Open-plan offices keep spreading. What do you do about privacy? | Our Offices ②

The three solutions in this piece share one thing: they scrap fixed desks, and they give employees more choices.

The office furniture maker Haworth recently published a white paper called Designing for Focus Work. The research found that between interruptions and other distractions, the average office worker loses 28% of the workday — and has to work late to finish. In the white paper's global survey, more than half of the respondents said their employers had made no attempt to help them manage an overloaded workload.

People in open-plan offices are under constant siege: messages cutting in at any moment, colleagues walking back and forth, noise from nowhere in particular. The time left for thinking alone and solving problems keeps shrinking.

None of this is a new discovery.

• In 2013, a survey of workplaces by the architecture firm Gensler found that office efficiency in the United States had dropped 5% over the previous five years;
• In 2014, a survey by the British office equipment services company Expert Market found that 54% of employees would rather work in a separately partitioned space;
• Also in 2014, a survey that the American office furniture brand Steelcase commissioned from the global research firm IPSOS found that nearly 69% of employees were unhappy with their work environment. Of those, 85% said the colleagues around them or other people's conversations broke their concentration day to day; another 85% said that when they wanted to be alone — to relax or to think something through — there was nowhere suitable in the office to go.

Over the past decade or so, shared, open-plan space has multiplied and gradually replaced the cubicle as the standard office layout. Open plans are credited with getting employees to work together more and with cutting real estate costs, but Haworth's report says they do nothing to improve an individual employee's performance.

“Successful collaboration takes both collective teamwork and highly focused individual work. Being able to move freely between the interactive, collaborative mode and the focused, thinking mode is what makes work meaningful and productive,” the white paper says.

It is worth remembering that noise pollution and visual clutter are only the visible problems. Much of the time, an open plan also creates a low-grade state of competition and strips employees of privacy. Not everyone adapts to a room where every move is on show.

We have been working through case studies of offices of different kinds, sizes and industries to work out what today's workplace design is actually doing. Five trends come up most often, and most office design fits under one of them:

• Tailoring the office to how a particular company works together, with an eye on efficiency;
• Balancing collaborative work against privacy;
• Smart offices that improve the employee experience;
• Attention to physical and mental health, and to sustainability;
• Using design to explain company culture.

This is the second piece in the series. Through three case studies, we look at “the balance between collaborative work and privacy.” Talking and working together is treated as an indispensable part of innovation and efficiency — but privacy, quiet and solitude matter just as much to creativity, to efficiency, and even to the work of leading.

“When people have a choice, I think that's when they feel this is an office with some happiness in it.”

This year the Shanghai office of the property agency JLL moved. The fixed desks are gone, and so are the managers' private offices. The old chain of command was broken open and replaced by a loose, organic space borrowed from coworking.

Wu Yunshen no longer has an office of his own. Since the move he would rather wander around and talk to colleagues at random. “I'd rather have a lot of people next to me I can talk to than sit working in a nice private office with the door shut.” He is JLL's managing director for Shanghai and East China.

JLL opened its Shanghai office in 1994, its formal entry into the Chinese market. After more than 20 years of localizing, it has offices in 13 cities including Beijing, Chengdu and Guangzhou. It no longer has to explain to people what JLL can do for them, and it has become a company that many people hoping to get into property agency want to join.

“A company should make some changes to meet the needs of its clients, of society and of its own employees. In the past we kept helping our clients realize their visions. What we want to stress now is what kind of environment lets our employees help our clients realize their visions.”

Many of Shanghai's best-known landmark commercial properties are JLL clients. It is the exclusive office leasing agent for Shanghai Tower, Shanghai IFC, Wheelock Square and HKRI Taikoo Hui; it provides strategic advice on the Hongqiao transport hub and the Bund financial district; it manages Citigroup Tower and Global Harbor, among others.

The Shanghai office used the move as a chance to redefine the brand through a different kind of design, and hired iDA Workplace + Strategy, a firm specializing in workplaces, to do it.

The new office occupies the 22nd and 23rd floors of Tower 1 at HKRI Taikoo Hui. Step out of the lift lobby, through a glass door, and you are in a large open room called the Equator Club. The designers threw out the conventional corporate reception desk and borrowed from the hotel concierge instead, hoping to play down the corporate register, put the user's experience first and create an atmosphere that is about more than work.

