When Facebook moved into new offices in Menlo Park in 2015, Mashable called the campus “a child’s candy-fueled daydream.” Designed by Frank Gehry, the building has a nine-acre rooftop park, teepee swings and meeting rooms that double as ball pits. Mark Zuckerberg called the mile-long workspace the largest “open floor plan in the world — a single room that fits thousands of people.” The goal, he said, was to create the perfect engineering space for teams to work together, a place that would “create the same sense of community and connection among our teams that we try to enable with our services across the world.” The result is a single office intended to encourage employees to meet, mingle and collaborate instead of walling themselves off in their own offices or cubicles… where presumably they could check their Facebook pages in private.
The company would have had a second motivation too. With Alphabet just down the road and Apple building its new “spaceship” campus in nearby Cupertino, Facebook has tough competition for the kinds of talented code crunchers it needs to keep the likes flowing. Showing interviewees a glitzy new building would have helped it to pull people away from the search company’s canteen and the iPhone maker’s 7,000 trees and apricot orchards.
Whether any of those companies have been successful at both spoiling their staff and fostering the collaboration that improves productivity though is debatable. Facebook’s employees have complained about the noise that comes from working in a space with no walls. Staff at Apple have expressed worries about the long tables and open floor plan at their new campus, with some people predicting an outflow of employees once the move is complete in the fall of 2017. According to one account, the reaction of John Srouji, Apple’s VP of hardware technologies, to the plan of his department’s workspace was a four-letter rant and a new building on the side of the campus where his team could develop Apple’s chipsets by themselves. Companies know that talent doesn’t want to work in dull office spaces or cubicles, and they recognize that when making their career choices, potential employees might well take an office’s interior design into account (especially when it includes nap pods and a lake.) But figuring out what staff will actually like when they work—and what’s likely to get the best work out of them—isn’t straightforward.
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Workers who have expressed doubts about Apple’s giant tables, for example, may be right. Some research has found that despite the popularity of open office spaces and the absence of walls, the benefits of greater collaboration are outweighed by the disadvantages of greater distractions, uncooperative behavior from deskmates, increased distrust, negative relationships, and missing supervisor support. In a study of 1,000 office workers, researchers found that “as work environments became more shared (with hot-desking being at the extreme end of the continuum), not only were there increases in demands, but co-worker friendships were not improved and perceptions of supervisory support decreased.” Other studies have found that information flow does not improve in a shared office, while co-operation in an environment in which workers have to compete for space becomes less pleasant. The results, the researchers conclude, “suggest that the open-plan office is not recommended for professional workers.”
If that’s the conclusion of academics, the message doesn’t seem to be getting through to the businesses themselves. Open office plans don’t just allow managers to hope that the sales team will chat with the development team and produce innovative solutions that customers will love. They also let them pack more people into the same floor space, and they show visitors and partners an inviting hive of activity instead of a corridor of closed doors.
Groupon’s London office. (Image: K2Space)
Office designers though are aware of the problem. They’re not turning their backs entirely on the open plans that their clients want to see, but they are looking for ways to free staff from the distractions of a noisy deskmate. One solution that’s growing in popularity is building flexibility into a workspace. Instead of forcing staff into a single personal work area—such as a seat at a shared desk—designers are creating multiple spaces in one office building that employees can move between during the day.
“What this boils down to in terms of office design is that today’s workplaces must provide staff with a variety of work settings where they can choose to work from,” says Kevin Byrne, marketing director of K2 Space, an interior design firm that has laid out offices for law firms, financial institutions and leading tech companies. “This translates to providing areas for collaboration, areas for concentrated working and also areas where staff can relax or unwind – in a nutshell, choice is key.”
The different zones in the office are marked by different designs, with each design approach intended to produce a particular reaction in employees. An office building could have areas that enjoy natural light, something that has been proven to raise energy levels, says Byrne. Other workspaces might have a “biophilic office design,” an area filled with greenery and plantlife that increase oxygen levels, improving mental capacity and creativity. “Chill out zones” might have plush sofas or good views, giving staff a quiet place to relax and read, while areas with visual stimuli such as artwork, graphics and vibrant colors, are intended to raise energy levels and promote innovation.
If that variety sounds a little like a private home, with different rooms for relaxing, working, sleeping and eating, each with a slightly different design but all following a similar theme, the similarity isn’t coincidental.
“Providing a variety of work settings designed for different tasks can have a huge impact in creativity and is why many companies are making the modern workplace look homelier,” says Byrne.
