Cutting the Cubicle Out of Office Design

Offices today are more than just a place to warehouse workers: they’re a statement about corporate culture and commitment to staff and customers. 
What does your office say about your company?

Few offices in the world are as famous as the companies they belong to. The Googleplex, for one, is known for offering Google employees everything from swim-in-place pools and volleyball courts to children’s play areas and catered gourmet meals. And before he passed away last year, Steve Jobs presented plans for his company’s new ­spaceship-like headquarters, as innovative and design-savvy as any Apple product. 


While these examples are exceptional for their scope, corporations everywhere are paying close attention to architectural and interior design today. “There was a time when office space was really a liability,” says Sarah Nelles, head of strategic facilities and planning at the Vancouver office of Kasian Architecture Interior Design and Planning Ltd., which counts Telus, TransLink, and the UBC School of Population and Public Health among its recent clients.

“It was a place to warehouse staff,” she continues. “Now, it’s an asset and needs to perform as such by effectively supporting four major pieces: the company’s business goals, its organizational culture, its processes and operational requirements and its technology strategy.” 


Niles Spiro, director of corporate interior design at B+H BuntingCoady, elaborates: “A business’s space is an effective way of branding what they’re really about, and how they really are,” he says. “It’s a marketing tool that says, ‘We value you’ to staff and to the client.”


Case in point: “It was critical that Telus be strongly represented within their new space,” says Nelles. “They wanted there to be significant alignment between the product the customer holds in their hand, the bill they get at the end of the month and their experience there.”


Compare this to office design philosophies of decades past, and things have clearly changed. “It’s a huge aesthetic leap all around – a rebellion against the Dilbert culture of the work world,” says Cynthia Penner, principal at Box Interior Design Inc., a firm known as much for its award-winning hospitality portfolio (Market by Jean-Georges, Coast restaurant, the Adara Hotel) as its commercial projects, which include the ongoing design of Kal-Tire’s new office in Kelowna and the recently completed Prima Colombia Hardwood Inc. office on Alberni Street.

“There are many messages that an office sends: how much has been spent, how the space is used and whether it’s an open-concept office,” she continues. “These are all cues to the outside world and prospective employees about the company, for better or worse.” In other words, where lavish reception areas might impress visitors, poorly designed individual offices with bad lighting and unattractive furniture tell employees that they aren’t as important. The exception? The person sitting at the large, L-shaped desk in the corner office. And yet even that has changed. “The private office used to be the carrot of your career,” says Penner with a laugh. “We’re seeing now with younger people that that’s not a motivator.” 


The focus on office design as a function of employee satisfaction is true even in more traditionally conservative law offices. In fact, law is perhaps the sector that has most embraced this new frontier. Most of Vancouver’s largest interior design firms have completed redesigns of many law offices, including Counterpoint Interiors Inc. (Bacchus Law Corp., Singleton Urquhart, Bell Alliance Law), Kasian (Bennett Jones LLP, Meyers Norris Penny LLP), B+H Architects (Heenan Blaikie LLP), and Group Five Design Associates Ltd. (Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, Bull Housser Tupper LLP, Harris & Co. LLP). 

[pagebreak]

Complementing culture with design

Spiro, who is an expert in law office design, says that 10 years ago, law firms had offices spread over multiple floors, each with its own impressive reception area. Not much attention was paid to the offices of the firm’s associates.

Today, a single client conference centre or a client-specific floor is becoming the norm (they are, after all, what keeps firms going), but greater attention is paid to ensure that the design of the back end matches the culture of the firm. 


All this talk of matching design to culture is new. Today it’s crucial for companies to identify their corporate culture and its impact on everything from marketing and branding to employee retention and, of course, office design.

Penner started her career in Toronto working mainly with restaurants and hotels, and while she acknowledges that hospitality design is still “trendier” and allows for more theatricality than corporate design, there’s now a greater understanding that both are actually focused on serving the community within the space. “Most people spend more than eight hours a day at work,” she reasons, “so we’re forced to ask more questions like, ‘How do you remain interested and stimulated?’” 


We know now that this is a common problem for that generation that grew up with the Internet. “A lot of the changes are driven by a younger demographic that has a different learning and working style,” explains Nelles. “There’s a lot more opportunity to create spaces that have to support a variety of different functions.”

For instance, the older generation still prefers enclosed areas and doesn’t think twice about picking up the phone or walking to a colleague’s office, while the younger generation can work at almost any type of workspace and often prefers texting and emailing to actually speaking. Ultimately, it’s the designer’s job to balance these two and provide environments that suit both. 


However, Penner points out, if you see an employee sitting in an atrium engrossed in his laptop, “will you think he’s really working, or will you think he’s not working as hard?” How this impacts what type of work behaviour, and where, is clearly a 21st-century organizational behavior conundrum. The answer lies in defining corporate culture as clearly as possible. Laying out possible work arrangements can ease a company through a transition and help define exactly how flexible it is.

