Knowledge workers and office design
When considering how to attract and retain talented “Bright Young Things”, not only must you consider remuneration policies, flexibility and freedom, challenging work and personal development opportunities (amongst other factors), you also need to take into account the physical environment in which they will be working. (Yes, these “young snots” DO want it all – they DO want everything to change. In fact, they’d probably settle for a lot less than we often suggest, BUT, if you want to become a legend to them, and attract and retain the cream of the crop, then you’re going to have to overhaul everything!).
In a well thought through contribution in the Harvard Business School ‘Working Knowledge’ series, Thomas Davenport explains “Why Office Design Matters“. The article comes out of a research project aimed at understanding the link between office design and performance on knowledge workers. I would personally like to see the researchers overlay some of our understanding of generations, as well as insights into the changing values of younger talented staff, onto their research. It would be great to know if some of their comments (especially, for example, the last one below) have a generational bias on them. However, the article is still worth a good read.
The bullet point summary is:
- Knowledge workers prefer closed offices, but seem to communicate better in open ones.
- Knowledge workers congregate in particular geographical areas – i.e. they are drawn to, and are made more productive by living in, cities and regions with concentrations of other people like themselves.
- Particular designs can encourage certain types of behavior, although they will never guarantee it.
- Knowledge workers move around in the course of their work. They need mobility and spend a lot of time out of their offices.
- Knowledge workers collaborate. They meet, they chat, they congregate. Office environments need to facilitate the collaboration and exchange of tacit (hard to express in explicit written terms) knowledge.
- Knowledge workers concentrate. This requires a quiet setting with relatively few distractions.
- Knowledge workers work in the office. Despite many years of discussion about telecommuting and telework, a very small percentage—some studies suggest 5 percent—of workers do “serious” (full-time or near-full-time) telecommuting, and a good proportion of those are administrative workers rather than knowledge workers. Knowledge workers, like all other types of workers, like flexibility, and they like to work at home occasionally. However, they don’t want their homes to be their only offices. They know that to be constantly out of the office is to be “out of the loop”—unable to share gossip, exchange tacit knowledge, or build social capital.
- Knowledge workers communicate with people who are close by. Companies should design work environments so that knowledge workers who need to communicate are physically close to each other.
- Knowledge workers don’t care about facilities gewgaws. At least there is no evidence that anyone ever took a job, stayed at a job, or worked more productively because of foosball, pool, or ping-pong tables, cappuccino bars, office concierges, hearths, conversation pits, quiet rooms, lactation rooms, creativity rooms, relaxation rooms, nap rooms, etc., etc. In these lean and mean times, many workers are even reluctant to be seen using these facilities for fear that they won’t be considered hardworking enough. In any case, there’s no clear relationship between knowledge worker performance and various appealing features of the work environment, though they may help slightly with recruiting or morale.
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The Innovation Hub (joint venture between the University of Pretoria and the CSIR) have a whole section with offices they call “Hot seats”. These booths are fully equipped with every piece of office equipment you can think of. In this area is also boardrooms and smaller meeting rooms. All of these are booked and paid for by the hour. They hope to attract single entrepreneurs or professionals to use these facilities as their offices – with the added advantage of networking opportunities, an ultra-modern look and feel etc. etc. I don’t know what the costs are, but I know it looks really funky. The problem is that I cannot see how I would suddenly use one of those – my mobile office has everyting I need and my clients’ boardrooms are quite sufficient….
Oh yes, another very concept I saw is the fold-up office. It is a desk with drawers and filing space and everything. If you arrive at the office, you push your working station to any open space in the open plan, unfold it and there you go. This was designed for companies where people spend a lot of time out of the office and thus they never need floor space to accommodate everyone simultaneously.
During a recent Social Network Analysis I conducted at one of the larger banks, we found evidence to support much of what Davenport says.
We found for example that office design has a huge impact on silo behavior – and it can seriously hamper efforts to break down functional silos and stimulate knowledge sharing.
We also found that it is important to create more opportunities for ’serendipitous’ encounters by creating more pause areas and installing coffee machines and water coolers in pertinent areas. This leads to opportunities for informal knowledge sharing, and also increases the chances of innovation.
The CSIR has done a lot of research in this area if anyone is interested in SA research.