Changing Workplace : A Fantasyland With Time for Daydreaming
Something’s happening at the office--something’s happening to the office. Experts in disciplines ranging from artificial intelligence to interior design are rethinking how, when, why and where we work. Although their viewpoints and forecasts differ, all agree with Washington strategic planner Maree S. Forbes that “the rate of change in the U.S. workplace is unprecedented in our history and will touch us all.” Times staff writer Connie Koenenn interviews four of the nation’s top thinkers on work-space design.
Wayne Veneklasen’s concept of the ideal office sounds like a futuristic fantasy.
He talks about an open, airy building with a soaring atrium and skylights, encircled by outdoor terraces, its interior combining small private rooms for solitary thinking, with personally tailored work cubicles for privacy and technical efficiency, a fitness facility, and lounges, open cafes and coffee bars for socializing.
He would provide escalators, instead of closed elevators, to move people at a human pace. He would discard the traditional open office plan with its rows of desks or workstations and its office manager marching through periodically to make sure no one is daydreaming on the job.
In the ideal office, says Veneklasen, there would be lots of daydreaming on the job. In fact, Veneklasen’s ideal office is a reality, and he was a member of the team which designed it.
The building, which opened last May in Grand Rapids, Mich., is the $111-million Corporate Development Center for Steelcase Inc., a seven-story pyramid of sloped glass and skylights, set in a lush, low-maintenance landscape of wild flowers and prairie grass.
“It’s a fun building,” says Veneklasen. “It allows people to be better at what they do.”
That’s his job--allowing people to be better at what they do. In corporate jargon, Veneklasen is an organizational environmental psychologist who studies new ways to structure both the workplace and the organization of its human elements. The new building, a research and development center for 800 engineers, designers, accountants and others involved in new product design, is described by Steelcase, the office equipment giant, as a “step into the 21st Century.”
Left behind, says Veneklasen, is the corporate building with its honeycomb of private offices where task-driven employees work in solitude.
Also discarded is the notion that employees clustered around the water cooler talking are wasting time. The Steelcase research center is designed to let people connect. “We encourage water cooler talk,” says Veneklasen
Why the change? “We have done research for communications in organizations that want to foster creativity. It turns out that 80% of an engineer’s ideas come from face-to-face communication with other engineers. If it works for engineers, we thought, why not marketing people, industrial designers, accounting people?” At Steelcase, which started manufacturing desks, file cabinets and chairs in 1912, the conversation is sprinkled with words like “collaboration,” “interaction” and “creative energy.” Executives there like to note that one-third of the consumer products we will use by the year 2000 have not yet been invented, and most of these new ideas are going to come from people sitting around in offices thinking creatively.
That was the philosophy that produced the pioneering Corporate Development Center. Says Veneklasen:
“We have created as many opportunities as we could for people to run into each other: There are 11 beverage centers, we have 60,000 square feet of walk-out terrace spaces that we encourage our employees to use as a work environment. People working inside are pretty well-connected in almost any direction. Outside, they see the landscape, and inside they see other people in their own work group as well as those in other groups.”
In the process, Veneklasen adds, traditional organizational structures are altered as the office of the future breaks barriers from the top down, and laterally between departments--encouraging feedback, recommendations, participation and decision-making from workers who used to take orders. “Cluster” is a word mentioned frequently.
Some of these concepts have been kicking around the corporate world for a while, emphasized Veneklasen. “What we’ve tried to do is gather as many emerging trends as possible and implement them in one facility.”
He feels confident about the short-term reliability of the model. “Ten years from now the emphasis will be people as individuals with their own work styles, work hours, and much more flexibility.
“We don’t have a fix on what it’s going to be forever, but we think we can be fairly accurate about the future of work for the next 10 years.”
Veneklasen is the organizational/environmental psychologist and manager of facilities planning at Steelcase Inc. He is also a member of a planning group working to shape future development of the city of Grand Rapids, Mich.
