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America's Cubicles Are Shrinking
Hugh Pickens writes "In the 1970s, American corporations typically thought they needed 500 to 700 square feet per employee to build an effective office, but the LA Times reports that today's average is a little more than 200 square feet per person, and the space allocation could hit a mere 50 square feet by 2015. 'We're at a very interesting inflection point in real estate history,' says Peter Miscovich, who studies workplace trends. 'The next 10 years will be very different than the last 30.' Although cubicles have shrunk from an average of 64 feet to 49 feet in recent years, companies are looking for more ways to compress their real estate footprint with offices that squeeze together workstations while setting aside a few rooms where employees can conduct meetings or have private phone conversations. 'Younger workers' lives are all integrated, not segregated,' says Larry Rivard. 'They have learned to work anywhere — at a kitchen table or wherever.'"
I'll be in the basement, clutching my red stapler.
In the USA, office employees are kept in a sort of shoe-box with a size that, for understandable reasons, is measured in feet. Those boxes have shrunk.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I think it's more accruate that we don't work anywhere. So why should the office be any different. :)
maybe it's the occupants getting larger.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In other news, factory farm operators claim that today's livestock has, over time, come to crave the experience of being squeezed shoulder to shoulder.
(Just kidding.... I think....)
Someone had to do it.
Who's running these corporations? Millipedes?
Why people still like cubicles.
The cubicle wall provides a place to hide when a button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho who is sick of working in a cubicle snaps, and then stalk the office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers.
Have you considered a career in management?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
You're not alone, I'm the same way. It is so bad that I'm seriously considering building some timed interlock system where I would push a button and have the Internet down for X minutes, or a timed door lock that would keep me in a distraction-free room for enough time to get useful work done.
The irony is I'm supposed to be doing work, and here I am designing a timed lock...
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
A couple of years ago, my company decided to vacate one building, and placing all people and equipment in the one remaining building. To save money, of course. ... if it weren't that they had just signed a 3-year contract without termination clausule to rent the -empty- building!
It would seem almost logical
Oh, yes, and the same company has published a book, proving that people do get more productive and less errorprone if given enough space!