Md. Fakrul Islam Chowdhury writes for DOT :
The cubicles, had become a parody of the productivity,by the end of the 1990s, as workplace designers, thinking outside the box, began to tear down Cubicle walls and personal offices became rare. Low or no walls between groups of desks, few private offices, and wide, open rooms became the norm in the open office plan around the early 2000s.
The objective of the open offices was to facilitate collaboration, innovation, and a more egalitarian workplace. The open office plan became the office design of forward-thinking corporations since then.
But in recent years, researches have shown that job satisfaction decreases after a transition to an open office from a more traditional office.Critics of open office argue that the lack of privacy in open offices results in stress among the employees rather than fostering creativity, and innovation.
Now, designers and architects are pushing beyond open office plans toward the next generation of barrier less office design: something we might call “zoned offices.”
These spaces will feature hot-desking, where assigned seating is a thing of the past, and the office itself becomes a flexible, dynamic private-public space. With semi-defined areas for taking phone calls, meeting with clients, and creative brainstorming, the worker will be free to move to the room or zone that fits the mood they’re looking for.
As workers’ needs shift, each zone may provide flexibility to change the space to fit more people. In some cases, the public may be invited into certain zones, as the offices themselves have open walls to the outside to allow for mingling with public spaces. It’s a design movement that will further reduce an employee’s sense of privacy in the workplace.
Glassdoor, a Chicago based company’s office, designed in 2017 is a good vision of the future of the open offices. It’s a space in which the boundary between home life and work life is permanently blurred, and the sense of permanence and fixture is abandoned in favor of flexibility, ease of movement, and transience.
One hallmark of the next generation of offices will be hot-desking, or “hoteling,” where employees are no longer assigned permanent desks, but instead move around within the office to work where they need to, with the whole office turning into a kind of co-working space, with personal workspace boundaries changing on a day to day or even hourly basis.
Advertising agency Essence has transitioned its main New York office and offices in other cities across the U.S. to a form of hot-desking, which the company calls “agile seating.”
The way in which the millennial generation live their life is mobile and agile and workplaces have responded to that and morphed into a more mobile and agile spaces.
With more employees allowed to work remotely from anywhere with Wi-Fi, offices now compete with local coffee shops, or co-working spaces. To reflect that, Essence is actively mimicking the qualities of those spaces in their designs and atmosphere.
Ethan Bernstein, associate professor at Harvard Business School summarized this trend by describing it as giving the employees the opportunity to work in the office the way they work at Starbucks.
Since new hires don’t need a fixed desk, there’s less rearranging to do.
To attract employees reluctant to actually come into the workplaces, offices are being designed more like homes. Companies likeGlassdoor, have by set up chairs and couches to look like a living room.
Other offices are taking the blending of private spaces even further, creating workplaces that bleed into their surrounding communities.
However, a survey from Oxford Economics shows that the constant connectivity and distractions that come with open offices can lead to frustration and burnout; another study suggested that the open office facilitates the spread of illness, leading to more sick days. Open offices have even been tied to an increase in stress hormones and poorer posture.
Interestingly, a study by Harvard Business School showed email and other electronic communication actually increased after transitioning to an open office, and face-to-face communication decreased.
Critics of open offices have identified Noise, as a big problem. Employees have to learn how to tune people out. Some employees have begun puttingon noise canceling headphones while at work.
The lack of privacy in open offices can be a hurdle. All of your information is public, for 40 hours a week. Every phone call, every conversation with customers, even what you do on your computer. It becomes things others can look at and judge, and depending on the environment, it can become hostile at some points.
Experts have argued that, most people treat their assigned desks as a bit like their bedrooms, a private space to regroup and also as the base from where they go about with their daily workloads. A desk is an employee’s kingdom when s/he is at work.
The Work-Life barriers exist for a reason, and breaking them down can be counterproductive.
The writer is Consulting Editor AmaderNotunShomoy
Our time is a news portal