Companies still want everyone in one place. How do you design an office that works? | Our Offices ①

All three cases here deal with the same question: how to work more efficiently.

Over the past several decades, changes in office culture have kept changing what a workplace looks like.

The cubicle, which arrived in the 1960s, was once the indispensable lead character of mainstream office culture. By the 1990s, attitudes had begun to shift: the British sitcom The Office aired its dissatisfaction with the cubicle layout, and the cartoonist Scott Adams mocked working life in his Dilbert strips. The office came to stand for a place where people burned through their lives in dull, characterless rooms.

Around 2000, a group of Silicon Valley tech companies led by Google set off the open-plan trend, and shared long tables, themed meeting rooms, dedicated game rooms and casual coffee bars started to become "standard."

In recent years, the spread of smartphones, wireless networks and remote video equipment has fed the growth of "SOHO" and "co-working" models. In theory, as long as the hardware allows it, a person can finish their work at any time, in any place — and the "collective atmosphere" an office provides weakens accordingly.

Do companies still need to spend heavily on building out office space? If technology makes it easy to work anywhere, will anyone still need an office? Doubts of this kind aim straight at the value of the office's existence.

Yet at the same time, big companies have set off another wave of campus-style headquarters: Apple, which spent 5 billion dollars on a new headquarters; Amazon, which bought land in Seattle to build its own; Facebook, which brought in the architect Frank Gehry to design a new campus; Tencent, which put up twin office towers in Shenzhen; and Alibaba, which raised a new headquarters at its Xixi campus in Hangzhou.

Cherry Wan, Asia-Pacific marketing communications director at the office furniture brand Steelcase, made a practical point in her article 《未来我们还需要办公室吗？》 ("Will We Still Need Offices in the Future?"): "No matter how technology develops, gathering everyone into the same physical space to work is the precondition for the best work performance."

If that holds, it still has to account for one detail. Technology has already changed how a person experiences belonging to a group, so how should design answer that change, so that workers whose expectations have been rewritten by it will still gather in "the same physical space" to work together, spark ideas and get things done efficiently?

One important premise is that design has to serve the company's needs closely. What a company does, and the nature and variety of its employees' work, determine how its office is laid out and shaped.

We started from offices of different fields, sizes and forms to work out what office design looks like now. Five trends turn up especially often, and most office design falls under them:

• Cutting the office to fit how a company actually collaborates, with efficiency as the goal;
• Balancing collaborative work against privacy;
• Smart offices that help companies improve the employee experience;
• Attention to physical and mental health, and to sustainability;
• Using design to explain company culture.

Start with a few cases on "how to work more efficiently." Because every company's business differs, and so do its ways of working and collaborating, there is no standard answer here of the kind the cubicle once was — only a solution the designer cuts to fit each company.

How do departments from different fields work together efficiently?

Boeing's "Move to the Lake" after an earthquake is a classic case of raising efficiency through office design.

Running the project were NBBJ, an American firm with deep experience in corporate headquarters, and a consulting team from the office furniture brand Steelcase. Move the engineers' offices into an airplane factory? Before 2000, at least, Boeing's executives had never entertained the thought.

The plane maker had nearly 12,000 commercial jets flying worldwide, and its most popular model, the 737 series, took 40 percent of global commercial jet sales.

In 2001, the September 11 attacks in New York hit the global aviation industry hard. Business travelers and tourists fell away sharply, and Boeing was at the same time fighting Airbus for market share.

Earlier that year, on February 28, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake in Seattle had flattened several of Boeing's office buildings, leaving an urgent problem: 1,200 engineers and support staff with nowhere to work.

Two disasters, no question, made 2001 a hard year for Boeing.

Riding the wave of lean production that one plane maker after another was adopting at the time, Boeing planned to streamline its own manufacturing process.

The old offices were rubble anyway, so why not take the chance to move the displaced engineers into the empty warehouse space at the 737 factory on Lake Washington? The company called the move "Move To The Lake," hoping to blur the old line between the people who design and the people who build, and put them to work under one roof.

