked:

‘They put in wavy desks and imagine everyone will start working in amazing new ways.’

And that’s not all. Anjum notes that while the working space sector has started to develop an understanding of employees as ‘consumers’, ‘their needs are often dictated by the client (the manager or the employer of the organisation) rather than the employees themselves.’ This is a critical point. We have to be thinking about the processes and politics of space management and change. In particular, we need to discover just how, and how much employees are adapting space to fit their needs.

(3) The political economy of the firm. Working space and its effects on people, teams and organisation rests on a wider set of relationships with the firm. This is a point well taken but rarely understood: Alternative Officing models, with their focus on linking people, culture and space barely register the complex realities of the organisation. The workplace is intimately connected with the social and economic dynamics of the firm and the labour market. For example, working space should be set within the informal tone of the company, not just its formal culture. Budd points out that most conventional workspaces involve a ‘universal, bland sameness … forms of paternalism, groupthink and group control become a tacit objective of the built environment … workplace tools underscore rank and privilege.’

Similarly, using the workplace to foster interaction between employees will have little effect if they’re not interested in their jobs. People will simply gripe around the watercooler. Space can help, but only so much. Engagement with working life does the rest.

To properly understand these connections, we need a much better model of smart space. Space is a key part of the ‘active firm’. Separation of ownership and control, economies of scale and new production methods create different, often competing groups – each with their own agendas. Profit-focused shareholders, professional managers and salaried staff will all want different things at different times.

To understand the politics and geography of working space, we have to know the politics and geography of working life: the political economy of the firm.

CHAPTER 3: THE SPACE WE’RE IN

An unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high golden noons to selling junk – yet it rules us. And life is there. The office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition.

Sinclair Lewis

Many forces are at play in the modern company. Here, we shine some light on the informal or ‘invisible’ aspects of the firm: individual motivations and behaviours, customs, rituals and codes. Realising the existence and persistence of this invisible firm alongside visible systems of organisation is crucial to understanding what goes on inside company walls.

Why we work where we work
Much of what firms do could, in theory, be carried out by classic market transactions between individuals. However, the costs of doing business in the marketplace – discovering prices, negotiating, monitoring and enforcing contracts – can be expensive, particularly if information is imperfect or hard to come by. For modern firms, the process of buying complex inputs often represents an investment only worth making once. Moreover, if firms downstream in the production process make mistakes, firms making the goods or services they distribute risk damaging brand value. It makes sense for companies to control the whole process of production from concept to sale, as many do.

The things that make firms work can also work against them. If companies get too large, however, they can suffer control loss, as information flows poorly through the organisation and errors are made. Since most firms have elements of hierarchy, some poor decisions will be made and not countermanded or questioned elsewhere. The division of labour is also double-edged. The specialisation it implies can generate rigidity and inefficiency, commitment to group, not company objectives – and hence, conflict between expert groups in the firm.

Surely this has all vanished in the age of networks and flat hierarchies? Actually, no. Sure, firms are becoming flatter, shorter, more connected and more wired-up. Many companies have also developed caring, sharing corporate cultures and seek to nurture their employees. Some actually manage to do this. Others, however, remain resolutely economy class enterprises: repetitive work processes, low quality product, high labour turnover, low morale and no corporate conscience.

Why so slow to change? The same factors remain in the frame because they concern people, not machines. Human wants, capabilities and behaviours explain much about why firms are the way they are. Because they have imperfect information and are hired to do a part of the firm’s work, not all of it, individuals in organisations often have to make decisions with less than all of the facts. Confronted with this, they tend to ‘satisfice’: choosing to do the thing that does some good, rather than the most. A good example of this are standard operating procedures – simple and efficient in the short run, maybe less so in the long run.

Similarly, specialisation creates potential conflicts of interest between different departments and teams in the firm. These will slow change down. Behavioural theories of the firm convincingly depict companies as coalitions of much smaller groups and individuals: managers, union members and various worker collectives, all jostling for position and bargaining with each other to support various formal and informal policies. As Hay and Morris put it:

‘Firms as such cannot have objectives: only individuals can …’

Systems analysis produces a very similar conclusion. The firm is a complex social and economic organisation, with dense linkages between agents and teams. The firm itself arises ‘as many agents achieve a critical density of interconnection and operate to common sets of rules.’ Again, people are critical to the whole process. If social environments change faster than people in them, the organisation as a whole ceases to function.

Individual and group objectives can be crude or hearteningly complex. Many of us will similarly crave money, position and power at work. Some, though, will simply be passing the time. In one survey of UK Directors, over 75% of respondents said that their main ambition was to retire. Over 65% felt their time at work was wasted; most of whom would rather be playing golf.

Others work for very different reasons again. Their job is their vocation; their work is a source of value to them; being at work fulfils social needs and acts as a form of community – or even surrogate home, in some cases. Informal codes, rituals, friendships and networks develop into informal organisational culture, which, as Cummings and Cooper point out:

‘…like social culture more generally, functions to create cohesiveness and maintain order and regularity in the lives of its members.’

Routines reassure – and retard change. People like what they have and seek to preserve it. Networks develop organically between employees. They are ‘communications channels … that honeycomb organisations. Messages and judgements course silently in networks … We have all been part of one and surprised by a few.’

These factors and forces are played out in physical workspace. Working space is an arena for resolving the complexities of information and economic organisation, a place of conflict, control and exploitation. It is also a place to settle old scores and make new friends; to pursue power and glory, earn your keep and live your life. It is far more than just people, culture and space.

The invisible firm
All of these factors create outcomes: formal efficiency, equity and effectiveness, informal need and job satisfaction. In thinking about the firm, we need to consider:

• Physical space
• Job design
• Work: process and sector
• People: workers and managers’ motivation
• Organisational culture: codes, rituals, customs and symbols
• Corporate culture: firm structure and objectives, rules, regulations and official tone
• Economic resources: capacity, size, financial position, knowledge
• External factors: technology, state of expert knowledge, state of the world

Organisational behaviour literature makes a critical distinction between formal and informal parts of the firm. When thinking about space, it’s useful to cut things another way: to distinguish between the visible and the invisible firm.

• Visible: physical space, corporate culture and stated objectives, job description,
economic capacity.
• Invisible: organisational culture and processes: satisficing, hierarchies and power
relations, status, knowledge, effective/actual objectives.

It’s worth spelling this out more clearly. The visible firm is what you can see and what’s written down: the space around you, company policies, balance sheets. The invisible firm is everything else: individual territory, institutional culture, team loyalties.

There are two key points to note here. First, the invisible firm has tendencies to resistance and drag. Networks, codes and customs evolve slowly and organically. People seek steady states: they don’t like radical change. Second, the invisible firm reveals itself through communication and behaviour patterns in the workplace – and crucially, through the use and abuse of working space. Employers and designers may know little about what goes on out there – but they ignore the invisible firm at their peril. This is the focus of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 4: WHAT WE WANT (AND WHAT WE DO TO GET IT)

Deep down, we’re all still cave dwellers.

Chiat/Day copywriter

What do people want from their working space? And how do they behave in it? Here’s the evidence. It draws on three national surveys of office workers, including new Futures data specially commissioned for this paper. The Futures team also conducted new qualitative research, which involved asking people to photograph their working spaces, using disposable cameras. A selection of images – and interviewees’ comments – can be seen at the back of the report.

Three main findings emerge. First, workers, especially office workers, value many different kinds of spaces. Community space matters – but people also want their own, individual areas. Unfortunately, trends towards hotdesking and flexible workspace are taking this away.

Second, habits and behaviour are critical. We want what we need for the job. But more importantly, we also want what we have. We like what we’re used to and don’t want anything that different. Big changes are hard to deal with.

Third, we want control. Users of working space want control of that space – to help them do their jobs, and because for their own psychological needs. We want to control the environment and the things that might change it. We want stability, to avoid stress. We change the space and bend the rules to suit the job and suit ourselves.

