The Eternal Coffee Break

Read this article about the future of offices.

Computers and electronic communications are allowing many people to use their homes as offices. But offices will never disappear entirely. Instead, the office of the future may become more like home.

American managers who want to get more out of their white-collar workforce will be in for a shock if they seek advice from Frank Becker, a professor at Cornell University who studies the pattern of office work. His advice: companies need to devote more office space to creating places like well-tended living rooms, where employees can sit around in comfort and chat.

Mr Becker is one of a group of academics and consultants trying to make companies more productive by linking new office technology to a better understanding of how employees work. The forecasts of a decade ago – that computers would increase office productivity, reduce white-collar payrolls and help the remaining staff to work better – have proved much too hopeful.

Mr Becker predicts that the central office will become mainly a place where workers from satellite and home-based offices meet to discuss ideas and to reaffirm their loyalty to fellow employees and the company. This will require new thoughts about the layout of office buildings. Now, spaces for copying machines, coffee rooms, meetings and reception areas usually come second to the offices in which people spend most of the day working. Mr Becker sees these common areas gradually becoming the heart of an office.

Managers, says Mr Becker, will also have to abandon their long-cherished notion that a productive employee is an employee who can be seen. Appearing on time and looking busy will soon become irrelevant. Technology and new patterns of office use will make companies judge people by what they do, not by where they spend their time.

That does not mean the end of the office, just its transformation into a social center. New ideas about offices are catching on elsewhere. Digital Equipment Corp’s subsidiary in Finland and equipped offices with reclining chairs and stuffed sofas to make them more comfortable and conductive to informal conversations and the swapping of ideas. Companies such as Apple and General Electric are experimenting along similar lines.

Steelcase, a manufacturer of office furniture, is one of the firms keenest to experiment with new office layouts and designs. The company’s research center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a $11 m building completed in 1989. It is designed around a series of office “neighbourhoods” that put marketing, manufacturing and design people close to each other so that they can find it easier to discuss ideas and solve problems. Employees on different floors can see one another through glass, and easily go from floor to floor via escalator.

Top managers work in a cluster of offices that are wrapped around an atrium in the middle of the building, rather than occupying the usual suite of top-floor offices. They can see, and be seen, by the people they manage.

But, sometimes even the most communicative employee just wants to be left alone.