ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAKERS COMPANY 12 FASTCOMPANY.COM FEBRUARY 2019
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Big Idea N
Creek Software in 2000 and is
currently the cofounder and CEO
of Stack Overflow. “They were so
loud, because there were no drop
ceilings. It was painful for everybody. But [dotcom startups] were
doing it because they had literally no choice.” Out of necessity,
an aesthetic was born.
By the time Facebook opened
its Frank Gehry–designed Menlo
Park headquarters in 2015, the
open office had become not just
the face of innovation in Silicon
Valley but a powerful metaphor.
Facebook now houses roughly
2,800 employees in a 10-acre
building that the company claims
largest companies, according to
calculations from Erik Rood, an
analyst in Google’s human re-
sources department who exam-
ines corporate financials on his
personal blog, Data Interview Qs.
Perhaps no company has ex-
ploited these efficiencies more
than We Work, which popularized
communal tables and lounge
areas in its coworking hubs and
now builds out offices for other
companies. We Work distin-
guishes itself by using its data
to compress people into smaller
areas—it recently took Expedia’s
Chicago office from three floors to
two—without, it says, sacrificing
employee satisfaction. Liz Burow,
We Work’s director of workplace
strategy, says that this entails
bringing people closer so they
interact more, while also creating
a variety of seating arrangements
and, yes, even some private ar-
eas. “People have different needs
throughout their day and their
life,” she says. “They might need
to focus at a certain point and talk
to someone at another point.”
Many architects share this
vision. Janet Pogue McLaurin, a
principal at the architecture firm
Gensler, which has designed
dozens of prominent corporate
offices, says that the most effec-
tive open plans include a host
of meeting rooms and private
areas for deep concentration.
“Innovative companies actually
use more spaces throughout the
office,” she says. They don’t expect the desk to be the center of
an employee’s work life.
It’s an enticing idea. But, as
We Work has found, the most
expensive part of an office is
the small meeting room. As a
workaround, We Work offers its
enterprise clients phone booths—
basically, portable pods that can
be dropped right into an existing
layout. At 15 square feet, they’re
rather tight for a private office.
But at least there’s a door.
Seating Arrangements
SIX COMPANIES THAT EXPERIMENTED WITH WORK SPACE
Pixar, Emeryville,
California | 2000
Steve Jobs rejected
the open-office trend
for Pixar’s headquarters. Instead, he
placed groups of five
to six workers in adjacent offices, with a
collaboration space in
the middle.
Intel, Santa Clara,
California | 1995
CEO Andy Grove assigned himself a cubicle, hoping to foster
conversations and
“constructive confrontation,” in which people could criticize
him and the company
without fear.
Chiat/Day, Los
Angeles | 1994
Workers at ad agency
Chiat/Day’s “virtual
office” had no assigned seats and had
to check out laptops
and phones each
day. The result: People began ditching
work to escape.
R/GA, New
York | 2016
At marketing agency
R/GA, an app lets
employees manage
and adjust their open
office, including
changing the lighting
and booking rolling
“conference” round
tables on the fly.
Airbnb, San
Francisco | 2013
At Airbnb’s offices,
bookable work rooms
are replicas of Airbnb
rentals around the
world, giving them a
residential feel at a
time when many people enjoy working
from home.
Zappos, Las
Vegas | 2013
Zappos’s campus
is intentionally
cramped. CEO Tony
Hsieh allocated less
than 100 square feet
per employee, based
on research that
showed denser cities
are more productive.
is the largest open floor plan in
the world. “The idea is to make
the perfect engineering space:
one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough
to collaborate together,” founder
and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote
when he announced the design
in 2012. Famously, he has a plain
white desk in the communal
area, just like everyone else. (He
also has a private “conference”
room, where he is rumored to
spend much of his time.)
The whiff of disruption that
open offices carried became ir-
resistible to startups and estab-
lished companies alike. “When
you talk to leaders in corporate
real estate or CEOs about why
they designed their space [in an
open plan], most will give some
fluffy answer,” says Ben Waber,
cofounder and CEO of workplace
analytics company Humanyze,
which uses sensors to track how
people use offices and interact
with each other. “But when you
dig down, it’s because this is
what the workplaces look like at
a couple of highly successful tech
companies.” Calvin Newport,
a computer science professor
at Georgetown University who
studies how people work, takes
an even more skeptical view:
Open offices have become a way
to indicate a company’s value to
venture capitalists and talent.
The goal is “not to improve pro-
ductivity and collaboration, but
to signal that the company [is]
doing something interesting.”
Lost amid the symbolism are
the employees themselves. Ac-
cording to Humanyze, open plans
are great at encouraging interac-
tion between teams, which is use-
ful when a company is trying to
create new products. But they are
terrible at encouraging interaction
within teams, which is necessary
for execution-based work, like
writing code, when employees
need to be in sync. An open office
might be suitable for a company
coming up with new ideas, but
when someone has to implement
them, it becomes distracting.
Of course, one of the main
reasons that business leaders
default to open plans is simply
that they’re inexpensive. According to commercial real estate
association CoreNet Global, the
average space allotted to individual employees globally fell
from 225 square feet in 2010 to
176 square feet in 2013, and is
projected to keep decreasing.
This adds up to hundreds of
millions of dollars—or more—in
savings per year at the country’s