Fast Company - Feb 2019

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAKERS COMPANY 12 FASTCOMPANY.COM FEBRUARY 2019

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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