The office where they work like dogs

In Japan, where pets outnumber children, WeWork is adapting to the lay of the land.

The office-sharing company’s push into the country includes opening a dog-friendly office by June with plans to later offer onsite childcare at other locations. The four properties the company has announced in central Tokyo, which will start opening from February, will also have

No one’s ever gotten bitten. Chris Hill WeWork’s Japan head

special rooms for mothers. “Not only dogs, and not that there’s a parallel, but people in the future will need to bring their kids to the office,” WeWork’s Japan head, Chris Hill, said. “Part of our global vision is to create workspaces that are conducive to having more mothers and women enter the workforce.”

While pets are already a feature at the startup’s locations from London to New York, they’re unheard of in Japan, where offices tend to be cramped, quiet, and overrun with paper documents.

But it is the focus on childcare that strikes a deeper nerve in a country steadily evolving and office design will likely bend in accordance with shifting habits, preferences and fads.

As much as modern tech companies get credit for the popularity for open-plan offices, they certainly weren’t the first in history to use them.

As far back as the 1750s, clerical work was sometimes done in large, open offices in which numerous employees crowded around desks struggling to provide enough daycare. Facing a labour shortage exacerbated by an aging and shrinking population, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is trying to boost female workforce participation. Yet one of the biggest barriers facing new mothers is a lack of facilities.

“We will put funds in place to resolve the urgent problem of childcare waiting lists,” Abe said. Increases in supply of care facilities are still falling short of demand, particularly in large cities, as the Government urges companies to provide more facilities. So far, that includes Tokyo employees of Goldman Sachs and companies such as Toyota, who provide daycare at some offices.

WeWork’s first location is opening in Ark Hills in Tokyo on February 1. That will be followed by a site near Tokyo station it created in partnership with Mitsubishi Estate By April, it plans to open an office in Ginza and a building in the Shinbashi district, where SoftBank Group has its headquarters. SoftBank is an investor in WeWork and a partner in the US company’s Japanese expansion.

“Having dogs in offices is something we’ve tried to do everywhere in the world, and we’ve been able to do it successfully,” said Hill. “No one’s ever gotten bitten.”

— Bloomberg

The open offices we have are overrated bullpens. Phil Edwards, Vox

(standing desks aren’t all that new either).

Later, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright experimented with open-plan design that focused on balancing the need for space and privacy with benefits of collaboration offered by the open-plan design.

In his video Open Offices are Overrated, Vox correspondent Phil Edwards explains that the modern iteration of the open-plan office has jettisoned all the careful design elements of Lloyd Wright’s initial vision.

“The open offices we have are overrated bullpens,” Edwards says.

Suffice to say, the modern office might be in for a renovation over the next decade.