The Workplace You Need Now. Sanjay Rishi

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1 The Origin and Evolution of Workplace

       “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

       George Santayana, Philosopher

      Today, most C-suite leaders recognize that great workplaces and workplace strategies can help win the war for talent and provide competitive advantage. That recognition is a relatively recent development, however. With a few notable exceptions, organizations historically have viewed the workplace as a location to get work done and a necessary expense. Today, a more sophisticated view of workplace is emerging.

To understand where we’re headed, let’s understand how we got here. The first dedicated corporate office buildings began to pop up in London in the early eighteenth century, housing the likes of the Royal Navy and the East India Trading Company. With the British Empire expanding and creating trading routes across its empire and the world, the concept of a centralized and dedicated physical space in which to administer a growing enterprise – and all its paperwork – began to take shape.ⁱ

      In the United States, the corporate office dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when railroads expanded economic and geographic prospects. The complexity of growing businesses demanded a new physical workplace model.

      Since that time, the workplace has evolved only incrementally through economic and business cycles, social and military crises, and industrial and technological revolutions.ⁱⁱ In the early to mid-twentieth century, offices were designed with efficiency in mind. Little attention was paid to the quality of the environment for employees. Using the efficiency strategies of mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor, many offices simply squeezed employees together to toil under the watchful eyes of supervisors, in an effort to boost productivity. Meanwhile, offices were growing bigger as advances in architecture, engineering, and construction led to larger buildings. Skyscrapers began to dot skylines of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and other major cities around the world.

      The 1960s saw a move away from the endless rows of workstations lined up to maximize space. Post-Taylorism, the concept of “office landscape,” or Bürolandschaft as coined by a German design team, promoted the idea of breaking up rows of desks into smaller, organic cluster of workspaces with small privacy partitions. The goal was to create a less hierarchical workplace that fostered collaboration and socialization, not just productivity.

As buildings grew taller, space design grew more creative, too, allocating space for work, secretarial teams, meetings, and eating. Bürolandschaft eventually evolved into the concept of the “action office,” the brainchild of Herman Miller’s Robert Propst. Propst was among the first industrial designers to recognize that the workplace environment affects the ability to perform mental work. He conceived of the action office as an environment where workers would have the space and privacy to perform their work, instead of being elbow-to-elbow with coworkers. Ironically, what eventually emerged was the modern-day cubicle,ⁱⁱⁱ with fabric-covered walls and modular flexibility – which evolved into ubiquitous and uninspiring “cube farm.”

      The widespread adoption of cubicles contributed to generic, albeit functional, office interiors at the same time the growing sophistication of consumer product branding began to influence corporate building exteriors. By the 1960s, companies like IBM were building unique headquarters designed to embody their brands. Completed in time for the 1972 Olympic Games, BMW’s famed world headquarters building in Munich, Germany, resembles the four cylinders of a car engine. However, the brand concept was typically expressed only in the exterior architecture of these facilities, rather than in the experience of the workplaces inside.

      By the 1980s, large corporations had mostly shifted once again toward a focus on productivity, with profitability as the primary motive, per economist Milton Friedman’s mandate that the primary objective of business is to maximize returns to shareholders. In an era of junk bonds and leveraged buyouts, Wall Street investment banks became infamous for working their junior associates around the clock. Cubicles shrunk in size while their walls grew higher, isolating workers from everything but the task at hand.

      With the focus on profitability and productivity, it’s no wonder that the cubicle rose to prominence. The C-suite viewed workplace as a cost and utility with limited choice, not a creative, inspired, or desired product with a compelling value proposition СКАЧАТЬ