Boeing was then shifting from a "stockpiled equipment" model to "just-in-time production," which emptied out the huge spaces in the three towers on the factory's assembly floor. NBBJ used that vacancy to insert 18,580 square meters of office into the factory, a factory-office hybrid that let engineers work beside the workers assembling the planes.

Bringing factory and office together shrank Boeing's building footprint from more than 1.2 million square meters to a little over 800,000.

The move also overturned Boeing's traditional manufacturing process and its office culture. Carolyn Corvi, former vice president and general manager of Boeing's airplane manufacturing division, said: "This wasn't just a move of facilities. We wanted to change the way we work, to create a bond between the people who build and the people who design, and to connect people in a way that helps us communicate more smoothly, operate more effectively and compete better."

As Carolyn Corvi remembers it, a huge gulf had long separated Boeing's product designers from the workers on the factory floor. The engineers — the designers, that is — took pride in the white-collar standing they had worked hard for, and the factory was somewhere this group would never set foot. To Corvi, that clearly got in the way of developing a product: "Every employee at the company should have all their attention on the airplane, but if you sit in an office building far from the plane, how can you pay attention to the details of how it is built?"

The earthquake was a disaster. It also handed Boeing a chance to change.

Trying to talk the company's executives into moving the engineers' offices to the lakeside factory, Carolyn Corvi argued: "Reinventing how we work can raise team performance and hit specific productivity and efficiency targets." Put plainly: get the engineers and the factory workers collaborating more closely in the new space.

Three office buildings were lined up along the long outer side of the factory, with a tower holding an employee services center set among them. About 1,200 business and engineering staff worked in the three-story office, and 900 mechanics worked on the factory floor. Following the idea of the moving assembly line, the planes stood in a row, five abreast across a 91-meter-wide space, creeping along the factory floor at 5 centimeters a minute as they were assembled.

NBBJ's chief designer Anne Cunningham and project manager Lori Walker led a team that put aircraft manufacturing itself at the center of the design, trying to recreate the production process inside the office area: how a plane's parts look scattered about before they reach the line, how they come together into a whole aircraft, and how that aircraft then passes through testing, delivery and the rest. The design team hoped this arresting visual effect would open a kind of conversation with the colleagues on the line.

The engineering team went into an open-plan office on the middle level. The walls of the office tower were made of clear polycarbonate panels and clear glazed dampers, used to cut noise from the shop floor. That made an already enormous factory feel more open, and, more to the point, let engineers watch the whole vast production line running in real time through the transparent walls.

The strip between the office and the production area, once used for parking aircraft, became a wide boardwalk corridor — a place where engineers, technicians, workers and executives from different departments now meet and talk business, blurring the line between office and factory, blue collar and white collar.

The new layout paid off in how fast planes got built.

Lights flashing on the shop floor pass through the transparent walls into the office and catch the eye of engineers who would once never have gone near the factory, letting them see for themselves how the line is running.

When the two areas were separate, a problem on the line could take a technician anywhere from a few days to several weeks to resolve. Now every problem can be raised and solved on the spot.

The whole factory was designed as one large showroom, where the planes can be seen from any angle in the building. That visual link is the key to drawing every employee into the process. When something goes wrong, strong visual cues — a warning light, a stopped line — are visible to everyone. Engineers and mechanics who spot the alarm can fix the problem within minutes.

In most cases, problems that used to take days or weeks are now settled within an hour.

Pat Manelly, the plant manager who coordinated engineers and technicians during the move, said: "I work right next to the plane I designed. When I see it moving toward the back door of the factory, I know it's time for me to get moving too."

The whole process sped up, and the average time to build a Boeing 737 fell from 22 days to 11 — a 50 percent gain.

Boeing ran a pilot before the more than 2,000 employees moved in. Forty volunteer engineers worked for 90 days in an open mezzanine office inside the factory, testing the ideas in practice. Kendall Krieg, a manager on the pilot, noted at the time that most engineers were not especially keen to come work in the factory — but the 90 days let them feel how convenient and efficient this way of working was. "It let employees know they didn't have to keep doing things the traditional way. Every employee started thinking about the step before theirs and the step after, which made designing our process go more and more smoothly and broke down the walls between stages," Kendall Krieg said.

