Is it weird to want to celebrate National Cubicle Day?
My calendar alerted me that Thursday, April 28 was National Cubicle Day, to which I excitedly began brainstorming ideas on how to decorate my workspace. And then I remembered — I work at a startup with an open office! How can one individualize their desk when it’s clustered with half a dozen others?
Current startup office design trends highlight large open spaces and lots of natural lighting, and in general this is seen as a positive trend. It facilitates engagement and communication between co-workers and often clusters individuals together who are collaborating on a specific project. Cell-like cubicles are replaced with communal work spaces that represent an inherent transparency: the idea that the company, and therefore the space it inhabits, belongs to everyone.
As a result, the look for the typical startup is very streamlined — for the most part, everyone has the same desk chair, same computer monitor, and same basic desk setup. Any kind of decoration (posters, paintings, figurines, etc.) therefore becomes a representation of the company’s personality rather than individual personalities.
Some of the drawbacks of an open office space are well-documented, especially when it comes to privacy and distractions. In the case of my wanting to celebrate National Cubicle Day, the current setup makes it difficult to decorate in the way that traditional cubicles allow for.
While seemingly liberating us to express our individuality and decorate at will, cubicles were in fact designed to kill us. And on a surface level, it may seem that the homogenous nature of the shared office space in a typical startup limits people’s ability to personalize their immediate surroundings and, by extension, their ability to be happy in their workspace. Yet perhaps instead, the parameters for how people express themselves have simply evolved.
For example, in an open office, rather than personalizing the walls around you, you might take to adding your own stickers to your laptop or choosing to make a quiet conference room you’ve always liked your personal office for the day (until someone actually needs it and kicks you out). In the modern workspace, individuality and expression is thus more mobile, traveling with you: it’s on the laptop everyone can see wherever you are, and it’s in your choice of space to work in.
It’s also in your clothing. While some industries remain untouched, the black/gray/navy uniform of business dress in the erstwhile corporate world has been largely replaced with a more flexible wear-what-you-want attitude. The advent of “startup casual” allows for individual interpretations of workplace attire.
If you asked young startup employees to choose between a cubicle they could decorate or their own personal style and the opportunity to work on a bean bag chair for the day, the results would probably skew to the latter.
So while National Cubicle Day might seem like a strange event to observe in today’s shifting work culture, maybe it shouldn’t be abandoned entirely. It could simply be updated; modernized to reflect the new ways technology and ideas about the “office” have changed the way we express individuality in the workplace.
