Workspaces Design -
Balancing “We” and “Me”: The Best Collaborative Spaces Also Support Solitude - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
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Summary.
The open office is the dominant form of workspace design for good reason: It fosters collaboration, promotes learning, and nurtures strong culture. But what most companies fail to realize is that collaboration has a natural rhythm that requires both interaction and private contemplation.
Companies have been trying for decades to find the balance between public and private workspace that best supports collaboration. In 1980 52% of U.S. employees lacked workspaces where they could concentrate without distraction. In response, high-walled cubicles took over the corporate landscape. By the late 1990s, the tide had turned, and only 23% of employees wanted more privacy, and 50% wanted more access to other people. Ever since, firms have been beefing up spaces that support collaboration and shrinking areas for individual work. But the pendulum seems to have swung too far: Once again, people feel a pressing need for privacy, not only to do heads-down work but to cope with the intensity of work today.
To address these needs, according to the authors, we have to rethink our assumptions about privacy. Traditionally defined in physical terms, privacy is now about the individual’s ability to control information and stimulation. In this article, the authors examine workspace design through the new lens of privacy and offer insights on how to foster teamwork and solitude.
The
open office has a lot of critics these days. But it remains the
dominant form of workplace design for a reason: It can foster
collaboration, promote learning, and nurture a strong culture. It’s the
right idea; unfortunately, it’s often poorly executed—even as a way to
support collaboration.
There’s
a natural rhythm to collaboration. People need to focus alone or in
pairs to generate ideas or process information; then they come together
as a group to build on those ideas or develop a shared point of view;
and then they break apart again to take next steps. The more demanding
the collaboration task is, the more individuals need punctuating moments
of private time to think or recharge.
Companies
have been trying for decades to find the balance between public and
private workspace that best supports collaboration. In 1980 our research
found that 85% of U.S. employees said they needed places to concentrate
without distractions, and 52% said they lacked such spaces. In
response, thousands of high-walled cubicles took over the corporate
landscape. By the late 1990s, the tide had turned, and only 23% of
employees wanted more privacy; 50% said they needed more access to other
people, and 40% wanted more interaction. Organizations responded by
shifting their real estate allocation toward open spaces that support
collaboration and shrinking areas for individual work. But the pendulum
may have swung too far: Our research now suggests that once again,
people feel a pressing need for more privacy, not only to do heads-down
work but to cope with the intensity of how work happens today.
Inside the U.S. Workplace
The
open plan is just one of the culprits assaulting our privacy. The
increased focus on collaborative work means we’re rarely alone, and the
ubiquity of mobile devices means we’re always accessible. In light of
these pressures, it’s not surprising that the number of people who say
they can’t concentrate at their desk has increased by 16% since 2008,
and the number of those who don’t have access to quiet places to do
focused work is up by 13%. Meanwhile, people are finding it harder to
control who has access to their personal information, at work and
elsewhere. In fact, 74% of the people we surveyed said they’re more
concerned about their privacy now than they were 10 years ago.
Leaving
the office to work at home or in coffee shops or libraries isn’t the
answer—at least not for the long term. Too much remote work creates its
own set of problems, such as diminished knowledge transfer, decreased
engagement, cultural disconnect, and a slew of new distractions. And, of
course, it makes collaboration more difficult.
Steelcase
has been exploring the issue of privacy since the 1980s, and over the
years we’ve worked with thousands of organizations in many industries to
develop open office environments. Recently we conducted a study of
workplaces and workers in Europe, North America, and Asia, using
surveys, ethnographic research, observations, and interviews to update
our understanding. Here we present new insights into the nature of
privacy and offer strategies that allow employees to get away without
going away.
The Big Differences Between Satisfied and Dissatisfied Workers
Redefining Privacy at Work
Researchers—and
architects—have traditionally defined privacy at work in physical
terms: acoustical (Can we hear each other?), visual (Can we see each
other?), and territorial (Do I have a place that’s just for me?). But in
today’s workplace, we’re always connected, always reachable, and to
some extent always findable, in both the physical and the virtual sense.
That accessibility can enhance our interactions but can also leave us
feeling overexposed.
So we need to rethink our basic assumptions about privacy. At Steelcase, we believe that privacy has two distinct dimensions.
Information control.
Employees
today wage a constant battle to protect and manage access to their
personal information. Over the course of a day, we shift constantly
between revealing and concealing aspects of ourselves and our work to
and from others: Who needs access to these project files? How can I keep
coworkers from seeing sensitive information on my computer screen?
Where can I have a confidential conversation without being overheard?
Can I read an article or check my Twitter feed at my desk without fear
that people will think I’m slacking?
