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
