The end of the office (as we know it)
More and more companies seem to be coming round to the idea of the open office, although there is still criticism to be found in some quarters. Such criticism usually has to do with a misunderstanding of the open office as a design or an architectural matter, when the issue is related a change in the philosophy of work: if you don’t understand that, your redesign will not work.
Many employees see the idea of leaving an office to work in an open space as a loss: they lose their privacy and must now function in plain sight of the world. It is essential to convey to people that the open office means a change in how we conceive of work and that it is not about taking things away, but about offering you the freedom to work from wherever you want. If you need concentration, work at home or wherever suits you. You do not have to go to your office, because your office has become a place where what is essential is the exchange of information, collaboration and social interaction.
The shift toward seeing work as something you can do from anywhere using technology that offers you much more freedom is not easily carried out. It implies giving up many elements of control, ending the idea that showing up at the office constitutes work and that whoever spends most time in the office is necessarily doing the most work. That idea, typical of the post-industrial revolution and when a job was reduced to spending hours in front of a machine or an assembly line, no longer makes sense in most companies or jobs today.
If you are planning to open up your office, here are some tips:
- Do not do it partially. All or nothing. Caste structures in which employees above a certain level are allowed offices makes no sense. The open office is not “I have my office out of which I go to see if the smurfs are working,” along the lines of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison design. An open office means an open culture.
- Do not worry: the open office does not mean that human resources will have payroll papers in sight or that that accounting staff have to discuss the books in front of everyone, or that evaluation meetings become public assemblies.
- Firstly, the open office means an end to paper. And second, because an open office generally involves defining shared workplaces and infrastructure, such as meeting rooms, privacy areas for a telephone conversation or with a partner, or recreation areas where you can sit down for coffee or a break. The armchairs and the Play Station is not a cliché: they are part of the design because they fulfill a function.
- An open area should be that: open. If everyone is going to have their table assigned, you have not changed much. By habit, we all tend to sit in the same place every day. Try to change that habit, because if you do not, you will not have achieved anything. The idea is that whoever arrives sites where they want, not at “their” place. There should be no fixed allocation of places, no one should leave anything on your table, and at most, there may be lockers so people can leave something overnight, but if all goes well, they will be used little. For a meeting or conversation that requires privacy, there will be specific spaces. And for other issues, such as the computer screen, there are filters and good habits such as leaving it locked when you get up for coffee.
- Of course, the open office involves laptops. If necessary monitors can be placed on desks with some kind of docking connector in which to plug the laptop so that it is comfortable to use them, in addition to chargers. The open office implies that people bring what they need with them to work and then take them away with them.
- Avoiding the use of paper is because the stuff uncomfortable. If you cannot leave it at your desk overnight and you have to take it with you when you finish each day, you will soon stop using paper and instead leave documents on the cloud, which is where they should be.
- The open office is about creating consensus. The transition must be explained well and involve everyone understanding that it is not a change of furniture, but something much deeper.
- If you are planning an open office to save on costs, forget it. You might save money, but that should not be the purpose. If you do it with that idea in mind, you’ll probably try to skimp on common areas, shared-use infrastructures and issues where you usually do not have to skimp. An open office should be considered a pleasant place where people want to work, it should be a place that offers something to people, which means not trying to make savings.
- Fight seriously against the appropriation of spaces. If someone tries, by force of habit, to appropriate a certain area or a meeting room, make it clear that this goes against corporate culture and will not be allowed. The appropriation of spaces is a relatively normal reflection at the beginning, but it is fundamental to prevent, whoever is doing it.
- Open offices are not compatible with a culture of control. If you want to monitor the number of hours your employees spend in the office, in an open office model you will be frustrated. And of course, forget about the idea of signing in when entering and leaving. You will know if a person is or is not in the office because there are elements that allow it, but you should not do it to check up on them. Look for other ways to evaluate people’s work
- You will have to get the design right if you want to avoid problems. If you leave people with no place to work because there aren’t enough workspaces, or if a meeting becomes a problem because there are no rooms available, you will be generating tension.
- Hire a team of professionals who will study workflows, people, their habits and their needs and who will then give you recommendations to do with how to divide spaces, furniture design and even parking spaces. If you don’t do this, your open office is likely to be badly designed, and that could mean it won’t work properly.
- Your technology architecture has to be able to contact people who are not in the office that day and be able to include them in meetings. Until you have the right technological architecture in place, do not move to the open office.
- The open office is not some passing fashion: it is a radical change in the conception of work. If you do not understand this, then my advice is to stick with what you know.
(En español, aquí)