Favourite places
Our survey asked people to rank different kinds of working space. Placing the average rankings for all space types side by side, office workers edge shared space into the lead, but only just (table 1).

Table 1. The workspace we want: office workers’ overall scores.

Space type
Average importance (1 = most important, 7 = least important)

Shared space for me and colleagues

2.50

My own individual space

2.74

Flexible space that can be reserved as required

2.97

Space for clients or customers

3.15

Space for working alone

3.46

Space for relaxation

3.63

My own private space

3.78
Source: ICM / Industrial Society.

In other words, when giving a fully reasoned assessment, office workers can see the value in most types of space. The one consistent finding is the unpopularity of having one’s own office, working alone and having relaxation areas. People want privacy and territory, but they also want company.

However, taking first alone, they prefer to have their own desk, workstation or office (all varieties of ‘own space’) than shared or flexible space (table 2).

Table 2. The workspace we want: first choices.

Space type

% rating as most important

All workers

Office workers

My own individual space: e.g. desk/workstation

19

22

Shared space for me and colleagues
22

21

Flexible space that can be reserved as required

14

14

Space for clients or customers

14

16

My own private space: e.g. office

6
8

Space for working alone

6

6

Space for relaxation

6

5

Don’t know
19

10

Source: ICM / Industrial Society.

A closer look at the data reveals exactly what we like about having our own space. People prefer to have their own desk than their own office – 30 per cent rate the latter as the least important type of working space. And it’s having the space, rather than being able to work alone that seems to matter – only six per cent of respondents thought having space for working alone was most important to them.

This has implications for hotdesking and flexible working. It might be all the rage, but not with employees. Taking the group as a whole, having one’s own desk or office is almost twice as popular: 25 per cent rate own space as most important, against 14 per cent for flexible space. For office workers, the gap is even starker: 30 to 14 per cent. That is, having one’s own space is more than twice as popular as having flexible space.

Particular professions show differing preferences. Associate professionals (nurses and policemen, for example), technicians and those in frontline services are most keen on shared space. Senior staff and professionals show strong preferences for their own desks and for private space (having one’s own office is most popular among the latter). The starkest findings are for clerical and administrative workers, almost 40 per cent of whom rate having their own desk as the most important type of space.

Note also that many don’t have strong views on the matter – overall, around 20% of all workers and office workers don’t know what types of space they prefer.

These results clearly reflect the types of work different people do – and thus, what they’re used to. Associate professional and technical workers show the strongest preferences for shared space; administrative workers show the strongest attachment to desks; senior and managerial staff are most in favour of private offices.

The problem for the workplace sector is that many of these preferences go against most current trends. Hotdesking and other forms of flexible working are taking away the individual and private space most office workers seem so attached to. Certainly, employees in cellular offices are more satisfied with their work environment than those working in shared or open plan spaces. Anjum concludes that ‘most people would rather have a cellular office’ than any other type of space.

This may reflect other factors as well. Senior and managerial staff tend to have most say over working space – they can give themselves exactly what they’d most like. If that is so, their preferences are fairly clear. 48 per cent of clerical/secretarial staff are placed in open plan offices, while 28 per cent work in shared offices. 54 per cent of professional/managerial staff have cellular offices.

So how are office workers dealing with new-fangled spaces? And what else do they do at work to get themselves the spaces they want?

What goes on there
Our psychological needs and subsequent behaviours at work are highly complex and often subjective. Drawing the literature and the fieldwork together here, they are grouped into six main behaviour types.

Colonising

‘My in-trays are always full and I have since abandoned them to simply hold desktop detritus. I have different degrees of 'in', depending on how many things I need to get through. There's stuff in them I have meant to read months ago. For really urgent work I just put in a pile right in front of me. Stuff that doesn't fit into the in-tray goes on a shelf next to me. Other stuff is put elsewhere. I try to operate a hierarchy of surface areas….’

Office workers colonise their space. Identifying, marking and maintaining territory are key human behaviours. Susan Cave defines territory as ‘an area that is visibly bounded .. habitually used and defended, and relatively stationary’. Territory matters because it is a human organiser:

‘Having control over our environments means that life is more predictable and we therefore know how to behave …’

Some studies suggest that more intelligent individuals mark off larger areas for themselves. Altman makes important distinctions between types of territory:

• Primary: e.g. an armchair. Primary territory has clear markers, is owned or used by one person and is considered under the control of the owner.
• Secondary: e.g. a classroom seat. This territory is used regularly but shared with others, using norms and informal rules, and is generally not defended.
• Public: e.g. a park bench. Accessible to everyone and used on a temporary basis. However, markers used to try and reserve it are usually respected by others.

At work, people often treat what’s officially public as primary. A management consultant explained:

‘This is one of the company meeting rooms. It’s been colonised by someone for an internal project. This tends to happen, though it’s not company policy as such. Rooms can be reserved, but people tend to just take them over.’

There are clear parallels here with Newman’s work on ‘defensible space’, which he describes as ‘the range of mechanisms – real and symbolic barriers, strongly defined areas of influence, and improved opportunities for surveillance – that combine to bring an environment under the control of its residents.’ Traditional examples at work include building towers of books or files, or using human gatekeepers, such as secretaries. Many of the workers we talked to were developing their own physical and non-physical defensible space systems in the office:

‘The best spots allow you to face the door, see who’s coming in. People descend on you when you’re working – you need to be prepared.’

Warmdesking

‘This is the hotdesk area … and this is my favourite hotdesk.’

At work, treating public territory as secondary or primary takes particular forms. Personalisation of space is the most important of these. It seems to matter to people on several levels, as a symbolic means of self-expression and as something that helps them get the job done. 20 per cent of respondents in one survey thought workplaces should reflect ‘the personality of the person working there’. Eric Sundström finds that having a designated workspace – especially one that can be personalised – encourages ‘responsibility’.

This has always chafed with tidy-minded office managers and minimalist architects. The 1965 Business Etiquette Handbook states clearly that employees should:

‘Avoid over decorating your desk or area. When your desk, shelves and wall space are covered with momentos, photographs, trophies, humorous mottoes and other decorative effects, you are probably not beautifying the office; rather you may be giving it a jumbled, untidy look. You may also be violating regulations against using nails in the walls …’

Rampant personalisation goes on nevertheless. In a recent survey by Office Angels, 75 per cent of office workers admitted to marking company stationery and other items with their own names. 49 per cent always used the same mug. Some had even personalised the bathroom – around 49 per cent had a favourite cubicle, which they’d wait to use if necessary. It all helps people stay in control of working life: over 50 per cent thought that dropping their habits would cause ‘depression’ and ‘make their productivity suffer’.

This strongly suggests that flexible workspaces will make employees unhappy by denying them territory. One US study found that over a quarter of companies introducing flexible workspace reported a loss of morale. In many others, it is likely that employees are bending the rules and are developing their own rituals that grab territory back, such as ‘warmdesking’. We found numerous instances of this:

‘This is officially a hotdesk area, but is permanently inhabited by one person who leaves it in a total mess.’

Communing

‘The hotdesking area at work is as much a gathering spot, a place to chat as a place to work. When coming to the office, my priority is to come in, meet and interact with people I work with rather than doing work as such.’

It’s good to talk – preferably face to face. Social interaction is one of our basic psychological needs, and formal and informal communication is vital at work. How close people sit together and whether there are barriers between workspaces increases or decreases the chances of this happening: communication between employees drops off alarmingly with distance. MIT research finds office workers are four times as likely to communicate with someone sitting six feet away as 60 feet away; people seated more than 75 feet apart hardly ever speak. Similarly, BT research finds that two people working on different floors of the same building have a one per cent chance of meeting on any given day. ICT may be compounding this – one recent study found around half of all office workers regularly email colleagues less than 10 feet away.

