Building Dialogue

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38 / BUILDING DIALOGUE / JUNE 2015
O ver the past several years, there seems
to be a constant debate surrounding the
“open office” layouts that are springing
up in hip new startups. Businesses in a variety
of industries have embraced the trend, break-
ing down the walls of private offices, investing
in public spaces, and seating employees in more
integrated, collaborative settings. More often
than not, the decision to move to an open office
layout is framed as a two-sided argument. On one
side are the social-media saturated millennials,
bright eyed, optimistic, brilliant and looking
to change the world. On the other side are
stodgy, old managers and executives, unwill-
ing to sacrifice the relative quiet of a private
office (and all of the status that it holds) for
the noise and distraction of a common space.
In the last edition of Building Dialogue, the
article “Private Offices: A Concept that Isn’t DOA
After All” indicated that “more collaborative spaces
do not definitively lead to increased productivity.”
Along these same lines, other articles with titles
such as “Google got it wrong. The open office trend
is destroying the workplace” (Lindsey Kaufman,
Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2014) are starting to surface
and circulate the Internet. Here is the problem: Goo-
gle does not appear to have gotten much wrong. Let’s
think about it for a second. Regardless of who you
work for, Google probably has more cash, smarter em-
ployees, lower employee turnover, higher levels of in-
novation and constant growth. If you don’t care about
these things, go ahead and stop reading now. So what
are we missing?
The debate over the open office plan is focused on
the wrong question. If we take a minute to consider
the history of the office, it may help us understand
where we find ourselves at this current point in his-
tory. Nikil Saval wrote a compelling book on the top-
ic called “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace”
(Doubleday, 2014). Believe it or not, office work has not
been around forever. It began with merchants’ clerks
in the mid-1800s, when the rapid industrialization of
the American economy required businesses to keep an
accurate record of accounts, bills and payments as or-
ganizations expanded. Through the technological rev-
olution (1870s-1910s), more and more people joined the
clerking class in airy, light-filled rows of desks where
clerks sat alongside their managers. Does that sound
familiar? These are essentially open office layouts.
While the clerking class evolved from necessity,
management evolved to create efficiency in the of-
fice. In the early 20th century, Frederick Taylor started
a movement called “scientific management,” which
focused on eliminating small inefficiencies in the
ways that people work by making tasks simple and
repeatable. This separated the management of how
work was done (management) from the employees
who actually perform the work. It was this division of
Esther Davy
Business
Development,
CONNECT
People +
Space
John Wanberg
Knowledge
Strategy
Manager,
MWH
Global
TRENDS in Office Spaces
Photo by Garret Hacking
The IMA Financial Group Inc. office projects comfort and security, everything you’d want in your insurance
company.