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Thursday 2 April 2015

Office cubicles are not as bad as you think

With the rising trend of open plan offices, the old office staple — the office cubicle is fast going out of style. In a world where office culture, collaboration and transparency are the buzzwords that most companies love to throw around, it is easy to see why the humble office cubicle has been underestimated and cast aside. Despite what you may think, it is vital if not necessary to separate fact from fiction and truly understand both the benefits and pitfalls of office cubicles before you take a stance on their necessity in the work place.

The office cubicle was born almost 50 years ago and was the brainchild of Robert Propst. Originally created to increase productivity in the work place, Propst’s idea was to create a work station where office goers had more space to work, while office partitions would provide them with a semblance of privacy. Though he originally created the cubicle as a modular workplace solution, he eventually grew to dislike his own creation as it evolved into a rigid geometric structure that lacked vibrancy. In an interview in 1998, Propst commented on the misuse of the cubicle, “… not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.”

Propst’s criticisms reflect the current consensus on office cubicles and many a blogger and op-ed writer have taken great joy in vilifying the cubicle to mythic proportions. However, the fact of the matter remains that the cubicle in the right office landscape is still a very good idea. According to The New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, “Cubicles are the perfect middle ground between private offices, which are impractical and waste space, and entirely open rooms of desks, which lack privacy and are woefully inefficient because they require people to keep files, books, and personal possessions somewhere else. I don’t hear people using the phrase ‘office landscape’ much anymore, but the reality is that the fundamentals of the cubicle—a waist-high partition, allowing privacy when seated and a little bit of wall space, and a built-in countertop with lots of horizontal surface—are absolutely reasonable and right.”

However, in the new millennium, with many large tech firms choosing open plan offices to foster a collaborative environment, office cubicles have been appropriated as a symbol of the 21st century office drone. The question arises, are open plan offices are really as productive as one is led to believe? A recent study by researchers Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear found that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction… was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices, and the tasks requiring complex verbal process were more likely to be disturbed than relatively simple or routine tasks.”  Similarly, according to Steven Orfield, president of Orfield Laboratories an architectural and product-research firm, the brain is often perceptually loaded in an open plan office layout, which can make it harder to focus. Supporting this is a study from Bosti Associates that states that almost 60% of an employee’s time is spent on tasks that require quiet focus while only 40% is spent on collaborative tasks. Which can bring one to the conclusion that when it comes to productivity, open plan offices may not be the best idea.

Consequently, just because open plan offices do not bolster productivity as well as we thought, does that make a convincing case in favor of office partitions? Research by Kim and de Dear finds that enclosed offices are ideal when it comes to bolstering productivity and comfort in the workplace. However, enclosed offices for an entire organization are simply not feasible or practical. Keeping this in mind, it is necessary to appropriate the office cubicle for the modern office landscape as it really does represent the best of both open plan and enclosed offices, while being convenient to install and extremely cost effective. Keeping the current criticism of the office cubicle at the fore, it is important for office designers and planners to use office cubicles in a more organic way, so as to avoid creating a geometric maze of cubicles or a cube farm. Using cubicles to create organic structures can actually increase collaboration and foster communication, while providing employees with a certain degree of privacy. According to a report by Herman Miller Research, “…the cubicle is especially right when it becomes just one of the features of the entire office landscape, joined by other space types such as common areas, meeting rooms, private offices, and cafés or public areas.”

After evaluating the pros and cons of the office cubicle, it is evident that cubicle by itself is not as bad as popular culture suggests. However, the use of the office cubicle needs to evolve in to something more dynamic and organic contrary to its iconic rigidity. This doesn’t mean that we need to re-invent the wheel, we simply need to reconfigure long standing traditional office elements to meet the changing needs of the modern office landscape.

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References:
The Cubicle Turns 50 by Andrew Burmon
Journal of Environmental Psychology
Forward Thinking: Why the Ideas from the Man Who Invented Cubicles Still Make Sense
Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst by Sarah Green