In the main, office workers seem happy with provision for routine work-based communication, but not with arrangements for formal meetings or informal interaction. Around 50 per cent of respondents in Anjum’s survey complained they lacked space for informal social interaction; those we talked to in more detail felt having such space was very important:

‘The building as a whole is nice and friendly. But we don’t see much of people outside our floor … you can go for weeks without seeing anyone …’

‘There’s a real mix of people, jobs and work styles in my office. What’s good is that there are lots of conversations between different people. You can talk across the whole space, other people join in. I’m shocked at how good people are at adding value.’

‘Being up at the front of the shop is great; I really enjoy the interaction with customers. We have a lot of regulars; it’s like being in a big family.’

If people don’t feel they own social space, however, it won’t work:

‘The space actually designed for socialising is never used – anyone can walk in and hear what we’re saying. Our office is like someone’s front room though. Other than that, the pub is our social space.’

Keeping a low profile

‘Privacy is a very serious issue in this space. The management has not provided any viable private space for confidential talks, disciplining and so on. Staff use the canteen, reception area or training rooms, for the most part. However, because everyone works on the same level, it’s obvious when someone needs to talk…’

We can have too much community. Densely populated spaces or spaces without privacy do not make good workplaces, and make ‘homing at work’ tricky to pull off. High density environments – or environments that people feel are crowded – seem to make complex tasks harder to do. For example, it is hard to think or hold a meeting in a crowded room. People tend to be less chatty and sociable. But simple tasks seem to become easier.

Crowding, density and privacy in the office are deeply connected with real and felt control over the work environment. People given control, or those who feel in control are less affected by crowding. Privacy is about ‘having control over the amount of interaction we choose to have with others’ ; or to put it another way, it’s about having selective control over access to the self.

Privacy is a major issue at work, both to get the job done and to ensure personal happiness: there is a strong relationship between privacy and job satisfaction. Anjum finds that open plan and shared offices have most complaints about lack of privacy – people have difficulty concentrating, dealing with personal matters and colleagues’ annoying habits. Overall, our interviewees hold widely differing views. For some, privacy can be a problem if people use different workstyles in the same space, which may mitigate the synergies supposedly generated:

‘I tend to work in a very chaotic way, switching between several things at once, work and non-work stuff, as ideas, inspiration and energy strike me. The problem is that other people don’t always think I’m working when I work like this, although I am. So I need to have some privacy.’

One manager noted that:

‘Everyone says open plan is the way to go, but you can inhibit the team by being with them constantly …’

On the other hand, offices with very mobile workforces, could find a lack of privacy useful, for security and community:

‘The way I see it … it’s not a way for the boss to keep an eye on you, it’s a way for colleagues to feel connected and secure. It’s a type of peer scrutiny. In this office, most people work remotely for a lot of the time, so it’s important to have mechanisms to generate and build community.’

People in the office are prepared to play dirty to get some privacy. One interviewee explained how she had deprogrammed her boss’ phone, so that he was unable to ring through to interrupt her or give her more jobs to do. Someone else confessed that:

‘When I use the scanner, it leaves behind a picture of the last thing I scanned – if I’m scanning something not obviously for work, I tend to do a further scan of my hand or something afterwards, just to be on the safe side.’

Converting and customising

‘We’re not allowed to smoke in the building, it’d look bad. So all the smokers go here round the back. It’s become ‘smokers’ alley’ – they even put ashtrays in for us …’

UK offices are rife with adaptation, modification, conversion and hijacking, both of space and of objects within it. Everyone we spoke to provided several examples of customising, informal subversion and modification of corporate protocol. These invisible acts of rebellion are made visible through their effects on space and space use. Sometimes conversion takes place with the tacit connivance of managers and official culture, as above. At other times it involves assigning additional meanings to everyday objects in the office:

‘One day these ramparts were put up between our desks. We were outraged … If we want to create some personal space, we put headphones on and hide behind our monitors. There is no need to actually play music – people know not to disturb you.’

Computers seem to have become ‘Fourth Spaces’ for many professionals. They were widely considered primary territory, although they were usually the property of the employer:

‘My screen is my workplace – perhaps even more than my desk. Everything is always there. It’s the focal point of my workspace, I do most things through it, work and non-work stuff.’

These feelings are particularly strong in companies with flexible working policies and laptops for staff: in many cases the computers are considered surrogate desks and guarded jealously.

The centrepiece of individual workspace, the desk, is also used for any number of things: as a storage space; as ‘workday node’ which people use to anchor the working day; as a drop-in point where jacket, phone and other personal equipment is left for easy pickup; as an email/computer stop; and as the means of access to one’s immediate support network – people around the desk.

Living

‘This is where I spend up to 12 hours a day. It’s set up to function exactly as I want it. Books, music, coffee, laptop, sofa, bin. When I’m working well, it’s my favourite place.’

At the margins, territorial behaviour at work starts to resemble behaviour at home. Altman and Low suggest that people feel bonds with certain places, such as where they live. They are a centre for many daily activities; an important part of our identity; often have significant memories associated with them, and social networks are connected to them or located at them. For many people, this description fits work. Many of us see work not just as vocation, but often as community. We have many friends there, spend much of our time there and use the office as a base for ‘homing’ and working alike:

‘She’d created a home. She’d set up family photographs … There were four carnations on her desk, crocheted containers for her pencils and paper clips, a bright red cosy around her teapot. She’d refused to let that workspace – unpromising as it was – remain the company’s.’

Conversely, for those who often travel or are away from the office a great deal, home-lie places become more like places of work:

‘I spend a lot of time in hotels like this. When you’re away a lot, just watching TV or eating is not that interesting … It feels like a part of work, not home. So it makes sense to use the time you spend there to work more than relax.’

Over time, as other sources of identity and belonging change and are eroded, work should become more and more significant as a source of identity and belonging. Many of our interviewees felt this way:

‘Working like this is also part of doing my life, at work. I spend a lot of time at work. It’s my home from home … I spend a lot of time here, I need to feel comfortable, I can't feel comfortable without feeling it’s my own, complete, personal space.’

‘I’ve personally slept in the office one, two, er, several times. One evening I wandered in around 1am, had a few cokes, played some table football and fell asleep in a cupboard. When I woke up, someone was already at their desk, hard at work …’

Aesthetics

‘My space is about functionality, cocooning and comfort, in that order. I like the aesthetics of it, but they don’t really matter.’

The physical environment also affects how well we work. There is a U-shaped relationship between task performance and environmental arousal: extremes at either end, particularly in temperature and noise, mean agitation or tiredness. This affects attention levels and as such, ability to get the job done. These problems affect most office workers in one way or another. Control of the environment is a major issue. Anjum finds that between 25 and 38 per cent of office workers have no direct control of their ambient conditions. Air conditioning is the single biggest complaint: in summer almost 60 per cent are unhappy with air conditioning systems, falling to just under 50 per cent in winter. The fully automatic environmental control systems in many modern buildings are partly to blame – especially when they go wrong.

Around a quarter are unhappy with lighting systems and noise, particularly outside traffic. Not surprisingly, conversation and telephone noise is a problem for those working in open plan offices – 24 per cent of respondents were unhappy here. Other sound can also be a problem:

‘One of the worst things about working here is hearing the same background music over and over again. What’s played is decided centrally; we can’t change it.’

Gender

‘He’s a real spreader … look at that, he’s taken over about three desks with all his stuff.’

Men and women want many different things from working space. Studies suggest that males tend to have larger territories than females; and that women also tend to disclose more to other than men do, and prefer less private environments. Anjum’s survey supports only some of these findings, recording that female office workers are more dissatisfied than men with levels of privacy, temperature in winter, lighting and noise. However, men are twice as dissatisfied than women with the state of the furniture in their workspace (62 per cent to 32 per cent) and around 25 per cent more dissatisfied with the space itself (56 per cent to 46 per cent). For men, it really does seem to be a case of style over substance.

