The Death of the Corner Office and the Distributed Future of Digital Workspaces
While the global pandemic has disrupted almost every facet of modern life, its greatest disruption has been to human communication, blurring the boundaries between not only work and home, but even many of our cherished third places.
Although much of this blurring seems to have resulted in several cases of “zoom fatigue,” (a term that has already entered our common lexicon), the fatigue does not seem to have slowed the drive of some to look for alternative solutions in hopes of retaining some semblance of “normal” human communication.
But what do these alternatives look like…?
If you’re still skeptical about a future in which we all interact through virtual avatars and holographic digital twins to attend awkward christmas parties, consider that the youth of today who will soon enter the workforce are currently attending concerts in Fortnite and Roblox. It’s worth stressing that these youth are partaking in such social virtual activities not as a response to a global pandemic, but as a normal part of growing up.
But to be fair, many are not convinced that the metaverse is right around the corner and, as 2020 has shown us, the future is hard to predict. It is possible, however, to make likely predictions about what the (near) future of work might look like because some solutions, like Wonda VR, already exist and offer viable alternatives to retain and even enhance some of the most important facets of human communication.
A Brief History of Office Design
To make good predictions about the future, though, it’s often useful to look to the past. If you were to research the history of office design, you might be quite surprised to learn about the well-intentioned origins of the cubicle, which was actually a response to the common open office plans of the early-to-mid 20th century, where individual privacy was nonexistent.
Robert Propst, who led the research and investigation into office design on behalf of Herman Miller in the 1960s concluded that
But what initially started out as the utopian “Action Office I” in the 1960s unfortunately warped into the dystopian cubicle by the 1980s. What was supposed to be a template for any individual to create his or her own ideal work space morphed into stuffing as many people in as small a space for as cheaply as possible as quickly as possible.
So what went wrong?
Well, what went wrong is what typically goes wrong with many great ideas and why they ultimately fail: they fail in their implementation. In this case, not only did many executives at the time conceptually misunderstand the vision of the Action Office I and how to deploy it within their organizations, but the Action Office I as originally designed and intended was understandably impractical for most organizations that had to consider their bottom line.
Although Propst went back to the drawing board and created the Action Office II, a version that was more amenable to the different constraints of the time, copycat versions that were ghostly-pale imitations (i.e., the modern cubicle) of the original idea caught on because of the immense cost-savings.
The shift back to the open office space design of the late-1990s among startups and tech companies that valued collaboration above all else was yet again another reaction to the inhumanity (or as Propst later referred to it, the “monolithic insanity”) of the cubicle.
Yet, you may be one of many that are currently enjoying working from home during the pandemic, as it offers some a welcome respite from the open office. While it is still uncertain what organizations will do post-pandemic (even the idea of a possible return to the cubicle has been floated), it seems we are back where we started.
But what about the corner office?
Most surprisingly, aside from a few pieces on corner offices as symbols of status, which they most certainly are/were, it’s surprising to find that thoughts on what the corner office represents and how it fits into this story are largely absent from most analyses of the history of office design.
While great ideas sometimes fail in implementation, they sometimes also continue to exist and take on other forms. In my opinion, the original dream and spirit of the Action Office did not just die and disappear, but instead shifted and lived on in the corner office, one that was sadly only available to the elite few in many organizations.
In fact, a major reason that precipitated a modern shift to an open office space was not just for promoting collaboration and creativity among workers, but also because an open office space was supposed to reflect and represent a less hierarchical and a more egalitarian organizational structure: the “flat organization.”
This naturally led some in management to even disavow their thrones (i.e., their corner offices) to sit “in the trenches” amongst their employees. While this sounds great in theory, the results on its effectiveness in practice are mixed. In fact, in some cases this arrangement morphed the collaborative promise of open office spaces into a more stifling environment with management sitting in the center as a sort of weird hybrid between an all-seeing micromanaging Sauron and Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
In short, at the center of this history of the development of office design is a tension being negotiated between two extremes that reflect the advantages and disadvantages of private and collaborative workspaces: productivity and efficiency had from privacy on the one hand and creativity and wellbeing from collaboration on the other.
For some organizations, this a tension that has yet to be conclusively resolved. The truth may be that if your workplace culture is already dysfunctional, no surface-level cosmetic or physical changes to your office layout is going to solve its deep, underlying cultural problems.
Instead, what may be required is a happy medium that is easily accessible to employees; one that provides time and space for both privacy and collaboration exactly when both are needed.
But how?
A Corner Office for Everyone
Earlier, I opined that some of the functional advantages of the Action Office lived on in the idea of the corner office, establishing a sort of happy medium which avoided the negative extremes of both the open office and the cubicle.
Aside from escaping the smell of microwaved salmon lingering in the air, there are real functional advantages to having a corner office that recursively lead to better output — one of the sad productivity traps of not having access to such an office.
Organizational hierarchies can sometimes be self-reinforcing in that those who are given the corner office often have more opportunities to be more productive (i.e., they have more time to focus, think, reflect, and be creative), while those relegated to either the disruptive open office or the cubicle of death enjoy neither gains in productivity.
With webXR solutions such as Wonda, it may be entirely possible for individuals and teams to enjoy some of the functional advantages of the corner office, without needing to worry about the constraints that killed the Action Office.
Space, Privacy, and Windows
Three aspects of the corner office that lead to productivity, creativity, and wellbeing are its ample physical space, time for privacy, and of course the big windows. These advantages can also be enjoyed in Wonda VR Spaces while used in conjunction with other tools you may already be using.
Corner offices’ ample physical space allow a high level of personalization and the ability to think spatially, the office space itself becoming a representation of the mind.
With Wonda, not only can you create several custom 3D rooms for any occasion, but you can have a room to think spatially. All assets (whether they be 2D videos, 2D images, or 3D objects) are all persistent, meaning they will remain wherever you put them in your 3D room, even when you leave and come back. You can also interact and collaborate synchronously with other users in real-time, all easily accessible on multiple devices thanks to webXR.
Corner offices also allow time for privacy, which has more to do with focused time to concentrate and be productive than secluding oneself in solitude. At the heart of creativity is the time and bandwidth to think and focus on a particular challenge.
While Wonda can’t save you from a micromanaging boss or an unnecessarily verbose co-worker, it can give you a place to think spatially and to also craft and deliver creative immersive presentations. If you are tired of boring powerpoints, you can easily create an art gallery of your ideas and walk (literally) your team through your thought process. This is all easily accomplished with Wonda VR’s no-code editor.
There’s nothing worse than having a great idea, only to lose it to some distraction. Wonda also allows you to work and design in solo mode asynchronously in one of these 3D rooms and then invite collaborators when you are ready.
Corner offices also have big windows. While a virtual sun certainly won’t give you any vitamin D (yet?!), window-like experiences have other benefits. As counterintuitive as it may seem, some of the best ideas come from daydreaming or staring out the window, which can sometimes stir the imagination and creativity.
While sticky notes are great, they are great for quickly capturing creative ideas, not for generating and inspiring them. There really isn’t anything inspiring about staring at the same office work space everyday. If you feel most creative in a particular place, you can immerse yourself there to think, either alone or with your team.
2020 and 2021 have been a crazy year, and who knows what’s in store for 2023. As more and more professionals continue to work from home, many will adopt new creative solutions to be as productive as possible. If you are interested in experiencing a new type of workspace, give Wonda a try and sign-up for a free trial.
