"New Ways of Working" ⁽¹⁾

The design logic of the new office

The new kinds of offices are likely to be perceived by management to be closely related to increasing the potential for organizational survival. The diagram displayed in figure (1) explains why. It demonstrates the direct and dynamic relationship between client priorities and broad types of office layout. It explains why contemporary managerial thinking should be leading not only to richer and more diverse office layouts, but also to a particular sequence in which new kinds of layout are likely to be adopted.

Interaction and autonomy

The diagram is based upon two organizational variables: interaction and autonomy. Taken together, these throw light on the ways in which office layouts are likely to differ and to change, and also explain the dynamics of change in office design. Since most companies differ within themselves the diagram can also be used as a means of measuring the state of all the parts of any complex organization at any given moment - and also of predicting how the proportions of different kinds of office-use are likely to change over time.

Interaction is the personal, face-to-face contact that is necessary to carry out office tasks. As the amount of interaction increases, there is more pressure to accommodate and support such encounters. Even more pressure is exerted as the quality - the intellectual content and the significance - of interaction increases. Forms of interaction vary as the complexity, urgency, and importance of the tasks being carried out increase, so settings for interaction can range from the most informal to the most formal meetings and from the most casual to the most structured encounters. Interactions that are not face-to-face, i.e. are via the computer, telephone, or other virtual media, are not directly significant, although they are likely to supplement, or become a substitute for, face-to-face interaction both now and in the future.

Interaction outside the organization is also relevant because it has a direct impact on occupancy: heavy interaction with clients and colleagues outside the office is often connected with intermittent space occupancy.

Autonomy is the degree of control, responsibility, and discretion each office worker has over the content, method, location, and tools of the work process. The more autonomy office workers enjoy, the more they are likely to want to control their own working environments, singly and collectively, and the more discretion they are likely to want to exercise over the kind and quality of their surroundings in their places of work.

Interaction and autonomy are strongly correlated with many aspects of office design because they affect workers' expectations about the layout, the work settings - the heights of the space-dividing elements, for example - and their control over environmental services and lighting.

Four types of office work

The dominant organizational mode of the conventional office was 'the office as factory' - a place where individuals processed work, under supervision, at their own workstations. Such work is low in interaction - apart from social chatter - as well as low in the autonomy given to individual office workers. In the USA and the UK a great deal of basic clerical work has either been automated out of existence or been exported to economies where it can be carried out more cheaply. Hence the arrow pointing downwards to indicate that such work is already sifting like sand out of the box. Higher-level office activities of this type are being transmuted - re-engineered - into more intellectually demanding activity where working together and teamwork are all important. In such 'group process' work, interaction increases while individual autonomy remains relatively low. Another persistent, and respectable, form of office work - found, for example, in the legal profession and in research institutes - uses the office as a place primarily for 'concentrated study'. In such offices autonomy is high and interaction low. It is expected, as information technology changes work, that many examples of the offices now identified as being for 'group processes' and 'concentrated study' will tend to converge into what has been called the 'transactional' office where, through deft management of time and space, both interaction and autonomy will be maximized. Out of the top right-hand corner of the diagram is escaping, like steam, the growing amount of office work that is becoming virtual, more or less independent of space and even time.

Figure 1

Hives, cells, dens, and clubs

The diagram identifies four major organizational types and, as a shorthand way of capturing the distinct work patterns and distinctive design features of each, has characterized them as hive, cell, den, and club. 'Hive' because such off ices can be compared to beehives occupied by busy worker bees; 'cell' because these recall the monks' cloister or the venerable, highly cellular, offices of the Inns of Court in London; 'den' because these are busy and interactive places where it is easy to work informally in teams; 'club' because one of the nearest models to the new transactional office, despite its unfortunate and outmoded elitist overtones, is the old-fashioned gentlemen's club. This categorization is, of course, only a convenient simplification. In the real world any organization of any size or complexity is likely to be characterized by a shifting mixture of all four. The terms hive, cell, den, and club can refer either to a whole organization occupying a whole building or to part of an organization occupying a floor or even part of a floor. In most companies there will be found combinations of these work patterns. For example, many have 'back office' staff engaged in data-entry or routine administrative functions - typically accommodated in hives, or in cheaper office accommodation out of town - while other groups within the same organization are dens or clubs and are more likely to be located in a headquarters office near the city center. Also, while there are clearly many affinities between certain sectors of work and the types of office between advertising and dens, for example - the limits of the typology must be recognized since, even within the same professions, there may be sufficient differences in workstyle to preclude straightforward associations between particular sectors and the individual types defined here.

(1) "The New Office" Francis Duffy - New Ways of Working- 
       pages. 60-61

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