A single phone-based access card lets employees move through every part of the office without stopping.

At JLL, meetings large and small, at any hour and in any place, are unavoidable. Which is why wireless projection and wireless IP phones turn out to be such a kindness: they save the time normally lost to plugging things in and testing them. One meeting room cuts its own power after 15 minutes. A tall round table sits at the center, with walls around it that employees can lean against for a moment. At the 15-minute mark the whole room goes dark. The point of this small piece of cleverness is to turn long, dull meetings into short, useful ones — to turn rambling into “say it straight, and keep it short.”

Take the stairs beside the Equator Club up to the 23rd floor and the view opens out.

Past the wide floor-to-ceiling windows are daylight and the loud, fashionable city. This space, built out of wood textures and a wall of plants, is called the Aurora Café. Colleagues gather here in twos and threes to chat and talk shop; on Friday evenings, after a week of grind, some throw parties and hold events here.

Beyond the invention in those public rooms, the working areas — which fold in the feel of a coworking space — have also shed the stiff, serious look of the past.

Everything currently fashionable in a Silicon Valley tech office can be found here: innovative cubicle designs that follow the turn back toward privacy, small booths for a one-on-one conversation, a private phone call, or simply staring into space alone, desks and chairs for employees who prefer to stand, and sound-absorbing panel installations in different zones.

The range of meeting rooms gives employees choices too. Anyone who needs a degree of privacy can pick a room sized to the meeting and talk without being interrupted; anyone who needs to settle something quickly can take it to a more open space.

In Wu Yunshen's words: “When people have a choice, I think that's when they feel this is an office with some happiness in it.”

It is also the feedback he hears most. “Before there really was no choice — I could be in the meeting room or at my desk. Now they can find a setting that fits what they need. That might be the Aurora Café, or the sofa area, or even sitting in the Equator Club.”

The work areas also handle furniture, materials, color and lighting with some care, swapping bright colors for warm ones to make the room feel close and easy. The circulation plan takes its cue from city planning: it has “main roads” and it has the detail of “back alleys.”

More contact with colleagues has been one of the biggest changes since the move.

Wu Yunshen uses himself as the example. “I used to only talk to the few departments sitting next to me. Since we moved in, I've sat on the 23rd floor and I've sat at the desks of our different departments. Sometimes I'm too busy, but five minutes of talk, seeing what they're working on — those two or three chances to talk are an important source for understanding our business.”

Liu Dongxu, senior manager of JLL's East China marketing department, told us that the new office has quite a few fewer desks than the old one, and that this gets in nobody's way. With no assigned seats, people in the same department usually pick an area and sit together so they can talk; when they finish for the day they put their things in a personal locker and lock it.

Given the nature of the work — employees are out on business trips or with clients much of the week — a fixed desk for everyone would have been a waste anyway.

More choice of where to work and more chances for colleagues to run into each other are both outcomes Wu Yunshen is glad to see. But while the change was under way, he worried: “Is this going to have a big effect on how we operate?”

A few months of actually working there has settled some of his doubts, and raised new questions. “On the management side, I used to see our colleagues sitting together and know what they were doing. Now I only see the results. The process — there's no way to manage every piece of it. That's a big subject too.”

Private offices don't encourage people to work together, but employees don't want a space with no privacy either

TAQA, founded in 2005, is an international energy company based in Abu Dhabi. It has grown very fast over the past decade, expanding across the energy industry in 11 countries. Fast expansion also scattered its employees across regions, which made logistics and organization relatively hard.

Senior management believed the collective intelligence of the company could only be put to work properly if employees were gathered in the headquarters city. “We're still a young company, and we hold US$32 billion in assets around the world. But our team in Abu Dhabi was still working in cubicles. I thought we had to take some barriers out,” said Ifran Nadeem, TAQA's executive vice president.

They leased three floors — the 23rd through the 25th — of a tower in Abu Dhabi, 5,543 square meters in all. The American architecture and design firm Perkins+Will designed the space.

This was not a simple office move. For TAQA's employees it overhauled the way they worked.

