I’m starting to see demands that each employee have his or her individual office (with a door) as a means for luring them back into the office. That will not happen for all sorts of reasons. It requires too much space. It’s too expensive. It does not facilitate collaboration and communication but rather encourages isolation.
For the last 60 years American businesses have been oscillating between bullpens and cubicles. Here’s a bullpen:
and here are cubicles:
The transition from bullpens to cubicles began in Germany in the 1960s, an attempt at giving people more pleasant, practical workspaces.
Companies like Google (Alpha), Twitter (X) and Facebook (Meta) have been transitioning back to bullpens.
When I worked for a German company in the early 1970s there was only one private office in the entire company, that of the CEO. Other top managers staked out conference rooms as their “offices”. It was comical. And tragic. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the CFO rooting through a big cardboard box for the right ledger.
Office space is like gold in our system. I have shared mine with 2 other people for the last 10 years. It’s especially bad as every nurse who gets any kind of managerial position wants an office. As a doc if you are a chair or vice chair you can get an office, otherwise it doesnt happen much. If you are a nurse manager of a unit, no matter how small, you have to have an office. Part status symbol, part way to hide from staff.
Steve
It used to be one of the differentiators at Microsoft was 75% had their own office, only the newest 25% (by tenure) had to share an office.
Right at the end of its “lost” decade, Microsoft decided to switch to open office to imitate the cool kids like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. As luck would have it, Microsoft finished its switchover just as the pandemic hit and open offices turned out to be a germ factory…..
I think offices explain one of the key reasons why work from home is so popular. For 50% of the population, working in a solitary space is the environment where they are most productive, least stressed.
Blessed am I never having been cubicled.