You’ve scaled the company ladder, pulled yourself up from manager to vice president. Your reward? The corner cubicle. With current trends in office design, it appears that’s what many future executives have to look forward to. As companies push to make offices more efficient, the permanent walls that used to define office hierarchies are disappearing. Open designs with movable partitions are emerging. The new style makes rearranging offices easier, but it also means that all but the top executives will work alongside the not-so-higher-ups.
“If you have a strict hierarchy of space you’re limiting your flexibility,” said Keith Davignon, a principal at Vision III Architects in Providence. “It seems like companies are making a lot of executives get into the pits with the other employees.”
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With the demands they’re facing today, they have to. Growing businesses find that they need to move departments and people frequently. They’re also finding that permanent walls get in the way of change. Thus, executives who once commanded offices are now being thrust among the everyday workers so that the company may keep its options open, Davignon said.
“They’ve seen the pressures of fast growth, and they have to respond to that,” he said. “And they’ve found that built walls get in the way.”
That’s not to say companies are eliminating permanent walls and private offices completely. They still need conference rooms and other areas with privacy. But the overall trend, Davignon said, is toward flexible, open space.
Companies’ desire for flexibility means regular workers are, and will continue, to make sacrifices as well. For example, some companies are asking workers to share desks with employees who work different shifts. This increases efficiency. But it also reduces the degree of ownership that workers feel toward their workstation, said Christopher Placco, executive vice president of Robinson Green Baretta Corp., a Providence design firm.
“I think the reaction seems to be mixed,” Placco said, when asked how employees are responding to sharing workspaces. “You wind up with two very disparate groups using the same space.”
Companies that manage to work around the constraints of this setup usually see a net benefit, Placco said He added that changes in the way people work are also driving changes in office design. ‘Flex time,’ in which employees work non-traditional hours to fit their personal schedules, is an example. And some companies are setting up workstations that are assigned to no one so that employees who are on the road a lot can walk in and have a place to sit down and work, Davignon said.
With companies now thinking differently about how they arrange people, they are also altering the way they layout the office. For example, Davignon noted that the walled-in offices formerly received the exterior windows. Now, those large windows are directed to the large open work areas.
Companies are also spending the extra money to light their offices with indirect lighting – in which lights reflect off the ceiling instead of shining directly onto workers – to reduce glare and improve the atmosphere, he said.
One of the biggest issues for companies that want the freedom to move people around at will is wiring the office. Designers say companies are beginning to standardize their workstations, wiring them the same way so that they are interchangeable. And they also want to be able to change their furniture around as their needs change and still have all the computer connections that they need, noted Arthur Salisbury, president of the Salisbury Group Inc., of Providence.
Salisbury also noted that companies are also looking to build their offices in the suburbs where they can have more parking and better access to the highway.
“Most of the projects are very close to interstate highway connections,” Salisbury said.
With the computer networking and interfacing required for today’s offices, and with the creative approaches companies are taking to office design, this is an interesting time in the design business, designers say. For, example, high tech, financial services companies, and other businesses seeking to attract college graduates are now radically altering the traditional office by painting the walls with bright colors, including spaces for employees to park their bicycles, and even putting up basketball hoops in the office, Davignon said.
“It’s a great time in the interior design business right now,” Placco said.