According to Khaled Hag, a TAQA business manager, many employees steeped in Arab corporate culture were used to working in an environment full of private offices, and senior managers were used to a private office as a mark of authority — even though such an environment does not encourage people to work together.

Before the move, TAQA's leadership canvassed a good many employees, and quickly realized that privacy was the central design question: from what employees said, a space with no privacy would not be welcome.

Leadership set out clear requirements for the new space: “This should be a place for meetings, for hosting guests and for working together, where people can gather and work as one.” They also said the design could not ignore the individual employee's need for privacy.

“We need to create a space that reflects how varied our business is, one that makes it easier for people to talk to each other. Innovation and new technology matter, of course. But what matters more to a company is the quality of its employees and how closely they are connected.”

Space that satisfies individual privacy and space that supports working together: the design team had to find the balance between them.

The brightly colored furniture conveys an easy approachability and a sense of invention. The glass partitions are printed with a pattern of energy waves, an echo of the company's culture. Past the floor-to-ceiling windows is an unbroken view of the bay and old Abu Dhabi.

The floor plans separate the open work areas, the shared collaborative spaces and the private spaces cleanly.

Client meetings, for instance, can be held on the 25th floor, which has a boardroom, several ordinary meeting rooms, a large auditorium, and the Majlis, a reception room the company built specifically for receiving guests — so that dealing with outside visitors never disturbs the people working on an ordinary day.

On the 23rd and 24th floors, employees can find a corner that suits them, whether that is a booth for a private phone call or an open stretch by the window where they can work happily with the sea in view.

“Every employee works a little differently, and we need to give them different choices,” Khaled Hag says. “The ones who were worried about privacy stopped worrying once they got used to the new place. I don't think anyone wants to go back.”

Replacing fixed desks with flexible work areas, to make work both efficient and enjoyable

The headquarters of ING Bank Turkey sits in Maslak, an important business district of Istanbul. The renovation went to a local Istanbul team, Bakırkure Architects.

The first step was a survey of the staff.

Employees at ING's headquarters had feedback on the old office along several lines: the great majority disliked its dark, monotonous colors and the rigid arrangement of desks, chairs and space. There were also plenty of complaints that meeting rooms and public areas were too few and that the space was not well used.

Among those surveyed, 75% said they wanted an office space of their own, and 90% wanted to be able to move around freely while working. Another 75% were unhappy with the lighting, and 90% felt the air conditioning was too weak, which left them tired at work.

One other problem was obvious: the whole office design leaned too hard on rank. The large tables used for meetings, for example, projected the authority of the executive team but wasted space; employees wanted to close the distance with executives and work alongside them.

Those findings shaped Bakırkure's strategy. The team set out to reflect the different kinds of space a bank office needs in every corner of the design.

Mobility became the central goal of the renovation. As mobile work has spread, employees are no longer tied to a desk, and more and more companies are choosing to build an environment that encourages people to work together, to share and to invent — and so improves the experience of work overall.

Wireless base stations throughout the building let employees talk to each other on internal wireless smart handsets; landlines were retired. The designers added new flexible work areas so employees can pick a spot among different kinds of space to suit how they work. That hands people more control: a separate area to work in when they need to concentrate, a table to sit around together when they need to talk.

The old standard workstations were fixed desks assigned one to a person. The new space turned them into shared work areas where employees choose where to sit, a free arrangement that can lift both motivation and efficiency. To meet individual needs, the office also added phone booths for private calls and lockers for personal belongings.

Some executives sit in the corners of the floor, which makes it easy to keep an eye on the whole room. Work areas are pushed up against the windows to take full advantage of daylight, while spaces that need less of it — meeting rooms, say — sit in the middle of the floor.

To keep the whole place feeling open and comfortable, the designers removed the old drop ceiling, exposing the ceiling structure and raising the height of the room. In the crowded work and meeting areas, nozzle air distribution solved the weak air conditioning.

The public areas were the other focus of the renovation. Coffee points are scattered through the building for anyone to use at any time. The dining area is split into several sections, and there are tiered public steps, a winter garden and a basketball court, for employees to gather, read or do anything else sociable — which makes this one of the liveliest parts of the building.

Image sources: Dezeen, Archdaily, JLL