Tech workers resist social engineering of their work space

The iPhone X was the focus of Apple’s launch event last week, but the venue was equally alluring. CEO Tim Cook unveiled the device in the Steve Jobs Theatre, a sleek auditorium at Apple Park, its new head office in Cupertino.

Apple Park, a $5bn campus for 12,000 staff with a vast circular building surrounding a park planted with oaks and fruit trees, is an emblem of the US technology industry’s latest craze. An industry of start-ups founded in garages wants to redesign employee activity, prodding engineers to get up from their desks and exchange ideas.

Apple Park is “a building which is pushing social behaviour in the way people work to new limits”, says Stefan Behling of its architects Foster + Partners.

Apple is not alone: Amazon plans a $5bn second head office and chip maker Nvidia has built a two-storey office with spaces at its heart to “spark collisions”.

The vision is as ambitious as that of Louis Sullivan, the architect of early US skyscrapers, who declared loftiness to be “on a high road to a natural and satisfying art”.

The contrast is that, instead of skyscrapers that split staff across floors, they are building utopias in wide, flat campuses. But utopias are tricky: people do not always enjoy collisions, nor having their social behaviour pushed. As Nvidia’s director of real estate John O’Brien says: “Human beings do not like change, and engineers like it the least.”

There is reason to be reluctant about being made to mingle: people often get most done when left in peace. The guilty secret of many corporate transitions to open-plan offices and “hot desking” is the desire to save money. As work patterns become more flexible and technology makes remote working easier, one study found that the average desk is occupied only about half the time. Allocating everyone a locker and telling them to find a free desk when they arrive costs less.

The tech industry is innocent of that. Its main motivation for reconfiguring these campuses is not cost but revenue, the belief that innovation springs out of collaboration and that it is inhibited by walls and floors. Everyone has a workstation at Apple and Nvidia, and their buildings also allow them to gather and huddle when working together on projects.

Rather than staying in one place, staff should move among zones during the working day, depending on whether they are focusing quietly or collaborating. This can create uncertainty for employees, who have a human tendency to gravitate to one spot.

Some Apple engineers were reported to be dismayed at having to work in newly designed open-plan “pods” at Apple Park. As a result, activitybased working often does not operate as planned.

A study by workplace research group Leesman found that, while it often boosts productivity, many employees stuck to familiar habits. About 70% of those in activity-based workplaces still anchored themselves to a desk, which the study concluded “seems a catastrophic failure”.

It is also a waste, given the amount of ambition and money that goes into configuring these offices. There must be something in it for employees or they will not change their ways, no matter how much companies abolish walls to create space or alter furniture. Companies should start by recognising what their employees fear losing.

Gensler, the architecture firm that designed Nvidia’s new building, pointed out in one study that workers face “less space, less privacy … more distractions” in offices, and spend more hours working. Collaboration had to be balanced with “extended periods of uninterrupted focus”.

THEY ARE BUILDING UTOPIAS IN WIDE, FLAT CAMPUSES BUT UTOPIAS ARE TRICKY: PEOPLE DO NOT ALWAYS ENJOY COLLISIONS

They also need to accept that not every kind of professional works in a similar way. Some jobs require constant moving from communal discussions to individual focus that activity-based working is designed to facilitate. In other cases, employees work most efficiently in one place every day and prodding them to migrate around the office is a pointless distraction.

The need for uniformity has been eroded by changes in technology and working patterns. The 21st-century office performs a variety of functions and has to take on various forms. Silicon Valley’s campuses will work if they are flexible enough to allow diversity, not if they are technology utopias that try to re-engineer the behaviour of the people. /© Financial Times Limited 2017