Not what, how
How to resolve these tensions? One established and successful way to better match user needs and space use is to provide several types of workspace within the same building, to suit different tasks and people. However, most employers are unlikely to have enough space or enough resources for this kind of solution. In these cases, something else will be needed.

In any case, simply providing many spaces is not enough – it’s how they’re provided and how they’re managed. The consistent thread running through all the findings is the desire for direct and indirect control over the everyday environment. Privacy is about having control over others’ access to you; territoriality and personalisation involve taking control of particular spaces and maintaining that control over time. It’s clear that users of space seek the ability to directly influence their immediate environment, altering appearance, temperature, noise levels and so on. They also seek the feeling of being in control, and having potential control should conflict or stress arise in the future. This not only helps them feel better: it also helps them better manage and perform their jobs.

The workspace sector has started to realise that direct and indirect control is important for self-expression and efficiency. As one designer puts it, ‘the more ‘degree of freedom’ that can be designed into a workplace, the better.’ Ironically, the Hawthorne experiments themselves help to show why control and autonomy matter. Recent analysis of the tests suggest a quite different type of Hawthorne Effect occurred. Unlike workers on the factory floor, test subjects were constantly consulted about their wellbeing, allowed to set up modesty screens, change the lighting and to determine their own working rhythms. Perhaps not surprisingly, their productivity went up compared to regular employees.

The unhappy minority in UK offices clearly does not possess this degree of control, if at all. But how much control does everyone else have, and what’s stopping them get it? Let’s find out.

CHAPTER 5: DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO

From: Martin.Lukes@a-bglobal.com on 24/09/01
To: Keri.Tartt@a-bglobal.com
Subject: new seating plan

Keri – just seen the new office plans … I’ve got TWO windows and my area is twelve ceiling tiles bigger than Graham’s! Maybe this open plan living won’t be so bad after all. If you’re going out, could you get me a double espresso to celebrate - M

Most of us appear happy with our workplaces and our control over them. But our happiness is hard-won. In most cases, being at work is about being under someone else’s control. Bosses and managers are controllers and users of space; they operate in the visible and invisible firm, often confusing the two so that the rules suit or don’t apply to them. These behaviours have deep roots in conventional business practice: organisation and culture systems that prioritise close monitoring and control of the workforce.

In practice, space management is often controlled from the top by senior staff and enforced from the bottom by facilities personnel. User involvement and autonomy is minimised. The result is conflict: skirmishes controller groups and users, played out in working space.

How in control are we?
The Futures survey asked workers about their feelings of direct and indirect control over their working space. Around 74 per cent of office workers feel they have enough control over working space from day to day; 76 per cent feel they would have enough say in a workplace move or restructuring to suit them. 18 and 17 percent respectively disagree or strongly disagree Source: ICM / Industrial Society.

Anjum comes up with similar results, finding that employees are generally satisfied with their ability to change space to suit their work routines. However, a large minority – 23 per cent of respondents – is unhappy with their ability to change working space, rating it as ‘inadequate’, ‘poor’ or ‘almost non-existent’.

Perhaps not surprisingly, men, senior employees, managers and ABs are most likely to feel most in control of their working space. This hold for both direct and indirect counts. Cutting by occupation or class overall, however, feelings of control differ little across jobs or social groups.

Gender differences are more striking. On both direct and indirect counts, there is little difference between men and women who feel in control. However, those who feel they lack control are far more likely to be female. This may help explain some of the occupational differences. Women are disproportionately concentrated in clerical /secretarial positions; their immediate managers and bosses, who feel most in control, are most likely to be men.

Don’t I just love being in control?
Like everyone else in the office, managers and bosses like to feel in control of their working environment. The key difference between them and everyone else is simple: being in charge, they make the rules for the visible firm, and being in charge, they can manipulate the invisible firm most easily.

On one level, senior employees are employees like any other, and are likely to engage in much of the behaviour discussed previously. On another, they are likely to have different professional wants, as befits their position. Much organisation theory has focused on what managers want for themselves – namely, income, status, power and security. Given that they’ve supposedly been hired to maximise profits, some kind of balancing act is called-for, and many bosses end up juggling profitability and organisational goals, growth, fending off stockmarket take-overs, pursuing their own wants and controlling the workforce. Not surprisingly, one survey of UK managers found that a third had logically inconsistent goals and objectives.

This mixture of formal and informal goals has its most visible effects on working space. The need for status – ‘the value placed on an individual in comparison to other individuals’ – is particularly important here, since it’s most easily displayed in visible form. People express status using markers indicating rank and position. Anything can act as a status marker: people make up their own. In one office where furniture provided no means of distinguishing people, an informal status system had evolved, so that:

‘The man with the red ashtray is a senior analyst. The man with the green ashtray is one of our programmers. The ones with two plants next to their desks are supervisors.’

One of our interviewees arrived in a new office to find names displayed alphabetically on the door outside. She promptly rearranged these so that her name was at the top: after all, ‘I’m in charge here.’ Nevertheless, the favourite workspace status symbols remain the desk and chair. Researchers in one office were told that ‘you realise, of course, that your status in the corporate hierarchy is silently affirmed by the size, shape, contour, tilt, swivel of your office chair. It’s as if managers and, say, secretaries were entirely different species.’

People can be sneaky about status. Lipman et al remark that:

‘On the one hand, anecdotes suggest that office workers desire distinctions based on their own rank, and are upset when someone of equal or lower rank has something they lack. On the other hand, workers may not admit any more than a slight interest in status symbols, as if recognising that they contradict the values of democracy…’

Some commentators argue that the need for, and to display, status can’t be designed out. If it’s wired into us at work: the best strategy is to ‘heighten, maintain enhance or just fine tune a status demarcation system’ to meet individual needs and organisational goals. This may be so. However, senior staff are most likely to come out on top. That is the problem: our interview group felt wanting and displaying status was perfectly understandable behaviour. However, there was considerable annoyance – and in many cases, resentment – at the way in which superiors displayed status and exerted power visibly in the process.

This corralling of the workplace can take fairly crude forms. The classic status-driven space (a typical UK Government ministry, for instance) puts big shots at the top of the building, middle-ranking staff in the middle and service staff in the basement. Private offices for senior staff remain the norm, even while non-territorial forms of flexible working are introduced for everyone else. These large private spaces are rarely occupied by the owner, but no-one else is allowed in:

‘This is one of the directors’ offices. It’s a pretty big space, she’s rarely there, but no-one else is really able to use it. It’s not encouraged. The door is kept very much closed.’

So much for setting an example. Expressing status in this way can be contagious. We were told that in another office, all directors had agreed to sit in with their teams. A new arrival refused, demanding a private office, whereupon several others backtracked and demanded private space as well. In some cases rooms were simply commandeered as their own domains.

Other methods are more subtle. The grand design of many offices is easily read as personal expression of greatness, particularly when senior staff are likely to have overseen planning and construction:

‘This is the new grand entrance hall. It’s designed to impress visitors, but is hardly ever occupied.’

This is often made worse by what Holtham and Ward tag the ‘café cliché’ – the exciting new space promised for staff that turns out to be rather less impressive in practice. Holtham and Ward cite the staff ‘olive grove’ in BA’s Waterside offices, a space intended for ‘quiet contemplation’ made difficult by being on a busy public thoroughfare. The futures interview group provided numerous further examples:

‘We hate the staffroom. It’s inaccessible, much further away from where people actually teach … it hasn’t been thought through at all.’

‘This is the café, but we don’t use it. First, it’s colonised by IT people from the parent company who spend all day playing pool. We don’t mix with them. Also, it’s quite far away from where we work, and there’s nothing there you can’t get where you actually sit … Bosses do tend to wonder what you’re doing when you sit in the canteen as well – there’s a definite presumption you’re skiving.’

