Think There’s No Place Like Home? Try the Office
The so-called alternative office, where it’s hard to tell the managers from the managed, may soon need a new name: the mainstream office.
An urge to make the office more like home--and home more like the office--has caught on at a number of major corporations, where changes are being driven by the high cost of office space, competitive pressures and shifting cultural tastes. Among the new devotees are Procter & Gamble, AT&T;, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Swiss Bank and Southern California Edison. Most of the Big Five accounting firms have adopted the once-alternative style.
A survey published this year in the Sloan Management Review reported that 29% of 100 Fortune 500 companies surveyed had some kind of alternative work arrangements for employees, and 15% were considering similar programs.
Savings on real estate are a big reason for the growing popularity of the alternative office: Since 1991, AT&T; has increased cash flow by $550 million, a 30% improvement, by cutting back on office space and related overhead costs, according to the Harvard Business Review. Southern California Edison has also adopted a similar strategy to save money by shrinking its office space while using its remaining space more flexibly than before, according to a company spokesman.
If the top brass like the alternative office because it saves money, however, employees have their own reasons for embracing the new style of workplace.
A case in point is Marc Reynolds, director of shared services for the L.A. office of Arthur Andersen, who recently gave up a much-coveted perk: a spacious office on the 30th floor of Library Tower, with its privileged view of the downtown skyline.
These days, Reynolds lacks a fixed “address” in the office. Some days, he works at home. When he needs to visit the office, Reynolds must reserve a desk beforehand. When he arrives, he retrieves his files from a small locker and plugs his laptop computer into a desk in a large, sun-filled room that he shares with dozens of other people.
Reynolds does not seem displeased, however, to have become one of the new nomads of the Information Age. Far from feeling dispossessed, “I couldn’t be happier,” he said. “I feel liberated.”
In contrast to the traditional style of management, in which supervisors kept close tabs on subordinates, the alternative office is an approach that actually encourages office workers to spend time away from the office, either in the field or at home. Companies often buy standardized office furniture and laptop computers to outfit the home office and pay for additional telephone lines.
And when employees come to the office, the emphasis is on teamwork and socialization, as well as creature comforts to sustain corporate employees through workdays that often last 12 hours.
Possibly for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, office space is being designed for the comfort and convenience of rank-and-file employees rather than for top managers alone. Office suites that were formerly crammed full of windowless warrens now give way to large, open rooms. Executives must abandon their window offices so that all employees can enjoy the advantage of natural light and window views.
Food and drink--particularly coffee--is key to making the office seem like home. Andersen’s downtown office has a “town center,” where people meet and sip freshly brewed java, as well as “satellite coffee bars” with bistro-like bar stools and refrigerators full of free goodies. Throughout the floor are small conference rooms for impromptu meetings, with designer chairs and with tables equipped with computer plug-ins.
Top accounting and consulting firms like Andersen were among the first to lead the charge into the alternative office nearly five years ago. Since that time, such old-line corporations as IBM, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and AT&T; have converted to the new approach, according to the Sloan report.
Even Southern California Edison, described by one manager as “entrenched in tradition,” is making the switch to alternative officing. The Rosemead-based utility is removing many of the interior walls in its 1.2-million-square-foot headquarters in favor of an “open landscape.”
For Edison, cost control is prime motivation for alternative officing, according to Glen Donley, the company’s manager of shared facilities. Encouraging sales staff and other employees to work at home while tightening the use of space companywide is part of Edison’s strategy to control costs, particularly at a time of stepped-up competition in the energy industry following deregulation, he said.
By encouraging home offices and “virtual officing”--the practice of connecting with the office by telephone and computer modem only--Edison hopes to reduce the number of people who need permanent desks. Meanwhile, the open-space plan and the practice of “hoteling,” or requiring reservations to use a desk in the main office, will free Edison from much of the financial burden of reconfiguring and rebuilding offices to suit personnel changes, according to Donley.
Although he would not disclose figures, Donley said that Edison reduced the cost of relocating employees into new offices by 80%.
Productivity is improved in the alternative office, according to Peter Miscovich, an architect who is director of workplace transformation at Andersen. “To have a healthy building, one wants to have exposure to light and fresh air,” said Miscovich, who cited studies that people tend to perform better at work when exposed to sunlight and when they are able to open windows.
Fresh air, on the other hand, may prevent the “sick building syndrome,” a vague but widely reported malady that may be caused by such varying factors as airborne chemicals from new carpeting or deteriorating air-conditioning systems.
Beyond real estate issues, alternative officing also reflects a change in management style, in which managers work directly on projects with subordinates, blurring the traditional lines of authority.
“We are seeing an increasing breakdown of the hierarchy,” said Miscovich.
Throughout history, the workplace has been a diagram of labor relations. In the early 19th century, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham invented the “panopticon,” a factory in which the supervisor sat in the center and workers toiled in wings that radiated out from the center so that all employees were constantly in sight of the boss. (Significantly, the same layout was used for prisons.) In other factories, supervisors sat on a raised chair or oversaw employees through a second-story window.
More recently, in the age of high-rise buildings, managers would set themselves apart by situating their offices on the perimeter window walls. Subordinates worked in windowless rooms and cubicles near the elevators. This arrangement remains standard in most law firms.
In the future, office buildings will change shape again, this time to accommodate alternative officing, said Miscovich. “We are developing a global-facilities prototype, in which we try to balance the size of the floor [plan] with the need for natural light and efficient building economics,” he said.
According to Miscovich, the floors of office buildings will grow in size to 40,000 square feet per floor from the current standard of about 25,000 square feet. Architects will favor structural systems that leave office space free of columns, to maximize flexibility in placing furniture or using movable walls.
As with any cultural change, the transition to alternative officing is not always smooth. Some people resent losing their offices or working at home. And some managers fear they will lose control of their underlings if they cannot see them daily.
“Some supervisors say, ‘If I can’t see them, they aren’t working,’ ” recounted Edison’s Donley, adding that at Edison, “the management to a large degree has gotten over” anxieties about supervising people who work elsewhere and that employees’ performance has not suffered.
Employees, for their part, often resist giving up their offices and desks for a new spot in the alternative-office scheme. On a human level, “you get a lot of push-back when they are about to move into this arrangement,” said Donley. “They miss their hard walls a lot.”
After employees move in, however, “we get a lot of compliments about how quiet the open landscape is,” he said.
