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.'"

Comments

Causality

[Kev Vance]

"Younger workers' lives are all integrated, not segregated," says Larry Rivard. "They have learned to work anywhere — at a kitchen table or wherever."

Could that be because their office space has become so worthless that anywhere else is preferable?

Re:Causality

[JeffSpudrinski]

Amazing how corporations will justify whatever they want.

Because people are not given a choice but to work in less space, they therefore say that they don't need it or want it.

Question: did they ask the workers (really ask them...anonymously)? .02

-JJS

Re:Causality

[cbiltcliffe]

Definitely agree.

And to me "they've learned to work at a kitchen table or wherever" is only a small step away from "they're all on call 24/7, because they can work wherever they happen to be."

Re:Causality

[Moryath]

Shocker of shockers... no, not really.

Once upon a time, workers had to deal with crap working conditions in which getting killed was commonplace. In shitass countries like India, or Malaysia, or China where all the manufacturing has been "outsourced" to for slave-labor wages, this is still true.

Today, the US has laws and agencies that are supposed to prevent this. But companies run by the soulless, inhuman "I have an MBA and never did a fucking day of real honest work in my life" types will try to get around it however they can.

OSHA says you have to have an office where phone calls can be private? Fine, we'll give you one "private phone room" for 20 employees. OSHA says you have to have a 30 minute lunch break? Fine, but we'll stick the kitchen in another building 10 minutes walk away, good luck getting there and back and still managing to do anything but bolt your lunch at choking-hazard speeds, sucker, or you can take a bag lunch in and keep it in your desk and you might as well work while eating anyways.

What we need to do is bust up the megacorporations and get rid of the top-level leech class that don't produce anything. But good luck seeing that happen any time soon. Those tax-evading assholes have too much media control to get the word out about them.

Re:Causality

[swb]

Executive offices are fairly astonishing in size. Part of it is due to tabulatory gigantism -- the need to have the largest possible desk, despite the fact that many don't even "work at a desk". This latter aspect drives a lot of the large executive office syndrome; they "don't work at a desk" therefore they need the space for a living room setup, complete with a big leather couch, designer table, and a couple of chairs and a large flat screen TV & entertainment setup.

They also need a kitchenette setup (Keurig coffee machine, fridge for beer/pop, liquor, glasses, ice) and in many cases a private bathroom, because they want to be able to offer refreshments and a restroom for them and their guests.

One of the major ironies about all this space being devoted to them is that it stands empty much of the time due to their extensive travel requirements (cf. justification for Netjets/company airplane).

I sometimes wonder why they don't skip all the executive suites and instead build a small hotel on corporate campuses and hire a hotel company to manage it. The executives could be given a generic "large" office (of the type generally assigned to on-site senior working managers; large enough for a desk, conference table and four chairs, but not the big suites) and a group of suites in the hotel could be set aside for executives involved in meetings for which their "living room" setup would be required; the hotel's concierge and other staff could be used for food/beverage and other conveniences.

The side benefit would be a functional hotel that could be used for out of town employees, vendors and others needing accommodations and working on campus.

Re:Causality

[Opportunist]

Try that with programmers and watch your productivity go down the loo.

I was once working as the head of a team with a rather big company I'd rather not name. Let's say it was a German company, known for its big S and its bananaware. We took over a huge internal project. To explain: Internal projects are gold mines. You can charge what you want and the other departments have to pay it because there is simply no other place to get it from. You DO NOT WANT to lose an internal project. For no reason whatsoever. Why? Because even if your cost rises, you just add it to the price tag and they HAVE to pay it. You need money to cross-finance other projects? Jack up the price! It's the (internal) license for money printing.

So we snatched that project from another department that failed to deliver. That's the only threat there is: Not delivering.

So what would be the sensible thing to do? Stuff your best and brightest into that project, of course! You MUST NOT lose that project! You can basically hang your whole department onto it and it will hold! The rest of the company MUST pay you!

What was offered to me? Temp workers. Yes. You heard me. Temps. Not REALLY the most motivated people there are, right? Especially, have you ever hired programmers on a temp worker base?

Most of you will know, it takes a while 'til a programmer gets productive. Especially when you take over a HUGE project that consists of VERY crappy code that you yourself are still busy digging into. They're basically, at best, useless the first month. If, and only if, they're able to learn by themselves, which most temp proggers are. Because if they were any GOOD proggers, they wouldn't be forced to suffer a temp agency.

And while they're with you, they spend more time studying the classifieds than the code. Because who in their sane mind wants to work for a temp agency? It's not like programmers are bricklayers or plumbers. There are not THAT many. So even the mediocre ones get permanent jobs easily. In short, no programmer stayed longer than 3 months.

Eventually, after half a year and a pretty much stalled project I put my foot down and declared that either I get to hire programmers on a perm base or I quit.

I found a new job pretty soon. In the words I gave my superior back then: "More money, less you".

Re:Causality

[RapmasterT]

Amazing how corporations will justify whatever they want.