It’s an approach that AirBnB took to one extreme when planning its headquarters in San Francisco. In addition to the usual mixture of open space offices and private meeting rooms, the company also included eight rooms that copy the style of locations listed for rent on the website, including AirBnB’s first ever listing, the apartment the three founders shared when they set up the company.
“We wanted to create a space that encourages our employees to move around, interact across disciplines, and see movement and activity,” co-founder Brian Chesky explained, pre-empting Mark Zuckerberg’s desire for employees who are always on the move. “In an open floor plan, you typically have two types of spaces: desks and meeting rooms. We focused on creating a third shared space as well. Sofas scattered amongst the desks, the communal dining area, and project rooms with long standing tables all provide an opportunity for our employees to have casual conversations, spontaneous collaborations, or informal meetings.”
For Adobe’s offices in London and Dublin, K2 Space didn’t copy the style of real apartments but it did create meeting rooms with blue sofas and orange walls, a canteen with a pair of large blackboards and plenty of exposed wood, and vibrant colors on the walls of the open plan offices to give staff a choice of different working environments. For Beats’ office in London, the company again stuck with an open plan workspace but also made sure that it created plenty of smaller areas in which staff could meet and collaborate. And for Groupon, the firm stuck with its bold color schemes but in keeping with traditional tech company goodies, also made sure that the office included air hockey and foosball tables.
Home Furnishings… But Bright Colors
The bright colors might not sound too homely but there is some research that supports the idea that bright tones have an effect on mood. Following a literature review by NASA into the best colors and color combinations to create for the habitation module of the space station, Professor Nancy Kwaller, director of the interior design program at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas, tested the effect of different colored workspaces on workers. She painted three offices white, red and blue-green, and measured how the colors affected the clerical speed and proofreading accuracy among 90 volunteers.
The results weren’t straightforward and depended at least in part on the volunteers’ environmental sensitivity. Although in general, workers in the red office reported higher negative mood characteristics compared to those in the blue-green office, people who could more easily screen out external stimuli were more productive in the red office. “Only when individual differences in the ability to screen irrelevant environmental stimuli were taken into account did the color schemes exhibit a differential impact on productivity,” Professor Kwaller concluded.
Or to put it another way, the design of a workspace—and in particular, its color scheme—will have different effects on different kinds of people. Just as some people can work easily in a crowded café with music playing through their headphones while others can only get things done in an atmosphere like a library, so the same office design can provoke different reactions in different members of the same team, especially when they face different tasks. That need for different work environments is another of the reasons that office designers like K2 Space are now placing such an emphasis on workspace choice. Staff who find that the bright red open plan office is too distracting for them (and the person at the desk next to them too annoying) can take their laptop to the canteen or the lounge or the rooftop teepee swing, and crank out their code there.
It’s all a long way from the original concept of an office building in which only clerical staff shared a workspace while the professionals beavered away behind the curtains in front of the glass walls of their personal domains. Those private offices aren’t going away entirely. Private offices remain common in finance, legal and B2B sectors. Some functions such as accounting and personnel require privacy, and key developers like John Srouji will sometimes demand a private office to crunch their code in private and kick up a fuss if they don’t receive it. But on the whole, the trends in office design now remains away from the kind of individual offices seen in shows like Mad Men and towards shared spaces.
“The open plan is now the standard,” says Byrne, “[but it] isn’t ideal for concentrated work if it’s a particularly noisy environment or for collaboration due to distractions, so including areas away from the desk is highly recommended.”
Creating at least two kinds of workspace in one office is always going to be fairly easy for big companies like Facebook and Apple whose campuses cover kilometers and have plenty of small crannies for staff to hide away in. For smaller firms whose space is at a premium, finding ways to combine the collaboration of open plan offices with the productivity of private spaces is likely to be a larger challenge. But it is possible for company founders to create those spaces and if the first creativity test for an employee is finding a quiet place to work, with low colors and no second-hand headphone bass, passing that test should produce some positive results.
That might also make employees hard to find when you need them but it’s worth remembering that another trend in office design is the ability for workplaces to digitally track the locations of their employees, and even measure the amount of time they spend at their desks. If all that sounds dystopian, there is at least one silver lining: the days of Dilbert appear to be over.
“The cubicle is dead in our opinion,” says Byrne, “and is not something we would ever recommend as we believe it stifles the social aspect and has an adverse effect on collaboration, creativity and staff wellbeing.”
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