So are bosses’ actual priorities revealed – as is the actual status of most employees. Not surprisingly, as we saw in Chapter 4, staff prefer go to a real café instead, or transform their current space into social space.

Managers find other devious ways to keep control of space to themselves. J Thurlby’s story ‘Swivel’ describes a particularly sadistic example:

‘In front of the desk, facing Baxter, was the chair, a large, semi-formal swivel .. whoever sat there, found, with reactions varying from amazement to consternation, that the swivel chair did not swivel. It was fixed rigidly to the floor and its swivelling mechanism had been locked off … When you sat in chair it gripped you physically … I found myself watching mesmerically for the moment when the luckless occupant of the chair first found himself restrained by the inertia of the mediaeval contraption.’

Wilson and Hedge report widespread use of dummy switches in offices, to fool employees into thinking they can alter temperature, ventilation and light. A company we visited has a new building with central atrium, where staff working in adjoining offices have blinds for privacy. However, unknown to them, the CEO has been provided with a remote control device allowing him to open the blinds.

Long shadows
The boss doesn’t just get their own way because they want to. It’s important to remember that in theory, some kind of hierarchical relationships are hardwired into all firms of whatever shape: establishing the firm implies grants of authority between owner, managers and employees – principal and agents. Being employed, therefore, involves ‘granting authority within limits to direct.’ Work buildings are, in that sense, ‘structures of control – they both house the labour process and, in so doing, facilitate control over it by the way that space is organised.’ In practice, most offices have offered variations on this theme:

‘The office has traditionally expressed hierarchical organisation through space standards and types of office that correspond to rank. The managerial enclosed office and the open plan area for secretarial and clerical workers correspond to the old-fashioned hierarchy of the factory floor: the open plan layout represents the space the space for de-skilled routine work at the point of production, and the enclosed office represents an elite managerial status holding power and knowledge…’

This is the dumb space paradigm explored earlier. More recently, the emergence of intelligent buildings with fully integrated heat, light and ventilation ‘management systems’ has continued the emphasis on total control:

‘All services are monitored and optimised by a sophisticated building management system which provides occupiers with total control of the working environment thereby minimising management costs.’

The angle is the same: better control allows ever more effective manipulation of staff which generates better employee productivity. Workers as seen as promising but truculent factors of production, to be tweaked and prodded, downsized and re-engineered as necessary. New office space can help this to happen: it also helps save money by reducing floor space and increasing staff density. Conventional office planning involves 70-80 per cent open plan workstations with 20-30 per cent individual, private offices. In effect, it works on the basis that people are easier to manipulate than furniture. As Tanis and Duffy put it, this approach:

with all its bureaucratic and Taylorist connotations … is inextricably implicated in management by force.’

Will brave new spaces make all this go away? Not necessarily. Space can still be used oppressively, as well as progressively. If space management remains about keeping control at the top, then, as The Workplace Forum’s Paul Wheeler argues, ‘some initiatives described as “flexible working” or as providing flexible working do injustice to the real meaning of the words.’ Evidence confirms earlier suspicions. Open-plan, ‘intelligent’ or flexible workspaces are often introduced simply to keep costs down and staff working at full stretch.

In some cases, professional knowledge workers are forced into flexible spaces by management determined to generate business benefits (see examples in the next chapter). Progressive space is introduced and managed oppressively. In other cases, routine white collar work is repackaged as ‘Team Taylorism’. Companies use team rhetoric but linear work routines – data input, claims processing or customer service. Strategic space management decisions are taken to minimise cost and maximise control, while maintaining senior staff privileges. Club-like spaces or open-plan workspace are used to maintain intense surveillance:

‘managers sit in amongst the staff here; there is no separate space for them. However, they also tend to walk around quite a lot. It’s a culture of visible supervision.’

Very little quiet or private space is provided for most workers, while managers may carve out private spaces for themselves.

Lower down the hierarchy, facilities management staff enforce control. Automated building control systems ensure employees have very little say over their direct environment:

‘It does get stuffy very quickly … You can come in when it’s freezing outside and within minutes you can hardly breathe in here. By lunchtime you are nearly gasping for breath.’

These spaces are often ‘temporary and impersonal in nature and have little or no employee control. In the process of making an impersonal machine environment there is also a likelihood of introducing dehumanisation, low morale, boredom and stress.’

This type of oppressive space control has always hit female and lowest-paid staff hardest. In the early years of offices, the first women workers tended to be housed in separate spaces, entering by different doors and working different hours. Dohrn suggests this was done so women would not see and envy the more interesting and better paid work of men. Vischer points out that:

‘Many organisations encase their executives in closed offices with windows … to ensure … that they are as unaffected as possible by the problem of the building environment. … People who work in offices, especially clerical and support staff … are not very highly regarded members of society … they are dispensable, replaceable.’

Many of the vital cogs in the company – postroom workers, cleaners, care staff – get the very worst spaces in which to work:

‘She’s an essential worker, the only nurse … [she] gets a very small space in which to work. It’s very hard to move about or get in there. She doesn’t really get to sit down and tends to get harassed and stressed.’

There is also an implicit assumption in many firms that while senior and professional staff need to work flexibly, PA and support staff have to be confined to fixed desks. As Anjum points out, there is no research suggesting this is the most effective way to do such work. It has most to do with managers’ continued desire to keep an eye on and control subordinate staff.

It’s like a jungle out there
To summarise: both sides want control over their immediate environment, and control over the levers of change. For users, control meets personal needs and helps people do their job; for controllers, control appears central to efficient conduct of company business. Conflict is exacerbated by controllers mixing personal, team and organisation goals in their use and management of space. There seem to be two adjacent battlegrounds:

• Individual versus group needs: the desire for personalisation and personal control, versus managerial desires for single plans and templates.

• Visible versus invisible firm: formal rules and regulations versus the informal culture, customs, codes and behaviours in a company.

In practice, one of four scenarios is likely to emerge. Users’ general wants and behaviours are more or less the same: their jobs, workspace and management are very different. In most cases, managers and other senior staff try to keep control of space, while users more or less openly modify and customise space. These offices are the site of open and not so open space warfare: tinkering, hostility, skirmishes, guerrilla tactics and acts of resistance.

Some very poor quality environments lead to employee stress and sickness, typically on top of linear workstyles and oppressive managerial control cultures. In other instances, flexible workspace may be introduced without the necessary cultural change. New environments are introduced and enforced in old-fashioned, top-down style. only a few of the possible benefits will be leveraged. Smart space meets dumb culture: again, user resistance is the result. And just occasionally, everything works in perfect harmony.
Most of us are adapting, modifying and bending the rules – and many of us claim to be happy enough doing so. However, that satisfaction comes at a price. Adaptation and resistance is not costless. It takes place at some expense in users’ time and effort:

‘…most office workers will confess that if they get their work done, it is in spite of their office space, not because of it.’

Adaptation involves ‘processes that allow people to cope with their environment, including changes in perception of the environment and actions taken to cope with problems.’ As such, ‘all adaptation methods are potentially stressful: they can lead to a slow-down or avoidance of work and to workers becoming emotional or getting sick.’ Time spent making the workplace fit for purpose is drained from time spent doing one’s job. If working conditions are particularly bad, adaptation degenerates into poor performance, stress and illness.

Management, and in some cases, designers are complicit in these problems. Smith and Kearny argue that generic ‘task-based’ workplace design is part of the trouble; it ‘is the most common because it is easier to do, requiring the least data and fewest skills …’ Bad planning is ‘an outside-in process that bases design on management’s view. People are inserted into these generic workplaces and expected to adapt.’

Adaptation doesn’t just have individual costs; it also hits organisational effectiveness.
Our office space is inefficient on several counts: the cost of providing a desk in a UK office is around £6,000 a year, but on average, it is used for less than half of hours worked. A 1998 survey of office workers for IKEA found that 85% felt that their workplace inhibited their creativity. Standardised space solutions are associated with significantly lower levels of employee satisfaction and productivity.