Because people are not given a choice but to work in less space, they therefore say that they don't need it or want it.

Question: did they ask the workers (really ask them...anonymously)? .02

-JJS

This is strikingly similar to the attitude a previous CTO of mine expressed when we were remodeling workspaces (yes, the CTO got involved in cubicle design). His idea was "big open room, no walls, no cubicles...to foster a 'collaborative working environment'".

I tried til I was blue in the face to explain to him we don't have a business that benefits from collaboration...individuals work on individual projects mostly. He wouldn't listen.

After the remodel, and the office sounded like a bus station caffeteria from people talking, using the phone, typing, meetings (nope, no meeting rooms either), etc, most people you'd see would have headphones on to block out the noise. The CTO, he just went into his office and kept the door closed.

It's not driven by real estate prices

[Wansu]

In most areas, commercial real estate is going empty.

This is being driven by a desire to control employees. They want to huddle them close together so they are easier to watch and they tend to police each other.

Re:I have no idea....

[nblender]

yeah; not so much.. As you get older and gain more experience (while doing everything possible to prevent being moved into a management track), you value your privacy... During the work day, I have to deal with personal matters (calls from the boy's school, wife, accountant, etc) and having a cow-orker 3 feet away pretending not to listen is not optimal... In an open plan, people have to get up, transfer the call to some meeting room and take it there, while running across the office with paperwork or what have you. Then there's the little mental breaks you take throughout the day to let your mind stew on a hard problem; you don't want someone staring at your monitor from behind you... Don't get me wrong, my employer gets plenty of work out of me and they're very happy with my performance and my pay is commensurate with that assertion..

Currently, I have a cubicle somewhere in the building... I don't know where it is; I've never seen it. I assume it's like all the other cubicles in the building.. I work in a lab primarily because I need access to hardware and test equipment... The lab is somewhat open-plan but I have a private little corner that I've managed to arrange by moving benches around... It's noisy enough in the lab that I can keep from getting distracted by people milling about or make my phone calls without anyone listening in... I can focus for long periods when I need to and the restricted access to the lab prevents a lot of people from just wandering in for a visit...

When I need to communicate with my cow-orkers, we all use Jabber.. If you're focused, you can hide your jabber window and not be disturbed... I get to choose when distraction is permissible or unwanted.

Re:Working from Home?

[alcourt]

I work from home and have done so for over ten years now. I've made it work successfully. I will very openly state that many of my coworkers cannot effectively work from home.

The reasons that work from home isn't always a good idea vary. Some people require the human face to face contact. Others require the firmer separation, the act of actually going to another building to put them in the work mindset. Some do not have a home situation amenable to working from home. Some are just in jobs that require too much interaction with the rest of the team or just cannot be done remotely. (People who's job requires physical access to specific hardware without waiting an hour for the person to get there.)

Even many of my coworkers who do work from home make excuses to go into the office periodically to meet with peers for lunch. This helps smooth over issues so that work is done more smoothly.

Desk Space has become irrelevant

[kellyb9]

I think the reason for cubicle shrinkage has more to do with how irrelevant desk space has become over the past 30 or 40 years. Everyone works off of computers and doesn't need a large amount of desk space - at least not as large as they had in the past. I have very little on my desk, mostly personal items (pictures, cell phone, MP3 player, etc.). 30 years ago desks would have to accomodate stacks of paper and notepads, and they would also need the ability to spread these items out.

Re:I have no idea....

[mcmonkey]

The place I worked had an open plane. My team members had connecting desks to each other. If I needed anything (since I worked in ICT - needing someone else is common) - all I had to do it talk, or move my chair a bit.

I would love to go back to a cubicle.

I am the guy stuck sitting next to you. While you get your quick response by leaning over, I get my train of thought derailed.

And most of the time, you're bugging me for something you should be able to find for yourself in the documentation or something you should be doing yourself.

The rest of the office does not exist to do your bidding. Maybe having your own space is bad for your morale, because then you'd have to do your own work, but for me, having my own defined space where I can concentrate without interruption, increases my morale by about 1000%.

Re:I have no idea....

[Chemisor]

I have no idea how the whole country has become so oversocialized. Privacy is important to be an individual. How can you know who you are if you have never been alone? Without working alone, how can you realize that it is the individual that does the work, not the collective? How can you get any work done at all when you are constantly distracted (and spied on) by other people? Forcing "togetherness" was a great socialist tool back in the Soviet times, to ensure that you never imagine yourself as an individual, that you never have unapproved thoughts, and that if you do either of those things you can get ratted out and sent to Siberia.

Hear hear

[tygerstripes]

I currently work in an open-plan environment. My job requires some significant coding work (requiring total focus for long periods of time) while all of my colleagues are involved in much more piecemeal work. They have absolutely no comprehension of how frustrating and damaging it is to my productivity to be subjected to their distracted working pattern all day.

There are definite benefits to working open-plan, but for some tasks it is simply inappropriate and detrimental.