Execs Embrace Wide-Open Spaces
The highest ranking BP executive west of the Mississippi works in a space without walls or a door. There’s no mahogany. No imposing desk. And no privacy.
Although it’s on the 20th floor of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper, the space occupied by BP Regional President Bob Malone is not your father’s executive suite.
The demise of the traditional corner office in “old-economy” firms such as BP, the world’s third-largest energy company, is one example of how the Internet revolution’s mark on corporate culture is outlasting many of the dot-coms that it spawned.
“This is a fundamental shift,” said Gary Kusin, chief executive of HQ Global Workplaces, a Dallas-based developer of temporary offices. “It can’t help but work its way into old-economy companies through the younger people who don’t have the burning need to have four walls and a door.”
Over the last four years, twentysomething cyber-CEOs have rejected corner offices as symbols of slow-moving paper factories, where drones toil in cubicles, junior managers hole up in small offices and executives seldom emerge from 250-square-foot suites.
Today, with the obvious exception of compensation, such symbols of corporate castes are increasingly declasse. In office parks and high-rises far beyond the corridors of the “new economy,” executives are plunking themselves down in open work spaces, cheek to jowl with the rank and file. Others have traded luxurious suites for smaller, simpler, glass-walled fishbowls in office cores.
“The trend is to open the window walls to all levels of workers,” said Eileen McMorrow, editor of New York-based Facilities Design and Management magazine. “All the management is seen by the employees, and all the employees are seen by management.”
The way employees usually see Malone is pacing the floor and gesturing as he talks on a portable telephone. As employees walk by, Malone nods and smiles. Without a word, some are invited over. The easiest way to get a meeting with Malone is to catch his eye. His assistant makes few appointments for him, and there is no gate for her to keep.
“I’ve never been in an open floor plan before,” Malone said. “I grew up in a culture where as you progressed, the office got bigger, the oak got darker, and you moved closer to the corner.”
Malone was introduced to that culture 27 years ago when he began as a junior metallurgical engineer for the Kennecott Copper Mining Corp. in Ely, Nev. He had a beat-up roll-top desk in a trailer office near the smelter and, like most employees, he rarely saw the man who ran the mine.
Malone didn’t meet the general manager until he was promoted to full engineer. Summoned to the head office, the 23-year-old engineer rushed over, only to wait--first in a receptionist’s office and then in a secretary’s office.
When he was let into the inner sanctum, it was so big it seemed to take forever to walk to the huge desk that the general manager sat behind. Malone said all he felt was fear.
“I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said. “I couldn’t understand how you could run a company and not see people.”
In setting up BP’s Los Angeles offices, Malone gave himself a corner (northwest) and views of Hollywood and the mountains. But he shares his desk, the views--and just about every other office amenity--with 80 employees.
“Managers are starting to understand that if they want employees to work a certain way, they’ve got to walk the walk,” said Amy Tabor, executive director of Workplace 2010, a futuristic model office set up in Denver by a consortium of architects and designers. “It’s more about getting the job done than me sitting in a private office.”
Special Offices Needed For Private Business
Not everybody believes putting executives in the open is a good thing. “They are the worst candidates for open space,” said Mike Brill, president of the Buffalo Organization of Social and Technological Innovation, a New York consulting firm that has studied the work habits of 13,000 people.
“They have the most verbal interaction of any kind of employee, and a fair portion of it is sensitive interaction, either on the phone, or calling someone in to give them hell, or planning a downsizing,” Brill said. “The notion that you can get acoustic privacy in an open office is quite fallacious.”
Some open offices pump in white noise to muffle conversations, and some have installed unassigned offices--variously called “touchdown rooms,” “focus rooms” and “cry rooms”--for undistracted work, private meetings, telephone calls and emotional outbursts.
Many companies with executives in the open keep lawyers and human resources staffers in traditional offices in recognition of the sensitive nature of their work.
And some offices achieve a modicum of privacy for executives with space. “We have seen situations in which they’ve put senior executives out in the open, but the work spaces are so enormous, it’s almost like being on a beach with blankets spaced every 100 yards,” Brill said. “It’s really a way to make up for the problems of being out in the open.”
Executive office preferences vary by region, said HQ’s Kusin. “Southern California is very open. There are a lot of clients who like the open layout. But in Midtown [Manhattan], they still like four walls and a door.”
Law firms, financial institutions and insurance companies were the last to adopt corporate casual and appear to be the least inclined to dump corner offices. But Indianapolis Life Insurance CEO Larry Prible boldly ventured into an open workstation last year.
So did interior designer Jeff Wirt. Since October, Wirt has run his firm from an 8-foot-by-8-foot, L-shaped workstation amid 20 similarly sized and shaped workstations in a historical building in Pasadena. When he stands, everyone can see him. Seated, a four-foot-high partition gives him some visual privacy. Portable telephones allow Wirt, and everyone else in the office, to easily move into a conference room if they need quiet or need to keep something quiet.
Wirt said he got his first request to design an open executive work space about four years ago. Today, about half his clients ask for open plans.
“In the future, it’s going to be much more egalitarian,” Wirt said. “We’re doing work now for a couple of large public organizations, and they are pushing very hard to make it more open and more equal in the settings for people. I really think it’s going in that direction.”
While the movement may seem more democratic, it began as an effort to boost bottom lines, said Bob Gaudreau, executive vice president and head of U.S. operations for Regus Business Centres Corp.
“We saw it first during the early IPO times, about three years ago in Silicon Valley. Everyone was in on share options so they weren’t interested in spending a lot of money on private offices. They would just stack people next to each other,” he said.
“What they learned was, besides saving money, there was a lot of value being created. There was a lot of learning going on,” Gaudreau said. “You can hear people--the ways they handle different issues. It also helps with communications because by default you know what other people are doing. You don’t have to have a meeting.”
Open Plans Often Follow Corporate Upheavals
Some executives were ahead of the curve. In 1991, as white-collar headhunters were laying people off and going out of business, general manager Tom Thrower oversaw the shuttering of several Bay Area offices of Management Recruiters International. Then he moved out of his private office and “took a seat right in the center of the recruiters who were left.
“You can always hide in your office,” he said. “But if you are out there working, there is the idea that, ‘Hey, the boss is doing it, so I can pick up the phone and do it too.’ ”
HQ’s Kusin said open plans often follow corporate upheavals, mergers and acquisitions. Changing the layout is a relatively easy way for new executives to change the culture of an organization, he said. “There are very few levers that an executive can pull when he moves into a new situation.”
When BP acquired Atlantic Richfield Co. a year ago, the British oil giant brought Malone to Los Angeles. At the time the company was eliminating jobs, and the city was losing another corporate headquarters.
Opening up his office was part of a redesign Malone hoped would give employees a sense of belonging. “We said, if we’re going to have the opportunity to introduce BP to the community and to employees, we have a chance to do things differently,” Malone said. “We wanted to encourage progressive thinking and also working together as a team.”
Malone’s area measures 360 square feet, enough to make it difficult to overhear a conversation without really trying. There is a “no eavesdropping rule,” and Malone, like other open office workers, sends visual cues to indicate whether he is open to a conversation or hunkered down in work.
“Part of the new culture is a look that you give each other,” he said. “It’s a whole way of communicating nonverbally.”
So what’s become of the corner space? Some companies have turned them into glass-walled conference rooms, kitchens and office gathering spots. The Workplace 2010 project set up one as a “playground” with an ergonomic swing, Nerf guns, Legos and a conceptual sandbox--a pond of pebbles.