So how do we move towards the glittering prize, from task-based to people-based design? The working space sector and employers at large need to be thinking much harder about matching space with control. These ideas are explored next.

CHAPTER 6: SPACE SOVEREIGNTY

Accepting a new reality and embracing it are two different things, after all.

Daintree Duffy

How to minimise conflicts and skirmishes in the workplace, and make that space work better for all of us? We already have much of the answer, thanks to the body of best practice built up by leading players in the workspace sector. The trouble is that when these ideas are applied to actual companies, things don’t always go according to plan.

How not to do it: Chiat / Day advertising agency, Los Angeles

‘It was a bold experiment in creating the office of the future. There were no offices, no desks, no personal equipment. And no survivors.’

In the early 1990s the Chiat / Day advertising agency moved its LA branch from conventional offices to a new-style college campus. On paper the plan looked promising: out with fixed desks and private offices, in with laptops and mobile to sign out for the day, clusters of couches, central gathering spaces, private brainstorming pods and personal lockers.

However, implementation left a lot to be desired. The plan was the brainchild of Agency Director Jay Chiat, a minimalist with apparently open contempt for personal possessions. He ruthlessly put his vision into practice: ‘Jay didn’t listen to anybody, he just did it,’, says one erstwhile senior executive. Many employees were wary about giving up their own fixed or private space. Chiat’s response was simple – and in practice, almost meaningless: ‘you will have private space, it just won’t be personal space.’

There was very little private or personal space. There were not enough quiet working pods to go round, and not enough locker space. Any attempts at ‘nesting’ – working in the same place for more than a day – were put down by Chiat, who wandered round the office getting people to move. Staff began hiding things in corners and forgetting here they were.

Since the open plan spaces were completely unsuitable for focused work, staff moved into the enclosed client meeting rooms, took them over and barred the doors. Without enough computers and phones to go round, breadlines formed at the concierge desk – managers assumed staff would mostly work remotely. Senior employees pulled rank, sending in their junior staff: ‘get in there at six in the morning, get me a phone and computer and hide it til I get there.’

Within six months, staff were using car boots for storage, taking over rooms permanently, hiding equipment in lockers and secretly ordering desks and fixed computers. There was a complete U-turn and the company moved to new offices, based on zoned neighbourhoods, as before – but with a desk, computer and phone for everyone.

The problem seems to be not what to do, but how to do it. How to move from dumb space to smart space? How to better match the needs of users with the priorities of controllers? What’s required is some kind of devolution of power over space and its management. Doing so will help turn the endemic tinkering, adaptation, and reclaiming to best use for everyone. Given most firms do not have the budget for large-scale space changes, it’s important to develop solutions that make the best of what already happens.

Handing over the reins
The political economy of the firm is complex, and it’s clear that there are deep tensions in many workplaces that it won’t be easy to relax. However, three main areas for action can quickly be identified. The first two apply mostly to the workspace sector; the third should be a priority for employers:

• Campaign vigorously to spread and raise awareness of good practice;
• Develop space solutions for a range of firms with a range of budgets;
• Think much harder about how change and management occurs, and develop space solutions based on these richer conversations about people, culture and the physical environment.

These measures are strategic, and they are just a start: but they do matter. As things stand, a great deal of time, money and effort is being wasted on managing and changing the workplace. We don’t yet seem to have reliable solutions on how to do it. The boxed case study sections make this very clear.

How not to do it: Company X, London

A team in this large training and research company recently moved from a conventional shared office to a reconditioned flexible space – with much chaos.

At the outset, the team was presented with several options for new space. There were clear efficiency reasons for flexible space, and it became clear that consultation was cosmetic – the move was preordained. Some staff wanted to retain fixed desks, and they have done – in a way. Managers decided to allow them to ‘own’ the fixed workstations originally intended as spares when the hotdesk area was full. Since there aren’t enough hotdesks to go round, working culture conflict is now wired into the space.

To ‘fit everything in’, fixed desks and the PA – the hub of the team – has been located in the corner space, out of sight of everyone else. Staff report it is now much harder to communicate and interact than in the old shared office.

Worse, on arriving in the new office, employees found that much of the promised new equipment had not arrived – no phones, no wireless network, no bookshelves and no sofas. After working out of packing cases for some weeks, many simply gave up and stayed at home.

Some months on, team members confess to a variety of adaptive and resistance tactics. No clear desk policy is in evidence or enforced. People routinely warmdesk. The wireless computer network broke down weeks ago and has not been fixed; the wireless phones are very difficult to use and extremely unpopular. Hardly anyone uses the sofa area – instead, people go out for coffee. Employees’ territorial attachment to their desks shows signs of being replaced with attachment to computers – management moves to introduce a laptop pool are being met with hostility. Negativity and resentment about the move remains strong.

Over the same period, a number of senior Company X employees were upgraded, quickly and efficiently, to very spacious, well-appointed private offices.

As good practice suggests and this paper has shown, space change and space management have to be seen as part of much larger corporate and organisational management programmes.

This requires resources, time and thought. It also requires sovereignty – many sovereignties. In a whole set of workplace issues, the way forward is to better match control between agents and groups in the firm. Right now, control hoarding sits uneasily with the desire for autonomy. Good practice for working space, therefore, should be seen as part of a larger programme of employee empowerment.

Empowerment and empowering systems can work if they are taken seriously, but this requires granting freedoms to users, trust from managers and the proper balance between the two. People are not resistant to change – they are resistant to being changed.

So what might ‘space sovereignty’ look like? In many ways, it resembles good practice as it currently stands. The difference is that user involvement in working space is placed front and centre. A space sovereignty manifesto has three immediate demands:

• Day to day direct control of the immediate and ambient environment;
• Ongoing involvement in team management of space;
• A say in organisational space management and change.

Applying space sovereignty is not so simple, however. There are several things still to be resolved:

• Users of space have work to do – and lives to lead. They may not want to give up their time to become self-governing space sovereigns. In most cases, they may also lack the design and facilities expertise to make correct decisions, or to make them confidently.
• There is a risk that space sovereignty simply transfers responsibility for problem-solving. Conflicts remain: now, everyone has to help solve them. However, these are now problems shared. Space sovereignty approaches help people to realise the consequences of their choices, and the external constraints the firm may face.
• Exactly who has control? Devolving responsibility to a team will not help resolve internal disputes over space within that team. If space sovereignty is to succeed, it is critical to set the scope of individual, team and organisational control beforehand. Best practice may emerge, or this may simply be at the firm or team’s discretion.
• Several strengths of space sovereignty will be required: for different sectors, different types of job and different sizes of firm. For example, in small companies extensive private space will simply be unfeasible, and symbolic mechanisms to signal private time may be required. Much larger and well-resourced firms will be able to provide a range of workspaces for different types of task. Work in some office-based sectors will require much more group work than others.
• Space sovereignty concerns the micro environment – the immediate workspace, its contents and management. It also concerns the macro environment – where the firm works and how that environment is set up. These are two very different areas of concern, and some companies may have to restrict themselves to one, not both.

Space sovereignty, therefore, is not a panacea. However, it should make quite a difference: and it has to be better than the status quo.

Ways to do it
Space sovereignty is not yet a fully worked-out programme – this paper is the beginning of a conversation about that. This section, therefore, sets out some good ideas already in operation, as possible guidelines for action.

User involvement
Scottish Enterprise’s ‘Workplace of the Future’ pilot project has achieved notably high user satisfaction ratings, and has had other teams in the company clamouring to be involved. Much of this has to do with the extensive user involvement factored into the programme – and from the fact that users volunteered for the programme at the outset. The voluntarist basis of the experiment placed it on the strongest possible foundation. As a result, staff feel happy with the space – and feel they own it.

