Giving People Space
The popular “open office” design has many disadvantages. But some employers are going beyond it to create an empowering environment at the workplace
ra Kumar, 28, joined a fintech company based in Bangalore a couple of months ago as content head. She works among the endless rows of a workstation in a vast hall – her workplace is based on the ‘open office’ design, with a few cubicles for meetings. “I can see which sites my colleagues are browsing,” she says. “I have overheard one arguing with his wife, while another was discussing with financiers on funding a new car. I have no interest in their personal issues. But, in an open office, even lives are opened up.”
Open offices are the norm today. They are popular across corporate India for a variety of reasons. They foster egalitarianism across hierarchies, often enabling those sitting close by to discover common interests, collaborate and communicate more freely than they would have had there been physical barriers between them. But there is also the downside. “I can’t focus in office because there is always something happening,” says a risk analyst at a Gurgaon-based company, who prefers not to be named. “I’m able to get work done only on the days I stay at home. I go to office just to network with colleagues.”
Such offices have obvious attractions for employers – it enables them to pack more people into less space. “Adding more desks within the existing space saves on the cost of renting additional real estate and also brings down the per square foot cost per person,” says Rami Kaushal, Managing Director, Consulting and Valuations, South Asia, at global real estate services firm CBRE. The digital revolution has also made cramming people close together easier than before, removing the need to allot storage space – filing cabinets, cupboards and lockers have mostly been done away with. “Work space design has run parallel with technology changes,” says Ashwini
Deshpande, Co-founder, design and brand consultancy Elephant Design. “With the coming of desktops and laptops, the need for table space reduced. Computers have brought bosses out of their cubicles. Laptops and cloud technology have enabled employees to work from anywhere and anytime, which allows companies to even let them work remotely.”
But from the employee’s viewpoint, the open office is certainly a mixed blessing. Apart from the continuous distraction, it also means loss of privacy and reduced comfort at work. A CBRE study, Space Utilisation: the Next Frontier, says a single office employee needs a minimum space of 5.6 square metres (60 sq. ft), below which her performance and productivity suffer. “Research, from as far back as 1980, showed that reducing privacy at work lowers workplace satisfaction and job fulfilment,” says Ravi S. Gajendran, Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Open offices may facilitate interpersonal communication among employees and increase opportunities of meeting people, but they also reduce formation of deeper and more meaningful connections,” says Gajendran. “Sharing of innermost thoughts, experiences and views reduces if people fear they may be overheard.”
An extreme version of the open office – and one enabling employers to save even more space and costs – is that of having rows of desks with none assigned to a particular person. Employees log in from whichever desk is vacant when they step into office. “Since many employees are either in the field or on holiday at any given time, the
idea is not to block workstations for them on a permanent basis,” says Gajendran. This approach gets an even bigger thumbs-down from employees. “It gives me the feeling I don’t belong here,” says an employee in such an office in Singapore.
Another employee, working in a similar office, sanitises her desk every time before starting work. “I’m not sure of the hygiene maintained by previous users,” she says. The employee’s emotional attachment to her workplace decreases. “Not having the certainty of a particular desk to go to at work can be annoying,” says Sudhir Dhar, Director – Group CHRO, Motilal Oswal Financial Services. “More so for Indians who become emotionally attached to their workspaces, personalising them with photos, plants or printouts of quotes.” A manager at an investment company in Noida, which has not assigned fixed desks, notes that employees have informally allotted themselves desks within the shared bays. “It is very irritating otherwise to customise the brightness of the computer screen, the height of the desktop and so forth every morning,” he adds.
Enlightened Employer Interest
In the current competitive business environment, when talent is at a premium and innovation the only means of staying ahead, is saving on real estate expenses at the cost of employee morale a wise strategy? Many enlightened employers do not think so and are making vital departures from the standard open office design to better nurture their employees. “In the last three to four years, many companies have been trying to strike a balance between optimising space costs and providing an upbeat environment to employees,” says Kaushal of CBRE.
Adobe India, for instance, has adopted the open office concept – but with a difference. The private cabins have been dismantled, and they have been replaced by fourseat modules grouped together, where each seat measures six feet by seven feet, with one employee occupying each corner. There is also a round table at the centre of the module. The employees have their backs to one another giving them a sense of privacy, but at the same time, can simply turn and cluster around the table whenever they need to brainstorm together. “This format works for our teams as each team member knows what the others are doing and creates a sense of unified mission,” says Sanjeev Sethi, Director, GWS, Adobe India.
Many offices have also increased the height of desk partitions to curtail visual distraction. “People should not be able to see beyond six to eight metres from where they are seated,” says Ashish Sachdev, Managing Director, ADEelite Design Consultants, who has designed the Bangalore office of Tesco.
RAVINDER RANA Country GM/ Concentrix Those required to speak a great deal have been given high sound-proof partitions, in areas where ceilings have been treated to have greater noise cancellation quotient”