Lynda Carlson, engineering director on the relocation project, said: "By the end of the pilot, the engineers' attitudes had changed a great deal from where they started."

The factory also gained a number of new public spaces employees can come and go from freely: a coffee area with a projector, a screen and a small library, and an employee services center offering internet access, dry cleaning and photo processing. On the upper level of the employee cafeteria at the north end of the factory, they can take in Lake Washington through the window. And whether they are meeting in the coffee area or working head-down in a quiet room, the planes stay in view.

If employees don't need a desk of their own, how do you plan the space?

The new office of Inteltion IT, a Bangkok consulting firm we have written about before, is another example. In company size, business model and workflow it is nowhere near as large or as complicated as Boeing, but how to make good use of a 170-square-meter office for 60 employees was exactly why it brought in the local Thai design studio Onion Design Associates to rebuild the place.

Unlike most companies, Inteltion IT's employees usually work out of their clients' offices so they can maintain the clients' computer systems as needed, and only come back to their own office while waiting for a new project or a new client. So the company does not need a desk of its own for every employee; it needs places where employees and clients can meet and talk.

On top of that, everyone here works in front of a computer, which puts heavy demands on mobility and wireless coverage.

Given how hard employees work facing a screen all day, the design team planted a range of fitness equipment and game stations made of white iron pipe around the office — a pull-up bar, gymnastic rings, a punching bag. These set up different places to receive people, and, through exercise, push employees in an already detached way of working to talk to each other.

How can a floor plan meet the need for frequent, dense communication between departments and employees?

If Boeing found its answer to efficiency in the chance to rebuild after an earthquake, then Agnew Moyer Smith, a communications design firm with decades of history, changed of its own accord. Its main business is helping companies solve communication problems and make information visible — building complicated websites, developing e-learning courses and the like.

When the firm was founded, computers were only just entering the industry, and the design of its existing space had fallen behind the way its team structure and workflow had changed. So it asked the Chicago design firm Archideas to rebuild the whole office.

Before the renovation, Archideas' designers spent a great deal of time watching how Agnew Moyer Smith's employees actually work. They also brought employees into the design process, encouraging them to say what they thought about how the office was used, then built space that could meet the differing workflow needs of each department.

The design team learned that for a company whose product is information, Agnew Moyer Smith's growth depends entirely on how far its knowledge workers can create, collaborate and communicate. Employees talk to each other constantly, and brainstorms and work discussions come thick and fast.

As Agnew Moyer Smith partner Reed Agnew put it, "Our workplace needs to help employees explore different ideas and to support communication among them."

The key question became how to support a creative way of collaborating, and how to build an environment where everyone is willing to share a view or an idea.

Archideas' answer was to turn roughly 1,486 square meters along the corridor into a "Main Street," which amounted to giving the company a core gathering place. Every functional department now sits close to this "Main Street," which makes talking easy.

Agnew Moyer Smith has seven functional departments, among them project management, design and software engineering. Each new project draws colleagues from every department into a project team that works together for the life of the project — a month at the short end, one or two years at the long end.

Around that way of working, Archideas designed collaborative spaces at several scales to suit different needs. Movable display boards sit everywhere, meant to carry information quickly into another work area.

Around each team's office there are also work islands, so team members can hold short standing meetings.

Some of the smaller details are thoughtful too: swiveling monitor arms fitted with flat screens, so several people can look at the same information at once. Mobile desks let employees change the size and configuration of a space, and extra work surfaces can be borrowed for a short job.

Don Moyer, a partner at Agnew Moyer Smith, said: "The difference the new design makes is obvious. We see a more collaborative process, clients stay longer, and there's more presenting and discussing. Some people like to talk things over in the coffee area, others would rather stay in a private booth and work quietly. The whole company is getting faster."

Image sources: NBBJ, Archdaily, Steelcase