Space men invade UK offices

To a Work Foundation conference to consider how office environments affect the efficiency and effectiveness of computer users.

The Work Foundation’s chief executive, Will Hutton, dances on the grave of WorldCom. Sustainability of businesses, he explains, depends on trust, not short-term shareholder value. Trust is about who sits where, and about whether the layout of the workplace encourages interactivity, serendipity and cultural change. To gain the social glue for sustainable business we must ask: is my office beautiful? Does it make me feel good?

Lord Rogers, the architect, concurs. For him work should be a high-tech cafe. Work, home and leisure now overlap. All Rogers wants is a table in a cafe with a phone, visitors, and all-day victuals. Office hassles are, he says, caused by a poverty of imagination, not the poverty of technology.

Despite Hutton’s feel-good politics and Rogers’ cappuccino vision, it’s refreshing to hear that IT is actually not responsible for alienation at work. For Frank Duffy, doyen of office planners, the villains are the bureaucracies in property and facilities management. In America, their top-down drive to lower costs has delivered plenty of office space. It’s efficient, but it’s soulless.

Space, like IT, only accounts for 10 percent of the cost of running a workstation. If you want the other 80 percent – staff costs – to be spent effectively, argues Duffy, then follow North European practice. Carefully and expensively embed your corporate values in idiosyncratic office layouts that exploit today’s robust and distributed IT to encourage networking and creativity.

The logic is persuasive. What I worry about is the view that space – and its accompaniment, face time – are vital to innovation. In a subtle paper, the Work Foundation’s Mark Nathan argues that staff who say they are satisfied with their space might not have the environment in which they can do their best work. The reason why the devolution of corporate tasks from departments to teams has often failed, he says, is because staff have been denied what he calls “space sovereignty”.

Wait a minute. In the 1990s, US management gurus held that IT meant bottom-up empowerment in the workplace. I begged to differ. Now we hear that empowerment comes from space and the face.

Once again I can’t agree.

At the conference, the head of innovation at one of Britain’s top retailers waxed lyrical about how converting a warehouse into a New York-style loft, complete with sofas and magazine racks, has worked wonders. But while the ambience is better than the monolithic offices of the past, it will not necessarily bring about world-beating innovations.

“We shape our buildings,” said Churchill in 1960, “thereafter they shape us.” He was right; but at the conference it was left to Steve Harvey, Microsoft’s director of people, profit and loyalty, to note that it is the intellectual and emotional environment, not the physical one, that has the most profound effect on the workforce.