Today I thought…. about the rationalizations that drive stasis in office design. 

I learned about how a man named Robert Propst, a professor of fine arts, was responsible for introducing the office cubicles to modern offices. But Propst wasn’t intending to create dull, demotivating, and… just utterly trash work environments. 

Propst was hired into Herman Miller (they probably furnish most offices these days) to get creative and try all kinds of projects. During this time, the office was designed to be like in the scene from Mad Men where you have everyone in an open space. The bullpen style. 

Various companies have this style still. I know there are some investment banks, consulting firms and law firms still use this bullpen approach. 

Apparently, Propst wanted to do away with this bullpen approach so employees could have more space to get creative and actually do focused work. Funny, this is the criticism for the open office concept that many companies have gone back to these days. It’s nothing innovative. This open bullpen structure was the norm decades ago. 

Back then, the arguments were to make sure you knew everyone was doing their work. Nowadays, this reason is masked by claims of collaboration. But the fact remains that many in open offices still feel watched and most are so distracting that it hampers one’s ability to do any kind of focused work. 

As I think about what it was like working in both open-concept and cubicle style….I can say the best is the one where you have the option to work wherever you want. That’s really what’s important. To be away from the distraction when you need (and want) to do some deep focused work….and to seek out colleagues in collaborative zones when you want to talk about ideas…but you won’t talk about actually creative ideas when you are surrounded by people you don’t actually trust. Hence, most collaborative zones should be informal and semi-private. 

I think this is probably what Propst was getting at with his first office re-design concept. Apparently, he suggested this new style where each person’s work zone could be completely customizable to what worked best for them and it had all kinds of table sizes/heights/configurations so they can set up their own system. 

No one wanted it. All the usual excuses the conservative give for things that are too different. The second iteration was the simple cubicle where everyone had the exact same layout. This was easy for the bureaucratic to adopt…so it became the norm. Propst has lamented the popularization of the cubicle because it achieved the exact opposite of what he had intended. 

It’s crazy to realize how little we’ve progressed in designing offices. I’ve been a proponent of flexible working for a while and I think working from home just achieves all the environmental constructs required to do creative/meaningful work. Now, we’ll have to see if people realize they really don’t need to micromanage employees and the best company design is to be one where you trust employees to decide if they want to be in the office and what kind of setting they want to work in when at the office. 

It’s a rather simple solution. The only limitation is people’s fear…nay the insecurity they have with trusting people. I mean, why did you even hire people you’ll have trouble trusting? Possibly, the problem resides in the hiring process above anything else. 

But the fact remains that people will try to rationalize poor decisions. Hiring people you trust and letting them make the decisions of how and where to work seems to make the most logical sense. Hoping a sense of trust for people is some good that comes out of this COVID environment.