Back at Work, Back in Your Cubicle — But Do You Know Where This Kind of Office Came From? | QDaily Business History

Let's talk about the history of its rise and fall.

A few months ago, Citibank announced it was renovating its headquarters in Manhattan.

That may not sound like much. But banks have long been among the cubicle's most loyal customers, so when one announces it is dumping its old partner, that alone tells you how far out of favor cubicles have fallen.

The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, reported that the new open-plan office would do away with partition doors and with fixed desks for most employees. It also noted that "this is really an adjustment to, and a bet on, organizational culture — but whether a practice common at tech companies can work in banking remains to be seen."

Exactly right. This is the stage we are at: the cubicle has already come to stand for everything that hems in creativity, but no one has yet found a way to spark creativity while also protecting privacy and productivity.

What matters most, though, is the gesture. Creativity is scarce, and whenever a company starts talking up brainstorming, energy, and communication, open-plan space comes back into fashion. Worth noting too: the drop in headcount that comes with an economic downturn is another big reason companies get rid of fixed desks.

Years ago Google's offices became the model of open, creative workspace, but the reason people talked about them so much was the popularity of Silicon Valley culture. The idea that a handful of people can change the world is simply too magical to resist — though the people singing its praises may not know that before the cubicle existed, open offices were already the norm. Back then, the number of people doing paperwork was small: accountants, secretaries, and not many more.

The numbers: the office cubicle really is going out of style

According to the International Facility Management Association, about 70% of American companies now use open-plan layouts. Michael Bloomberg is another convert: he believes open offices make a company more transparent and fairer, and after becoming mayor of New York he brought the model into City Hall, meaning to strip officials of their bureaucratic air.

Even so, the cubicle is still the largest single category of office furniture in the world, with sales of more than US$3 billion a year. But that market is shrinking.

Business Insider reports that sales across the office furniture industry are flagging. Herman Miller, the company that started the cubicle revolution, is losing customers in North America, its biggest market. Steelcase, another office furniture giant, reported that sales in the quarter ending December 2015 fell 2% from a year earlier, and Wall Street analysts pessimistically expect the next two quarters to be worse. Sales at HNI, a third big player, turned negative in the third quarter of fiscal 2015/16.

A report from the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association (BIFMA) shows office furniture orders falling sharply — from a 3% decline at the start of last year to 10% in recent months.

But when the cubicle first appeared, it was revolutionary too

Before the cubicle, the open-plan office, which arose in the late 19th century, ruled office culture for a long time. Steel beams had made it possible for architects to build wide, column-free spaces; employees sat in rows of desks while managers watched over everything from glass-walled offices.

Imagine an atmosphere in which your every move is watched by your bosses and your coworkers. You wouldn't dare slack off for a second. Privacy, of course, was out of the question.

After World War II this rigid arrangement began to loosen. Perhaps in reaction to the Nazi regime's extreme order, surveillance, and hierarchy, the meticulous Germans took to a new and more relaxed office layout: employees no longer had to sit in tidy, uniform rows, and people could chat, move around, and make the place feel casual. The idea spread across Europe under the name Bürolandschaft — "office landscape" — which used screens and potted plants to divide up private space.

In the United States, though, what replaced the open office was the cubicle. In 1968 Robert Propst, a designer at the Herman Miller Research Corporation in Michigan, borrowed from Bürolandschaft to design a line of office furniture called Action Office II: a set of assembled desks with partitions that unfolded from the desktop. That was the start of the cubicle office.

Each employee's workspace was walled or partitioned off, cell by cell, into a form of independent office — a real advance for personal privacy.

Propst's cubicle tried to give employees privacy while keeping the space each one took up to a minimum. It caught on because it was cheap and practical. In the United States especially, it arrived just as the ranks of white-collar workers were swelling and teams were growing bigger, and just as real estate prices were climbing fast. Cheap and easy to assemble, the cubicle made planning an office floor far simpler.

No office furniture has had a deeper influence than the cubicle

The New York Times, in an article headlined "Who Invented the Cubicle?", pointed out that Propst had wanted to bring a democratic spirit to the office and instead created a cubicle office layout, a billion-dollar industry, and a more concrete shape for servitude.

Propst had earlier designed a flexible workstation called Action Office, meant to fight sedentary work. That product line never sold. The failure is what pushed him to design a revised version — the Action Office II mentioned above, which went on to be adopted on a huge scale.