User development
Experts may understand how to work in new physical environments, but new work styles and required behaviours are far less intuitive to most users of space. When people don’t know what to do, things go wrong. Smart designers and practitioners provide written notes, instructions or clues on how to use new space and equipment within it. In short, we have to build employees capacity to use new space. There is probably much to learn from capacity-building programmes elsewhere, particularly best practice in the community development sector.

Practitioners aiming to regenerate a community place great emphasis on involving local people in the design and implementation of regeneration strategy. The long term aim is to encourage ground-level entrepreneurship, giving citizens the knowledge and abilities to fully manage their own community. The experts phase themselves out.

‘Planning for Real’ (PfR) is particularly useful for managing space change. PfR uses a range of graphic tools to show plans for new construction. In informal, public and group sessions, citizens are encouraged to feed their ideas in, giving in idea cards, talking to designers and using simple maps and plans.

Micro and macro environments
Particularly when cost-driven, open plan workstyles can squeeze people into uncomfortably small spaces. In small firms, any shared space may feel rather too crowded, but there may be little money to move or make big changes. RCA designer Tim Parsons has begun to tackle these issues, by developing simple redesigns of objects used on/around the desk that enable users to signal privacy in a simple, intuitive way.

The Enterprise Village project aims to grant macro environment sovereignty to whole classes of worker currently constrained in particular ways and places – particularly administrative, clerical and secretarial staff, who find themselves stuck behind desks and under the eyes of their managers. Enterprise Village aims to construct large-scale serviced offices in commuter towns, enabling these groups staff to work remotely from the parent HQ building without exhausting daily commuting. These proposals are part of a much larger programme of time sovereignty and employee empowerment.

Learning from small groups
Many of the most successful flexible space solutions have been applied in small firms. However, while the general design features might transfer to larger firms, small team dynamics do not move so easily. Workspace that works for small, close companies is applied in a standardised way across a much larger firm, with predictable results.

Space sovereignty can help to capture these by encouraging space management settlements at team level or below. Space sovereignty also encourages a usefully hands-off facilities management style, in which teams develop their own models of workspace within a single company space. There is much to learn here from shared workspace.

The Inti design/new media space in East London is a successful working model of this approach. Inti’s aim is to foster a work community for several small firms, a space for ideas exchange, mutual support and joint projects. Tenants hire desk space in a large, mainly open area. There is discreet but active management of the space. Many companies wishing to move in – and offering more money – are refused because of the clash of corporate character, sector and working styles. This aside, tenants have complete freedom to rearrange and decorate their space as they wish.

User dynamics and needs
Space autonomy can’t happen if we don’t know what users want or how they behave – or if they don’t know. Some solutions to this are already available. DEGW routinely uses employee consultation and focus groups to determine different groups of user need. Architects Buschow Henley used a ‘homebuyers’ guide’ in one project, to assess user’s needs for space, show people how to match needs and resources. The guide helps make clear to people what they want and the costs of these wants. It ask them to think about it in considered ways as a first stage to designing the space they want.

US firm Netform has developed techniques to map patterns of social interaction and different kinds of employee behaviour. The invisible firm is rendered visible, and this can be used to redesign space to increase effective interaction and meet individual need.

Sovereignty in action
Sapient, a US e-business management consulting firm has developed one version of space sovereignty. The firm gives each project team their own room where they work on a single piece of work from 10-12 weeks to 18 months or so. For that time, the room is theirs and they can do what they want with it. This practice fits very neatly with the working methods of the firm. It is also part of a wider ‘cultural inclusion’ programme, which aims to make everyone feel a fully paid-up member of the company. As a recent start-up, the firm is keen to maintain the initial working atmosphere, and to keep a close match between formal and informal culture as it becomes more established. So far, the visible and invisible firm have remained well matched.

CONCLUSION

I have a lovely view from the window, but I never see it. I come in, open the window, sit at the desk facing the wall and get down to work. I could move the desk, but I haven’t got round to it yet. I generally enjoy the office as it is.

This is a happy story. Most office workers are broadly satisfied with their working space and the way it is run. Some are lucky enough to work in modern, well-designed and exciting workplaces that help them work better, faster and more contentedly.

This is also an unhappy story. Most office workers spend time and effort adapting their working space, defying orders and bending rules so that they can actually get their jobs done. A significant minority is unsatisfied with what they have, more still face numerous barriers to effective working. Overall, office workers seem more dissatisfied with their working space than their jobs.

It is not straightforward to unpick the reasons for this. Space and space management should be seen in the context of the economic and social dynamics of the firm. Employees are central: they want control over working space and they attempt to get it by any means necessary. Staff, their customs and rituals continually clash with official culture and rules – and with facilities managers, line managers and senior staff. Bosses tend to complicate things by mixing up personal and organisational needs. In most offices, the result is conflict: constant skirmishes and running battles over working space.

No-one seems to mind this too much. However, the lack of perfect space does matter. As we’ve seen, adaptation is not costless. It has major individual and economic costs, and hits both organisations and the UK economy.

There is a way forward. Where space is managed well, power-sharing agreements have evolved between the different groups in the company, and everyone works more effectively as a result. Often these agreements don’t just cover space, but fit into whole-company programmes of employee empowerment.

We need smart space, and we need space sovereignty. Otherwise, we’re just moving the furniture about.

Will we get it? Don’t be too confident. To empower users of space requires controllers to relinquish the levers of power. Experience shows that doesn’t happen without a struggle: there are decades’ worth of conventional thinking and entrenched interests to dismantle. Citizens of the office – return to your desks and prepare for the battle ahead.

GLOSSARY

Cell a conventional enclosed or fully private workspace, such as a private office or study. One of Tanis and Duffy’s four work types, along with dens, clubs and hives.

Cellular office an office partitioned into separate or enclosed private spaces.

Club a workplace with shared workstations and a range of communal work settings. Designed to allow employees to work in groups or solo as the task requires.

Den a workspace designed for a small group to work together effectively – on a single project, for example. Useful for team-based work models, such as consultancy.

Flexible space working space based on the notion that individuals undertake
different types of task during the working day, and therefore provides various types of working space – which could include hotdesked space, open plan space, private space and so on.

Footprint the total amount of space taken up by an office or worplace,
usually given in square feet.

Hive a large conventional workplace housing a large number of workers, typically in open/semi-enclosed, identical spaces.

Hotdesking a desk system in which desks do not formally belong to anyone and can be used as required.

Hotelling a system of desks which do not formally belong to anyone but
can be reserved or booked as required, usually through a concierge. Effective with mobile workers or those out of the office more than 50 per cent of the time.

Interaction
/ Autonomy Tanis and Duffy set out the ‘Interaction-Autonomy Model’ to explain how, as a result of exploiting IT, so the demand for a wider range of new kinds of office space is likely to increase. While some tasks will be organised in a more autonomous fashion, others will become more networked and interactive – such as project work. In practice, most jobs combine both work types, often during the same working day.

Modular space Workspace assembled from a set of components or modules,
which can be set up in different ways to suit the user or team.

Virtual office employees who are constantly on the move carry their offices
with them. Laptops and various telecommunications services allow mobile workers to connect to the central office from virtually any location.

Sources: D Duffy (1999): ‘The New Workplace: Cube Stakes’, Enterprise
Magazine, 15 April.
J Tanis and F Duffy (1999): ‘A Vision of the New Workplace Revisited’, Site Selection, September.

