OPEN vs CLOSED / PUBLIC vs PRIVATE #3

I currently represent a space for sublet in a decent, desirable neighborhood, the Park Avenue South area.  It was built six or seven years ago with perimeter, windowed offices and all of the offices have glass fronts to let the light through.  It has two nice corner offices and even though it's a side street building it gets pretty good light on three sides.  Some of the ceiling is dropped, but all of the offices have an open ceiling.  It doesn't sound bad in this description, but in reality, nobody seems to want it.  The space has been on the market for almost five months and there have been two offers that were subsequently withdrawn by the tenants.  This in a neighborhood that has a less than one percent vacancy rate. 

Why?

Because the space feels cramped.  The ratio of offices to the open space is skewed much higher for the offices.  There is a central conference room which blocks up middle of the space and everything has to move around it.  There is a dead end corridor leading to the last office so if you end up down there, you have to backtrack to get out of it.  

It feels as if the space was designed to make the people who have the nice large offices comfortable and everybody else can go pound it.  It doesn't induce a sense of belonging or community and that is the lesson of open vs closed.

When we seek to design space, it should be with two objectives in mind:  1) Efficiency:  The business processes that a company must accomplish have to be kept firmly in mind so that the space optimizes the efficiency of the individuals and teams that make the widgets that the company produces, and, 2) Promoting a sense of well-being.  When people feel that they are welcome, that they belong to a team or community, they are happier and more productive overall.  

As I said in my first post in this series, you, your employees and coworkers going to spend a lot of your adult life making a living somewhere.  In reality, money is a very poor motivator relative to other forms of reward.  One of the most rewarding experiences you will have is a sense of belonging to a group that has the same goals, aspirations and values that you do.  Whether it is a team, or a tribe, or a family, or a company, the goal is to make the people who embody it feel more connected, not less connected.

While there are issues of connectedness that are not under our control, the spaces we design are.  They are artful manifestations of an internal state and we must be mindful when making them.  

OPEN vs CLOSED / PUBLIC vs PRIVATE #2

A workplace must support the business activity. It doesn’t matter if the workplace is primarily open or closed as long as productivity remains high. How do we measure lost productivity in the knowledge market though?  With a factory it’s easier.  A recent article in the New York Times about a Harley Davidson factory in Pennsylvania described how the extra 1.2 seconds it took to attach a poorly designed part led to lost productivity equivalent to 2,200 motorcycles annually.  An open environment where most workers don’t have private space can seem appealing on the theory that interaction equals spontaneous collaboration equals innovation equals productivity.  But when employees are distracted from their primary activity, the longer term goal of innovation may become a moot point because the company isn’t keeping up with its current work.  A recent survey of workplace satisfaction by the architectural firm Gensler, suggests as much. 

“When focus is compromised in pursuit of collaboration, neither works well.”  

It also makes the not-startling assertion that “Employees who can focus are more effective, higher-performing overall.”

A survey of the attitudes of employees is a loose measure of actual productivity, but it does provide some insight.  The survey reports, “Those who can focus are more satisfied, higher performing, and see their companies as more innovative.” So perhaps that is the key to all workplace design: creating an environment that promotes the ability to focus, be it primarily open or primarily closed. Neither one is a panacea.   In the tech industry, putting a programmer in the desk next to a sales person isn’t going to improve the programmer’s ability to focus on writing new code. 

Once a company reaches past the start up phase where every day seems like a struggle for survival and good design seems like a luxury, it needs to consider the various work processes it requires and creatively promote focus as the key to a satisfying work environment, rather than just reflexively following the trend toward openness.  As I said in my last post, I think open is overall better than closed, but the reasons for it need to be thoughtfully examined or simple chaos can ensue.