The office-less office
Climbing to the corporate top doesn’t always come with the old rewards
FRANK VETTESE, CEO of Deloitte Canada, is married to Cinzia, with two children, Alessia and Andrew. But you will never see a picture of them in Vettese’s office in the new glass tower in Toronto’s financial district that Deloitte has called home since earlier this year. That’s because Vettese does not have an office. Nor do any of the firm’s 4,000 employees here. The dream of the corner office is apparently dead.
“It’s less about status, hierarchy, or who is hosting the meeting,” Vettese says, sitting at a table dwarfed by the rest of the space in a conference room on the sixth floor. A few paintings adorn the walls. In front of him are his laptop, BlackBerry and a glass of water. “We are removing barriers historically connected to hierarchy.”
Despite a lack of one now, Vettese, 53, fondly remembers his first office. In 1990, just out of York University, he co-founded a forensic accounting firm, Rosen & Vettese, in the Toronto-Dominion Centre. “I had a nice office with a beautiful view overlooking the lake,” he says. His parents came to visit. “They brought me my first plant for my office. It was a proud moment for all of us.”
All of these touchstones — views, plants, offices, desk telephones — are memories now. Vettese says Deloitte is all about “innovation, disruption, collaboration” — goals its staff can achieve whether they toil at standing desks, treadmill desks, couches, diner-style booths, work stations, meeting rooms or even telephone booths.
For example, Adam Patchet, a senior manager in Deloitte’s international tax group, takes the elevator to the 15th floor when he arrives for work, and retrieves his laptop from his locker in a bank of white drawers that open with a combination code. He then plugs into a dock on, say, desk 15C-1055. But with no assigned desks, how do staff find one another? “When you plug into your docking stage, your Skype messenger comes up and all your contacts come up, you click on one and it tells you where they are sitting,” he says. If a call comes in, Patchet pops on his earpiece and ducks into a phone booth.
Phone Booth 5A-045 is for “quick or impromptu calls of a sensitive or confidential nature,” reads a sign outside it. “For individual work of a few hours or all day, consider using a workstation, private workstation or a work table.”
Patchet likes the change. “It kind of keeps it fresh, to move around the floor a bit,” he says. “I feel more energetic, more engaged than just stuck behind my desk grinding out memorandums and dealing with dense tax laws all day.”
Open-concept offices are hardly new: MasterCard Canada took that step last year. But eliminating any personal space is more radical and the backlash has begun in other circles. “The Open Office Concept is Dead,” Fortune magazine wrote in May; the Boston Globe in June asked, “Pining for the Cubicle? Believe It.”
It’s much more taxing if you are constantly observed
Work couches make sense at professional service firms because they seek to blur the line between work and leisure, says Matthias Spitzmuller, assistant professor of organizational behaviour at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. “If employees start socializing at work, it creates a stronger bond among them.”
But in an accounting firm Spitzmuller worked with in Singapore, the removal of the “old partners’ room” prompted senior staff to object. “Some of the privileges they thought they had worked hard for over the years were taken away,” he says. “For employees, it is much more stressful” to work out in the open. “It’s much more taxing if you are constantly observed.”
Jean-Nicolas Reyt, who teaches organizational behaviour at McGill University in Montreal, says an office is more than a workplace. “It’s an indicator of status,” he says. At McGill, tenure-track professors get an office with a window. “The type of office you get matters, and if you don’t get an office, does that organization really want you? Are these people now going to feel like freelancers or outsiders?”
On the plus side, employees can benefit when they sit beside someone new every day. “Weak ties bring you a new perspective, new information,” Reyt says.
At Deloitte, past the couches and the phone booths spreads an expanse of white desks crowded with staff, toiling elbow to elbow. “These guys are accountants,” observes Reyt of Deloitte’s “windows for all” approach. “They probably made a financial decision.”