Technology
has further challenged our sense of personal sovereignty. Social media
in particular have done more than any other force to compromise our
ability to control our information. Facebook, for example, allows us to
curate what we share about ourselves—but only up to a point. Even those
who opt out of popular social media sites have a hard time hiding from
Google. What if we really don’t want coworkers to know where we live,
what religion we practice, what music we listen to, or how old we are?
We have to make conscious decisions about how we manage our personal
information and act on those decisions vigilantly. If we don’t—and most
of us don’t—then we’re left feeling uncomfortably vulnerable.
Stimulation control.
The
second dimension of privacy encompasses the noises and other
distractions that break concentration or inhibit the ability to focus.
Stimulation control is in some ways more variable and idiosyncratic than
information control. One person’s distraction may be another’s
comforting white noise. And on any given day, our notion of distraction
can change. Sometimes we might find background music soothing; other
times it might be annoying. However we define them, we all need ways to
manage distractions.
Fundamentally,
stimulation control governs the ability to focus attention. In thinking
about office design, it’s helpful to understand that neuroscience
research identifies three basic modes of attention. The first is controlled attention:
working on a task that requires intense focus, such as writing or
thinking deeply, while willfully avoiding unrelated thoughts and
inhibiting external stimuli. When we are in this mode, interruptions and
other distractions are unwelcome, and our need to control the
environment around us increases.
Further Reading
Who Moved My Cube?
Collaboration
Feature
- by Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks
Three things to consider before you craft your company’s floorplan and culture.
The second mode is stimulus-driven attention:
switching focus when something catches our attention. When we’re
performing routine tasks—responding to e-mails, scheduling meetings, or
catching up on other administrative work—we may tolerate or even welcome
interruptions or distractions. Many people choose to perform routine
tasks in open, social, or active settings.
We call the third mode rejuvenation—the
periodic respites from concentration that we take throughout the day.
It’s a time-out for our brains and bodies and often a chance to engage
socially with others or express emotions that we’ve kept on a tight
leash. For rejuvenation, people may seek either a highly stimulating
environment or a quiet one, depending on personal preference.
The
need to control stimulation as we switch among the three modes means
that we require a variety of workspaces that afford more or less
privacy. The challenge is to find the right balance of social and
private and to provide spaces that enhance all three modes.
Redefining Privacy
Privacy Across Cultures
While
the need for privacy is universal, the ways it is experienced across
cultures vary. To better understand the similarities and differences
around the world, Steelcase partnered with the global research firm
Ipsos to conduct surveys in 14 countries; we then synthesized the data
with our ongoing ethnographic research. Most findings were consistent
with earlier research, but a few surprised us.
Attitudes
toward personal space differ greatly from country to country. Germans
allocate an average of 320 square feet per employee; Americans, an
average of 190. For workers in India and China, the figures are 70 and
50 square feet respectively. Yet despite their relatively dense
workspaces, both Indian and Chinese workers rated their work
environments highly in terms of their ability to concentrate and work
without disruption.
That
finding points to a significant cultural difference. In China people
don’t think about individual privacy in the same way that Westerners do.
Chinese workers are most concerned about information control: keeping
personal data private and seeking refuge from the feeling of being
watched. Thus, in China, where offices are organized so that managers
can easily keep tabs on workers, people tend to duck into hallways or
bathrooms for a moment alone. Offices that allow workers to have their
backs to the wall are considered prime real estate. In India it’s not
uncommon for workers to seek out pockets of privacy—in unoccupied nooks
on the periphery of workspaces, in storage areas, or along walls.
Among
Western workers, by contrast, the issue of stimulation control tends to
take center stage: Only 55% of the workers we surveyed said they are
able to work in groups without being interrupted. Less than half say
they can choose where they want to work within the office on the basis
of the task at hand. In our research, the adjective Americans used most
frequently to describe their workplaces was “stressful.” The adjective
Chinese workers used most was “calming.” (Then again, it’s perfectly
acceptable in China to take a nap at work.)
When
it comes to heads-down focus, however, American workers give their
office environments relatively high marks, despite the vocal complaints
heard in social media and other forums. A surprising 70% of workers in
the United States say their workplace provides the ability to
concentrate easily. Because cubicles still dominate the North American
office landscape, and more real estate is allocated for individual
workspaces than for collaboration activities, we believe that the
reported frustrations are quite likely being exacerbated by factors
other than the physical environment—such as the intense pace of work.
Overall,
workers in European countries (except in the Netherlands) were the most
dissatisfied with their ability to control their privacy and were more
likely to be dissatisfied with their work environment in general. Of the
workers in our survey who ranked as the most highly dissatisfied and
disengaged, 53% came from France, Germany, Spain, and Belgium. The
cultural norm in those countries is that work happens in the office,
generally at an assigned workspace, and opportunities to seek solitude
or achieve greater levels of privacy are often limited. In the
Netherlands, by contrast, there’s greater comfort with letting people
work from a diverse range of spaces, inside and outside the office.