Propst's intent was to build in movable desktops, with the option to stand, to relieve the exhaustion of sitting still all day. But he soon realized that what customers wanted was to stuff employees into small compartments, so the original design for Action Office II began to shrink — until it became the little box with 1.5-meter partition walls that we now call the cubicle.

This product, a betrayal of its designer's intent, did have some good effects at first.

The American writer Thomas Hine has argued that the cubicle made it possible for women to move into middle management in the 1960s. If you've seen Mad Men, you can picture it: in a world still run by men, the cubicle let male colleagues talk to female managers there, without having to let a woman into the room that had traditionally belonged to men.

The German sociologist Max Weber held that the way an office is organized — the rationality and rule-following it embodies — is itself a mark of modern capitalism. The cubicle is that rationality and rule-following at its purest: its layout not only shapes employees' minds, it can remake their personalities. Think of Wesley, the office drone in the film Wanted who has to put up with his obese boss's nagging every day, a bullied cubicle animal too timid to fight back. As early as 1970, George Nelson, art director of the Herman Miller Research Corporation, wrote to the company's vice president that the cubicle had made the office inhuman.

Nikil Saval, an editor at n+1, wrote a book called Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. In it he cites a few interesting numbers that show the cubicle is still very much part of mainstream office culture.

• Today 93% of American office workers work in cubicles, yet at least 60% of them don't much like that kind of environment;
• Shrinking the cubicle has become one of the main ways companies cut costs. In 1994 the average American employee still had about 8.4 square meters of cubicle; by 2010 that had shrunk to less than 7;
• After the fear of unemployment that hung over the 2008 recession lifted, many people found themselves grateful just to still have a palm-sized patch of space they could call their own.

The cubicle has been redesigned many times, and none of the redesigns has scaled

In 1993, Jay Chiat, founder of the ad agency Chiat/Day, threw out the cubicle and turned a warehouse into a comfortable office with the atmosphere of a Starbucks. But employees had no fixed desks and had to lock their things in lockers, and many ended up preferring to work from home rather than come in. Chiat/Day was eventually acquired, and its employees went back to cubicles.

In 2002, Douglas Ball — a designer who had tried and failed to redesign the cubicle back in the 1970s — brought out a new version. Inspired by the German Westfalia camper van, he upgraded the cubicle with doors, wardrobes, and a great deal of glass. Herman Miller sells this suite-style cubicle today, but it remains a high-end niche.

Google is still active here too. Employees can decorate their cubicles however they like — a Star Wars lightsaber, a Lego creation of their own, a hand-painted lunchbox, anything at all. Here the cubicle is no longer a "cage" that pens you in but space that belongs to the employee, so you may find all sorts of throw pillows, or a beanbag chair someone can drop into at any moment.

Over the past half century more than 100 cubicle office systems have appeared on the American market. But on the production side and the consumer side alike, all of it is small repair work that never broke the cubicle framework.

So what can replace the cubicle?

Most of the time office design is decided by cost rather than by employee satisfaction, so although plenty of people dream of one day moving into a private office with a window, the cubicle's position is hard to shake. And everyone may want an open office, but rolling one out meets real resistance.

The open office is widely seen as an environment that badly distracts employees: a study by The Sound Agency found that productivity in one can fall 66%.

At the end of 2014, a survey by Expert Market, a British office-equipment services firm, found that 54% of employees would probably rather work in a separately enclosed space. And a Steelcase-commissioned study by the global research firm Ipsos, covering 10,500 employees in 14 countries across Europe, North America, and Asia, found that nearly 69% were unhappy with their work environment. Of those, 85% said nearby colleagues or other people's conversations made it hard to concentrate day to day, and another 85% said that when they wanted somewhere quiet to relax or think, the company had no suitable place for it.

Right now, beyond the open-plan office that is everywhere, more office formats are appearing: SOHO-style work, co-working spaces. Take the American co-working spaces we've written about before — WeWork, Wix Lounge, The Yard — whose defining feature is that they encourage people from different backgrounds and industries to talk to one another.

Office formats will keep changing. As Sarah Neville of the Financial Times put it, the key is how to strike a clever balance between mixing and privacy.

For a company, the real challenge is to rethink what its teams do and how they work, and what kind of company culture they need. Only a space design built on that is more than a pretty face.

Cover image sources:

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