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I Price (ibid.).
C Budd (ibid.).
C Holtham (2001): ‘The Office of the Future: Why the most important technology will be the coffee machine’, City University Centre for Virtual Work, Commerce and Learning, www.staff.city.ac.uk/~sf329/office/ec/pdf.
C Lavis and R Sinclair (2001): ‘Mood States and Perceived Hedonic Consequences of Task Performance Affect Productivity’, Alberta: University of Alberta.
J Myerson (2000) (ibid.).
Research interview.
C Baldry, P Bain and P Taylor (1998): ‘‘Bright Satanic Offices’: Intensification, control and Team Taylorism’, in P Thompson and C Warhurst (eds.) Workplaces of the Future, London: Macmillan Business.
C Budd (ibid.).
S Lewis (1917): The Job, London: Jonathon Cape.
G Akerlof (1970): ‘The Market for Lemons: Qualitative uncertainty and the market mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84: p.488-500; R Coase (ibid).
O Williamson (1981): ‘The Modern Corporation: Origins, evolution, attributes’, Journal of Economic Literature, 19: p.1537-1568.
M Weber (1947): The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
D Brown, R Dickens, P Gregg, S Machin and A Manning (2001): Everything Under a Fiver: Recruitment and retention in lower paying labour markets, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
H Simon (1979): Rational Decision-Making in Business Organisations’, American Economic Review, 69: p.493-513.
A good example is R Cyert and J March (1963): Behavioural Theory of the Firm, New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs.
D Hay and D Morris (1991): Industrial Economics and Organisation: Theory and evidence, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
I Price (ibid.).
Quoted in J Gladthorne-Hardy (1970): The Office, London: Curtis Brown Ltd.
J Doyle (2000): New Community or New Slavery: The emotional division of labour, London: Futures, The Industrial Society.
Cummings and Cooper (1997), quoted in Anjum (ibid.).
K Stephenson (2000): ‘Network Management’, www.netform.com.
Quoted in W Berger (1999): ‘Lost in Space’, Wired, February.
The three studies used are (1) N Anjum (1999): An Environmental Assessment of Office Interiors from the Consumers’ Perspective, PhD Thesis, Dundee, University of Dundee. This is a national survey of 1,000 office workers. (2) A national survey of employees conducted for Futures by ICM Research. ICM interviewed a random selection of 1000 adults aged 18+ by telephone between 31 October-1November 2001. 570 people were workers – either full or part time. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. (Removing craft and skilled manual workers, plant and machine operators, and manual workers, Futures estimates 404 respondents are ‘office workers’, i.e. those with an office as a main or sole working space.) (3) Futures qualitative data. We sent 50 disposable cameras to people working in all kinds of jobs across the country and asked them to take pictures of where they worked. We asked them to think about what type of spaces they work in; how they use and organise their workspaces; what they like or dislike about them; and how the politics of their organisation and team play out in the physical environment. The pictures were used as the basis for semi-structured interviews with a selection of participants. A selection of the images (and interviewees’ comments) are set out at the back of this report and on the State of the Office microsite at www.indsoc.co.uk/futures.
N Anjum (ibid.).
N Anjum (ibid.).
S Cave (ibid.).
J Edney (1975): ‘Territoriality and Control: A field experiment’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, p.1108-1115.
S Cave (ibid.).
I Altman (1975): Environment and Social Behaviour: Privacy, personal space, territory and crowding, Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
O Newman (1972): Defensible Space, New York: Macmillan.
N Gillen (2000): ‘What Role Could Virtual and Physical Environments Play in the Life of New Economy Organisations?’, paper presented for Workplace Forum seminar on The Enduring Importance of Place, London, 28 November.
L Harris and Associates (1978): The Steelcase National Study of Office Environments: Do they work? , Grand Rapids, MI: Steelcase; E Sundström (1986): Work Places: The psychology of the physical environment in offices and factories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
BOSTI (1991): The Impact of Office Buildings in Productivity and Quality of Working Life: Comprehensive Findings, New York, BOSTI.
E Sundström (ibid.).
Office Angels (2001): ‘Office ‘Rituals’ Make Workers More Productive’, press release, April, www.office-angels.co.uk.
AWS data quoted in D Duffy (ibid.).
Quoted in M Gladwell (2001): ‘Village People’, The Guardian, 6 February.
Quoted in J Myerson and P Ross (ibid.).
‘Half of All Emails Travel Only 10 Feet’, The Net, September 2001.
S Cave (ibid.).
S Cave (ibid.).
I Altman (ibid.).
Research interview.
I Altman and S Low (eds.) (1992): Place Attachment. Human Behaviour and Environment: Advances in theory and research, volume 12, New York: Plenum.
R Reeves (2001): Happy Mondays: Putting the pleasure back into work, London: Your Momentum.
Coombs, 1977, quoted in Sundström (ibid.).
J Doyle (ibid.).
S Cave (ibid.).
N Anjum (ibid.).
C Baldry et al (ibid.).
G Mercer and M Benjamin (1980): ‘Spatial Behaviour of University Undergraduates in Double-Occupancy Residence Rooms: An inventory of effects’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 10, p.32-44.
A point made forcefully by Sundström in particular.
Wyon (1997), quoted in Anjum (ibid.).
Gillespie (1991), quoted in Baldry et al (ibid.).
Martin.Lukes@a-bglobal.com, Financial Times, 27 September 2001.
R Marris (1964): The Economic Theory of Managerial Capitalism, London: Macmillan; O Williamson (1964): The Economics of Discretionary Behaviour: Management objectives in a theory of the firm, New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs.
D Shipley (1981): ‘Pricing Objectives in British Manufacturing Industry’, Journal of Industrial Economics, p.429-443.
Zenardelli (1967), quoted in Sundström (ibid.).
Fitzgibbons (1977), quoted in Sundström (ibid.).
Lipman, Cooper, Harris and Tranter (1978), quoted in Sundström (ibid.).
E Konar and E Sundström (1985): ‘Status Demarcation and Office Design’, in D Wineman (ed.) Behavioural Issues in Office Design, New York: Van Nostrand Rheinhold.
C Holtham and V Ward (ibid.).
J Thurlby (1986): ‘Swivel’, London Magazine, quoted in J Lewis (ed) (1998): The Vintage Book of Office Life, London: Vintage.
S Wilson and A Hedge (1987): The Office Environment Survey: A study of building sickness, London: Building Use Studies.
Although he assured us he wouldn’t dream of using it.
J Hess (1983): The Economics of Organisation, quoted in D Hay and D Morris (ibid.).
C Baldry et al (ibid.).
T Thompson (ibid.).
C Baldry et al (ibid.).
J Tanis and F Duffy (ibid.).
Research interview.
C Baldry et al (ibid.).
C Baldry et al (ibid.).
N Anjum (ibid.).
R Crompton and G Jones (1984): White Collar Proletariat: Deskilling and gender in secretarial work, London: Macmillan.
S Dohrn (1988): ‘Pioneers in a Dead-End Profession: The first women clerks in bank and insurance companies’, in G Anderson (ed) The White Blouse Revolution: Female office workers since 1870, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
H Vischer (1989): Environmental Quality in Offices, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Research interview.
H Vischer (ibid).
R Dubos (1980): Man Adapting, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
N Anjum (ibid.).
R Reeves (2001): ‘Britain Uncovered: Work’, The Observer, 18 March.
Quoted in N Anjum (ibid.).
F Becker, K Quinn, A Rappaport and W Sims (ibid.).
D Duffy (ibid.).
Sourced from W Berger (1999): ‘Lost in Space’, Wired, February.
Sourced from research interviews.
For more information, go to www.scottish-enterprise.com/workplaceofthefuture.
A good overview is P Brickell (2000): People Before Structures, London: Demos.
Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation (1995): A Practical Handbook for ‘Planning for Real’ Consultation Exercise, Telford: Neighborhood Initiatives Foundation.
More information from Helen Hamlyn centre at the RCA, or go to www.mrparsons.co.uk.
For more information, go to www.enterprisevillage.co.uk.
C Holtham (2001): ‘On Location’, Design Week, September.
Research interview. For more, go to www.inti-ltd.com.
Research interview.
Research interview.
For more information, go to www.netform.com.
Cited in D Duffy (ibid.). For more information, go to www.sapient.com.
Research interview.