Southern California Job Market : Weathering The Workplace : MAKING THE WORKPLACE LIVABLE

Never before has so much time, energy and money been spent on office design. And it’s a good thing, too. Because as things stand today, so the experts say, the great American office is a disaster area.

“What I find, typically, is that people’s feet are freezing, their heads are burning up and there’s glare everywhere,” said Steve Diskin, a Beverly Hills architect and industrial designer who specializes in office design.

Even worse, he said, the atmosphere is stale, infectious bacteria recirculate through the heating and air-conditioning systems and annoying noises seem to waft out of every corner of the office. “It’s a polluted environment,” Diskin said.

Lighting, acoustics, air quality and temperature--the four major components of the ambient office environment--play a critical role in determining how well an office functions. They surround us every minute of every working day; their influence is pervasive.

Mike Clevenger, who oversees facilities management at Xerox, said, “If I don’t pay attention to lighting, if I don’t pay attention to air conditioning, if I don’t pay attention to acoustics--all those things--I could screw up a $60,000 employee, or at least cut his productivity by 2% or 3%.”

The new breed of designers and facilities managers complain that office environments have failed to keep pace with the radical changes in office function during the past few decades.

A quarter-century ago, remember, the prototypical office generally conformed to the principles advanced when the science of office management began to develop after World War I.

The ‘60s, though, saw the emergence of the open office, and the ‘70s spawned energy-efficient lighting and air-circulation systems. But it was the onset of the ‘80s that brought the most revolutionary change--widespread computerization. And as Clevenger said, “You place new technology in a hostile environment, and you run into problems.”

The first problem encountered by computer users--and one that continues to plague many of them--is poor lighting. “It’s probably the most important issue now that we’re in computerized offices,” said Rani Lueder, an office furniture and design consultant based in Encino.

Traditional ceiling light systems, primarily designed to illuminate paper, produced a diffuse variety of light that proved to be the primary cause of glare on computer screens. And glare, in turn, proved to be a major cause of eye strain and fatigue.

The most effective response, said Bob Vrancken, director of the facilities management program at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, is to reduce the level of ambient light and rely increasingly on so-called task lights--small lights that provide sharply defined areas of illumination.

Glare produced by remaining overhead lights can be reduced by fitting them with louvers that can be adjusted to guide the light in various directions. As a last resort, computer users can equip their machines with hoods or filters.

While the key factor in lighting is quality, acoustic design revolves around quantity.

With the use of carpeting, free-standing acoustic panels and highly absorptive materials in walls, partitions and ceilings, it’s now possible to design offices that produce “dead” sound--and that’s not necessarily good. “When you make it too quiet,” Lueder said, “any sound can drive you crazy.”

An alternative to reducing noise is masking it by using a public address system to pump out a form of white noise that sounds like an air-circulating system. Although this is effective, there are questions about the long-term effects of such systems, which force people to raise their voices to be heard over not only office noise but the sound masking.

Air quality is an even thornier issue. In fact, prohibitions against smoking--long cast as the chief air-quality villain--have highlighted new, and possibly more serious, concerns about “outgassing” and stale-air syndrome.

Outgassing is a concern in new offices filled with synthetic materials, which often emit tiny quantities of unpleasant gases. “We’re seeing the return of natural materials,” said Chuck Pelly, an industrial designer in Newbury Park. “Part of it is for smell and ecological reasons, but mostly, people are getting plastic-conscious.”

Treating stale-air syndrome is usually a matter of determining the proper mix of fresh and recirculated air. As such, it’s a scientific matter. Selecting the right temperature, on the other hand, is a mysterious art form.

The problem is that what’s cold to one person is hot to another. It should come as no surprise, then, that a 1988 Harris poll showed that 63% of the people working in regulated offices were uncomfortable with the temperature. Even in unregulated offices, nearly half of the workers were uncomfortable.

The solution is more individualized control of the office environment. In fact, most experts envision a day when we’ll be able to control not merely the temperature but also the lighting and acoustics of our own workspaces.

Unfortunately, this will be expensive, and most companies are reluctant to invest heavily in the office environment. “A lot of managers believe that people can work under any situation,” said Stephen Margulis, co-author of the seminal book Using Office Design to Increase Productivity. “What you see is what cheap buys you.”

Upgrading the office environment is a particularly hard sell because it’s so difficult to quantify the relationship between environment and productivity. As Diskin said, “You put a bad chief executive officer in a great chair and the company can still go down the tubes. In the end, it comes down to people.”