At Gerson Lehrman Group, you won’t find an employee working in a cubicle day after day. You also won’t find an employee working in a free-form open office area consistently either. The reason is that Gerson Lehrman is invested in what it calls activity-based working. In this system, employees have access to cubicle spaces for privacy, conference rooms for group meetings, café seating for working with a laptop, and full open-office environments. Where you work on a particular day is entirely up to you.

It may be hard to remember, but office allocations were a uniform signal of hierarchical status and part of organizational culture until recently. As organizations have become flatter and the need for creativity and flexibility has increased, the open-office plan has become a mainstay of the business world. The goal is to encourage free-flowing conversation and discussion, enhance creativity, and minimize hierarchy—in other words, to foster a creative and collaborative culture and remove office space from its status position. Research on open offices, however, shows there is a downside. Open offices decrease the sense of privacy, reduce the feeling of owning your own space, and create a distracting level of background stimulation. As psychology writer Maria Konnikova noted, “When we’re exposed to too many inputs at once—a computer screen, music, a colleague’s conversation, the ping of an instant message— our senses become overloaded, and it requires more work to achieve a given result.”

So is the activity-based hybrid described earlier a potential solution? With its constantly shifting workspace and lack of consistent locations, this may be an even less controlled environment than an open office. However, it does signal a culture that values the autonomy of individual workers to choose their own best environment at a particular time. The lack of consistency creates other problems, though. Workers cannot achieve even the modest level of personal control over any specific space that they had with the open design. Design expert Louis Lhoest notes that managers in an activity-based office “have to learn to cope with not having people within their line of sight.” This is a difficult transition for many managers to make, especially if they are used to a command-and-control culture.

Questions 

1. How might different types of office design influence employee social interaction, collaboration, and creativity? Should these be encouraged even in organizations without an innovative culture? 

2. Can the effects of a new office design be assessed objectively? How could you measure whether new office designs are improving the organizational culture? 

3. Do you think certain types of office design can be utilized to create a more ethical or spiritual culture? Why or why not? If you answered yes, how can office design be utilized to create an ethical culture?