“The younger generation can work at Starbucks, but we don’t necessarily want them to,” says Spiro. The solution: “We can help create some of that atmosphere, where they can take their laptops or smart phones and help them get away from their workstations.”


Smart phones, laptops, tablets – it’s no surprise that the biggest changes in office design have these gadgets to thank. “There’s a huge change going on right now with this revolution in technology,” says Nelles. “It has finally severed the linkage between worker and desk.”

Because people are now connected, everywhere and anywhere, “collaborative work environment” has become the catchphrase of the day. Networked servers and Skype mean more collaborative work styles, greater knowledge sharing and increased use of an organization’s resources.


For office design, it necessitates greater diversity in types of furniture being used. “Fifteen or 20 years ago, you sat at your desk and then met in a closed room, around a long table,” says Penner. These days, “lounge furniture is finding its way into general office areas.”

According to Nelles, “We translate clients’ needs into the environment, which sometimes means sofas, sometimes means beanbag chairs, and sometimes means leather-backed executive chairs in boardrooms.”


Besides increased office mobility, desk styles and sizes have also been affected. “A lot of office furniture throughout history has been a direct result of technology,” says Penner, citing desks in the ’60s, recessed to accommodate typewriters, and those ubiquitous deep-corner desks of the ’80s and ’90s, which were the only thing that would accommodate an enormous monitor. With lighter, simpler, and more integrated systems – flat screens, networked printers – a recurring question now, Penner says, is, “Do I really need all this space?” 


Spiro tells a similar story: where workstations in the late ’90s were eight feet by eight feet, now, they’re seven or even six feet by six feet. Similarly, because of flat screen monitors, desk sizes have downsized from 36 inches deep to 24 inches or even 22 inches.

He’s quick to add, however, that the recession was another reason to cut back on office real estate: “Businesses are trying to be more effective and efficient, and we’re being challenged to create higher-density workplaces,” he explains.

“One way we achieve that is by using workstations and furniture that are more flexible and mobile.” Gone are cumbersome meeting tables; in their place are smaller, individual tables that can be added or removed. In some offices, open floor space quickly becomes a meeting area with the use of partitions or screens.


Not surprisingly, these changes have given rise to an entirely new concept altogether. Widely used in Europe and now gaining acceptance in North America, benching is where employees sit along long tables, with small partitions separating them. Gone are the five-foot-high fabric-walled cubicles that prevented connecting with one’s coworkers; in their place are low screens or glazed walls. “It gives the impression of transparency in communication and in the workplace,” says Nelles – something we know is increasingly important. 

[pagebreak]


These new office communities are also exemplified in the layout of desks and materials used in construction. Many of Kasian’s recent projects came from offices with traditional desk configurations: closed offices, which were reserved for senior staff, were around the perimeter of a floor, while more junior employees were clustered in the middle. At the UBC School of Population and Public Health, the front entrance was even shrouded in concrete.

“It was an intervention, if you will,” she says of Kasian’s involvement. The shrouding was removed to let in more light and give workspaces views to the exterior, and the space was furnished with more collaborative working styles in mind. Similarly, for all of its other office redesign projects, any enclosed offices were redesigned with glazed fronts to facilitate the entry of the most natural light possible. 


Spiro says that the same has been true of his law firm projects. Lawyers were often separated from paralegals and other staff by walls or even floors. Now, while most enclosed offices are still around the perimeter, their walls have been re­designed in glass, so that staff positioned in the middle still have some views to the outside. According to Spiro, “There’s definitely less of the enclosed feeling that you used to have,” which is a feat considering overall offices have actually downsized from 250 square feet to 140, on average. 


Finally, sustainability now ranks high when it comes to new developments in interior design. “Sustainability is huge here, and it’s driven by the B.C. business community,” notes Spiro. “It means better lighting, better air conditioning, and improving the workplace to create a healthy work environment that improves productivity.” 


As organizations have begun including sustainability clauses in their company policies, the use of environmentally positive materials has increased. It’s not uncommon now to ensure that everything, from carpet glue to paint and fabrics used for furnishings, is sustainable, eco-friendly or harvested according to these principles.

“Thanks to industry spokespeople such as Ray Anderson of Interface Inc. and architect William McDonough, who helped create awareness among the community in earnest in the ’90s,” says Nelles, “these considerations are now foremost in designers’ minds.” 


Sustainability, ergonomics, corporate culture, job satisfaction and employee productivity: these are the new concerns weighing on designers’ minds when faced with corporate projects. Spaceship-style exteriors or not, with so many local firms responsible for creating spaces that reflect the best of these elements, office design in Vancouver is now being revered in its own right.