Out of Office by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen

Author:Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen [Warzel, Charlie & Petersen, Anne Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

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A cubicle offered the illusion of privacy but with little of the reality. You can still hear the conversations of your neighbors; managers still have access to a full view of your current work; you were still hundreds of feet from the nearest window or source of natural light. But these offices weren’t built to make employees’ experience of work better or more bearable. They were meant to match the demands of the “flexible” organization, poised to expand and contract to meet market demands, shedding and accumulating employees as needed.

For Frank Duffy, the author of one of the first books to introduce “office landscaping” to the United Kingdom, the felted gray cubicle represented “the equal distribution of misery within which anyone and everyone can be replaced in any order and at any time.”13 The cubicle costs so little, bears so few traces of its occupant, and is so easy to dismantle: the perfect structure for an economic mindset and an attitude toward labor in which the workforce was increasingly figured as disposable.

The open office was celebrated and implemented with a mind toward worker efficiency: a means of facilitating communication and undamming the flows of information, decreasing conflict and competition in the office. And as Nikil Saval points out in Cubed, even the bastardized American version did make some forms of communication easier; you could still talk, after all, even with the sounds of the office in the background. But in so doing, it made concentration and contemplation nearly impossible. “In the rush to open-plan the world” in the 1970s and ’80s, Saval writes, “some crucial values for the performance of work were lost.”14 Including, somewhat ironically, the very efficiency and productivity that these designs were intended to create: a 1985 study of offices found that levels of privacy were a primary predictor of job satisfaction and job performance.15 Designing with a mind toward efficiency, in other words, produced increasingly inefficient workers.

When you implement a new office design with an eye only to what it facilitates and not to what is lost, you will simply create a new set of problems. Same for short-term strategies to cut tax burdens or real estate footprints: if a technology promises to cut costs quickly and significantly, chances are high that there will be perhaps as-yet-imperceptible effects of those cuts, and they will be absorbed by your already overburdened workforce. New office technologies, including the spaces where we expect employees to work and that determine how they interact with people while doing that work, are never simply “good” or “bad.” But their effects have never been, and will never be, neutral.

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