What to do About the Office? (Friend or Foe?)
A few years into my tenure at a large NGO, leadership announced that we were moving to an open office layout.
I was cautiously optimistic. At the time, in 2014, the open office concept was all the rage, espoused by the Silicon Valley creatives as bringing to life the Medici Effect — creating organic opportunities for ideas to collide every time co-workers found each other.
As a member of the innovation team, I was curious to try the approach, because according to theory - innovation and creativity should increase.
In theory, an open office floor plan should create collisions, conversation, and collaboration…
the question is how to find the balance?
Yet, I was also concerned… so much of the innovation work I was doing required me to escape into my thoughts. To ponder, reflect, consider, ruminate; to try and take data on the fuzzy front end of a problem and carve a logical and effective path forward. Up until this point, my most productive day was my one work-from-home day.
And disappointingly, that productivity trend would continue.
Once the new office plan was deployed, people squatted in conference rooms, staff complained their productivity had decreased, and I managed to finagle more work-from-home days.
Interestingly, as far back as 2009, the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation of Queensland University of Technology did a large-scale literature review about open-plan offices and concluded the following:
In 90 percent of research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open-plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.
It has been found that the high level of noise causes employees to lose concentration, leading to low productivity. There are privacy issues because everyone can see what you are doing on the computer or hear what you are saying on the phone, and there is a feeling of insecurity.
The research found that the traditional design was better - small, private closed offices.
Yet in theory, an open office floor plan SHOULD create collisions, conversation, and collaboration…the question is how to find the balance?
Enter the Eudaimonia machine, conceived by architecture professor David Dewane. The Eudaimonia Machine is an architectural concept that seeks to support the notion that form follows function. It is a linear series of rooms or stages, if you will, with each stage supporting more and more concentrated work. Ultimately, the stages culminate in deep work chambers for extreme focus.
While executing a full construction of the Eudaimonia machine is not cost-effective for companies, what it does elucidate is the need to have different environments for different types of work.
And with so many of us now working from home, this means we should be testing and discovering what locations serve each purpose of the machine. We need to take advantage of the widespread disruption of work to learn what environments are optimal for each purpose for different tasks, roles, and industries.
For example, we might consider designating certain days for each of the 5 components. Or we might devote half days to office areas that seamlessly flow into each other like the stages of the Machine (from the kitchen to the desk to an isolated conference room, for example).
The reality of the situation is that various types of work and brain functions require different sources of inspiration, distraction, connections, ideas, volume level, focus, and vibrancy. Expecting a single office, or a single workspace, to offer all the ingredients we need - short of the Eudaimonia concept - isn’t realistic. So, the impetus is on us to understand and create the world as we need it to do our most innovative work.