Moreover, the Dutch are more egalitarian than their neighbors when it
comes to office design. Privacy considerations are not based on status,
and leaders work alongside employees of all levels in open spaces. This
might explain why the Dutch accounted for almost half of satisfied and
engaged employees. (For a country-by-country comparison, see the exhibit
“How Employees Feel About the Workplace.”)
How Employees Feel About the Workplace
While
privacy means different things in different cultures, our study showed
that workplace satisfaction and engagement are deeply connected to a
sense of control over one’s environment. In our study, 98% of the most
highly engaged employees reported that they had “the ability to
concentrate easily” in their workplace and that this attribute is a top
factor in their satisfaction. They also scored high on “being able to
work in teams without being disrupted” and “being able to choose where
to work according to the task at hand”—other factors critical to high
engagement and satisfaction. Conversely, highly disengaged and
dissatisfied employees struggled with disruptions and felt they had very
little control over where or how they worked. Only 15% said they could
concentrate easily.
Personal Strategies for Privacy
In
addition to local culture, factors such as organizational culture, the
type of task one is engaged in, mood, and individual personality shape
how much privacy people require and the way they achieve it. For
example, introverts tend to gravitate toward places where they feel that
they have the most control over stimulation. Susan Cain’s recent study
of introverts argues that they are not shy; rather, they are more
sensitive to stimuli than extroverts are. Our research pointed to five
privacy strategies that people use, sometimes unconsciously, to control
both stimulation and information.
Strategic anonymity.
Some
of us find deep privacy in the middle of a crowd of strangers. When
people go to a café to do focused work, they are often trying to inhibit
the social distractions they face in their workplace. Recent research
by Ravi Mehta, Rui Zhu, and Amar Cheema in the Journal of Consumer Research
shows that working in an environment with a moderate level of ambient
background noise can enhance performance on creative tasks. Many people
enjoy the hum of activity in cafés or airports, where they can work,
read, or relax without disruption. The key is that it’s strategic:
Individuals choose when and how to make themselves anonymous.
Selective exposure.
In
today’s world, where our personal information is being shared and
demanded across new channels in exponentially higher degrees, the
boundaries between what is and isn’t private are constantly shifting.
People choose to reveal some information to certain people or groups,
while sharing different information with others. In the physical sense,
this may mean choosing whether to share a particular document with a
coworker or deciding what personal artifacts to display at work. It
could also be about making a decision to use the phone instead of video
chat if we don’t want others to be able to see us.
Entrusted confidence.
Privacy
doesn’t just mean being alone. There are many contexts in the workplace
where groups of individuals need to have private conversations. Some
moments of entrusted confidence, such as performance reviews, may be
scheduled and planned. More often, they happen spontaneously, such as
when colleagues need to discuss a sensitive problem that has cropped up;
and at these times it can be difficult to find an available conference
room. In workplaces that are highly open, we see greater demand for
dedicated conference or project rooms that teams or individuals can
easily access, where they feel secure sharing confidences.
Intentional shielding.
People
talk about feeling “violated” when they think they’re being watched or
eavesdropped on. They use a variety of shielding tactics to protect
themselves. We often see people go to an enclosed location to take a
call, or walk in public areas where they are less likely to be
overheard. Many people avoid working in spaces where they can’t see
coworkers approaching. Others engage in intentional shielding by keeping
their own counsel, protecting their individual thoughts and ideas so
that they can develop a point of view without the distracting influence
of “groupthink” or peer pressure.
Purposeful solitude.
Isolation
is largely a matter of circumstance and state of mind: Your physical
location, your habits, and your attitudes can all conspire to make you
feel isolated from a group. But solitude is intentional; you make a
conscious choice to separate from a group in order to concentrate,
recharge, express emotion, or engage in personal activities. Some people
may choose a closed space where they have visual and acoustical privacy
if they need respite or to focus intently on a project. Others may
choose to eat lunch in the farthest empty corner of a cafeteria.
Stepping outside to sit in a quiet courtyard and taking a short walk are
other ways people seek alone time.
Organizational Strategies for Privacy
As
organizations come to understand the need for privacy at work, they
must also recognize that privacy does not compromise collaboration. By
improving privacy you can actually enrich and strengthen collaborative
activities.
