Imagine having the following conversation with your boss:
You: Boss, I have a great idea, can I run it by you quickly?
Boss: Well, I’m a little busy because, surprise, we’re behind on this urgent project and have this meeting in a minute, but, OK, explain quickly if you can, please!
You: Great, thank you. I’ve come up with a way to boost productivity.
Boss: OK, what are the details?
You: Well, we need to improve the office layout.
Boss: How will that boost productivity?
You: I think if everyone likes it more, they’ll be happier and work harder. Eventually, they’ll produce more. I bet it’ll make them more likely to stay here longer, as well.
Boss: I see. When will all this magic happen?
You: Well, probably in a few months, maybe longer. We’ll probably start seeing more projects get done on time, actually –
Boss: Wait, how will we know that productivity is going up due to the layout rather than people just naturally getting better at their jobs over a few months? And why wouldn’t the projects get done on time anyway?
You: Hmmm, well, I guess we won’t know for sure, but aren’t we always behind on projects? Like, didn’t you just say –
Boss: What does that have to do with future productivity?
You: Well –
Boss: And how will we know people are staying here because of the layout?
You: Hmmm, well, I guess we won’t know that for sure.
Boss: I think I understand. So you want to spend more money today, tomorrow, and every day afterward in exchange for a productivity boost we won’t be able to measure and a retention increase we won’t be able to attribute to the spending? And on top of it all, you, the genius behind the idea, will never even know if it’s working? How do you even know it’s a good idea?
You: Ah, well, when you put it that way…
It’s a tricky sell, right?
The question of how to best setup a workplace is the type of problem I always enjoy thinking about because it is a battleground for the classic dilemma facing all organizations – how to balance long-term investment with minimizing short-term costs. In the context of workplace environments, the challenge is looking past the easily measured costs associated with rent and services to understand how investing in productive workspaces decreases turnover and increases morale.
The big problem is that it’s not such an obvious thing to spend more money on workplaces to improve morale or retention. Even in the workplaces with the worst morale or the highest turnover, there are always plenty of people who feel good or stick around. Since everyone shares the same environment, it’s difficult to isolate the office layout as the root of any problem (unless there is a sudden exodus in the wake of an office layout change).
There is also the market-driven way to look at this. Most organizations recognize that prospective employees barely consider the office layout. This understanding is reflected in how per-employee spending in salaries and benefits is generally many magnitudes higher than spending on workspaces. Organizations understand that the reality of fixed rates of pay means most employees prefer higher compensation ahead of productive workspaces. Although I don’t know this for sure, I suspect employees paid directly by production care far more about a productive workspace compared to those who work salaried positions with no performance-based variable pay.
I think a couple of things need to happen before organizations start doing a better job of finding the best office layout for their workplaces. First, there should be some basic agreement on what environmental factors consistently lead to reduced productivity. These agreements could then be used as guidelines to prevent them from becoming a source of reduced productivity in the workplace.
What might be some good candidates for this agreement? Noise is a good place to start because of its strong association to errors. In fact, when an employee complains about noise, what it usually means is that someone should start checking the employee’s work for errors. As noise is roughly proportional to density, a smart way to address the issue might be to ensure each worker has enough space.
Another common factor is interruption. An interruption is like a red light – not only do you have to stop, you also have to decelerate before the stop line and accelerate to get rolling at the previous speed again. A workplace that accounts for the negative effect of interruptions would make workspaces private while also allowing workers the ability to silence or divert incoming communications. A good approach here would be to design the space so that intimacy increases as people move to the interior. This would corral visitors at the edges and entrances, establish spaces for teams and groups as people moved toward the center, and designate space at the core for quiet thinking by individuals.
A third factor is forced uniformity. A workplace where everyone works the same hours makes a lot of sense so long as everyone’s work is best completed in those hours. But a team responsible, say, for the ongoing functionality of a website is very different from one responsible for direct sales to businesses. The environment should be designed within the governing principle of maximizing high-quality work. This means local variation must be encouraged within the broad limits of organization-wide governing principles (1).
A quiet, customizable workspace where employees are empowered to divert interruptions – sounds obvious, right (2)? And yet, given how difficult the benefits are to prove, the only way I can come up with to measure the productivity boost of these changes is through an experiment. I would simply choose a sample of workers to shift to workspaces that meet these criteria and measure their productivity against those who remain in the old setup. A well-executed random trial should determine, once and for all, the type of layout that best serves a given organization.
Footnotes / a look behind my curtain, so to speak, if I had enough space for one
0. Curtain call…
Over the past few weeks, I surprised myself by writing so much about Peopleware. What I thought would be one or two posts quickly expanded as I realized how much this book covered important yet generally unexplored ground about management.
1. The workers should design the workplace…
A lot of companies operate under an axiom of ‘the people doing the work should decide how it gets done’. Sounds nice on paper but in practice an organization that uses top-down decision making to design a workspace isn’t managing by this principle.
The best way to identify this problem is to look for clues that the layout serves the interests of management ahead of an employee. Does infrequently used furniture or an unnecessary plant take up more space than an employee? If so, it is time to rethink the layout.
2. Or at least, I think these are the numbers – it’s noisy here and hard to concentrate…
At my new job, it is almost impossible to have less space than I do now. I have roughly seventy-five cubic feet of space – my desk is four feet wide, three feet deep, and about six feet above the ground when I raise it into a standing position. For the record, the authors of Peopleware recommend seventy-five square feet of space.
Space isn’t the only issue. Our instant messaging tools make interrupting others more efficient than at any point up to now in world history – it is almost costless. The most customizable feature of anyone’s desk is the brand of headphones used to ‘drown out’ the complete lack of privacy. It is, in short, not a productive workspace.
