The office has gone through some interesting evolution over the last century - from a classroom style where the "manager" sits in the front, and rows of employees with typewriters in front of them hitting the right levers on these noisy machines - to the Beanbag, Pool and Foosball table filled open plan "ideation spaces" in the current decade. How does this tie into the "Digital Transformation"? And did we become more innovative or creative?
The Ideation and Creativity Myths
We need these modern workplaces - these open plan workplaces with bright coloured panels on the wall and bean bags - so we can be creative. Nonsense! Creativity is not sparked by leisure - some people are highly creative, and some people are not. Some people are attracted to visual stimuli, others require a more serene setting. If you draw a Venn diagram between these traits, you'll find that the overlap between one or the other is not much different than the statistical averages. It may not be that such environments foster creativity - it is likely that creative people feel right at home in such environment!
The best results from brainstorming actually happen in isolation. People thinking deeply about a problem, or just combining at random thoughts that can culminate into a solution, isolation often offers better and more creative solution directions as a start of the collaborative work. This collaborative work is then combining the individually thought out solutions into a brainstorming session - usually facilitated (Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats is a great way to moderate such discussion). No beanbags, candy-bars, or special brew beers involved!
The collaboration myth
Open plan offices - the ones without fixed assigned desks, are supposed to infuse collaboration. We get to sit with new people every day, or organise our seating position based on the projects we are working on. Unfortunately, none of this actually holds true in reality. We tend to sit in fixed places (we are creatures of habit), and instead of talking with our neighbours in the office, we tend to put on our noise-cancelling headsets - and work in isolation. These headsets are used for conference calling as well - which tends to get done a lot in these type of workplaces. So the definition of collaboration seems to have shifted sitting next to each other having different conference calls speaking into our noise-cancelling headsets. I think we could do that at home. The isolated "call booths" or small "focus-rooms" seem to get squatted by the same people for days, weeks on end. The "modern office" of this layout, simply doesn't work.
Co-working spaces?
Co-working spaces have been around for a while now, and seemed to have gotten very popular during the early recovery of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. There sure is a case to be made for co-working spaces: short term leases and flexible sizing. Especially for the startup community, this seems to solve a significant problem by allowing the business to spend based on the income and need - cash-flow is everything. And if startups get to collaborate and do business at the same time, than that is fantastic!
But is it for everybody? Should we all hop onto this cool and swanky co-working space with barista? Maybe, but not an automatic "yes" - many of us just need a desk, a laptop and an internet connection. We can meet customers anywhere, and our office is in the cloud - So it comes down to preference.
What do we really need?
For some work, you need an office. For every job, you need a place to work together from time to time. But in the information economy, we need infrastructure the most. A solid network connection, our files and applications securely in the cloud, accessible from anywhere, from the device we happen to have available at the time. A meeting room with a whiteboard to work through our ideas and make them into concrete plans and actions, something where you can truly collaborate with your co-workers, instead of just sharing a room with each their own headset. A cafe (either in office or nearby) to really connect with people over a cup of coffee (or tea), so we can get to know, like, and trust those we work with. These are the essential ingredients. Nowhere is written that we all have to be at the same place, at the same time, every weekday. But it is without doubt that when collaborating with others, you need the facilities of an office meeting room - and when working with others, you do need to know, like, and trust them to be productive as a team - therefore, meeting rooms and a place to connect are essential. As for an office - it seems that it works best to partition the open plan office in specific group partitions. You can still have a "hot-desk" policy - but it seems that people are more inclined to connect with people they share a smaller space with, than with the ones they share an enormous open plan area with.
To bring it all together
To make the modern office space work you need:
- to allow people to be creative where-ever they are - independent of others
- to allow people to interact with each other in a meaningful way, either over a cup of coffee, or in a smaller partitioned workspace
- to offer meeting rooms where ideas can be white-boarded and further developed in practical solutions
- to invest in training in facilitation and moderation on the ideation and brainstorming processes (recommendation: look into Edward de Bono's Six Hat Thinking)
- to offer infrastructure and flexibility where the team members can work independently and collaboratively, regardless of their location, their chosen productivity time, or the device the happen to have access to at that point