Organizations
have a range of strategies they can implement, but the success of any
of them depends on a supporting culture that gives employees control
over where and how they work and how they manage their privacy. Cultures
are built and reinforced when people exhibit certain behaviors over
time and those behaviors are articulated, adopted, and embraced across
the organization. Leaders who model the desired behaviors give implicit
permission to others to follow suit and send the message “This is how we
work here.”
Employees
can use a host of props or devices to establish boundaries, but gadgets
won’t work unless they’re backed up by a culture that respects the need
for privacy.
Some
strategies demand an investment in new kinds of space, but others
require only modest reconfigurations along with behavioral and cultural
changes. Here are four effective options:
Protocols.
Organizations
can lay down rules that define acceptable behaviors about privacy.
Protocols can be companywide or specific to certain departments, times,
or places. For example, an organization might choose to designate a
particular time for quiet work in one or multiple locations. Or it might
decide that music or videos should be a headphones-only experience.
Leaders should communicate the protocols clearly and explain the
rationales behind them. Many workplace protocols have gone by the
wayside when people don’t understand them or forget what type of
behavior is appropriate. To sustain the adoption of these practices,
encourage supportive but honest conversations when protocols are broken
and clearly communicate the consequences for repeat offenses.
Signaling.
Signals
are similar to protocols, but rather than being established by the
organization, they are adopted by employees themselves to communicate
their privacy requirements to others. In many offices earbuds are an
accepted way of signaling “do not disturb”; some people wear
noise-canceling headphones to make their point even more obvious. People
can also signal a desire for privacy by how they orient themselves in a
room: Facing others encourages interaction; tucking behind a screen or a
large plant says “I’m trying to be alone.”
Employees
can find a host of props or devices to help them establish privacy
boundaries with their coworkers. But even the most sophisticated gadget
won’t work unless it’s backed up by a culture that respects the
individual’s need for privacy. Leaders should make it clear that
employees must respect privacy signals in open spaces and support
individuals’ efforts to control their information and stimulation.
In Practice
Will This Open Space Work?
Change Management
Article
- by Jacqueline Vischer
A case study.
Strategic space planning.
There
are two primary design approaches for accommodating privacy needs in
the physical workspace: the distributed model and the zone model. In the
distributed model, spaces that support stimulation control are blended
into areas for both individual and group work. This model makes it easy
for people to shift quickly between modes of work. For instance, a
worker may need to focus deeply while preparing for a meeting, move to a
nearby project room to collaborate, and afterward break away with one
other person to concentrate on a task. Physical proximity of these
spaces facilitates quick switching between work modes.
The
zone model defines certain locations within the larger workplace as
private, quiet spaces. Organizations may designate a particular area or
even an entire floor or building as a sort of “library” or quiet hub. In
this model, the private zones are physically separate from open areas.
This approach can be especially useful in managing noise disruptions.
An ecosystem of spaces.
Our
studies show that the most successful work environments provide a range
of spaces—an ecosystem—that allow people to choose where and how they
get their jobs done.
In
some situations, individuals need their own enclosed space for regular
use. But design and allocation of such space needs to shift from being
hierarchy-based to being needs-based. For example, many executives are
granted spacious, enclosed offices that often sit empty because of
travel or meeting schedules. These could be redesigned to allow other
people to use them productively when their primary users are off-site.
Like others in the organization, many leaders simply need access to an
enclosed space for certain tasks when they are on-site.
Whether
owned or shared, enclosed spaces are more effective when they allow
users to control stimulation. Sound, for instance, travels like water,
seeping through partitions and gaps in walls and ceilings. Enclosed
spaces make it easier to avoid overhearing conversations that everyone
prefers to keep private. Such spaces should also take into account
visual distractions. The trend toward greater transparency has led to
more glass walls, especially in spaces that are situated near windows,
but they can lead to the unpleasant feeling of “working in a fishbowl.” A
simple band of frosted glass does a great deal to reinforce the privacy
of such areas.
“Shielded”
spaces can also be used to provide sufficient privacy for many tasks.
These areas are generally semi-enclosed, made with partial-height walls
or portable screens. When combined with appropriate protocols, the
boundaries signal “Do not disturb.” They are particularly effective when
placed in quiet zones. They’re also a low-cost solution: In one of our
spaces, designers used everyday objects such as books and plants and
simple configurations of the furnishings to discourage conversations.
Without any explicit communication, the space clearly told people that
it was intended for individual, quiet work.
Open offices are not inherently
good or bad. The key to successful workspaces is to empower individuals
by giving them choices that allow control over their work environment.
When they can choose where and how they work, they have more capacity to
draw energy and ideas from others and be re-energized by moments of
solitude. Providing the ability to move easily between group time and
individual private time creates a rhythm—coming together to think about a
problem and then going away to let ideas gestate—that is essential to
the modern organization.
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