Now another big company is going one step further and chucking out the concept of the individual desk entirely. Forbes reports that massive pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline is going deskless at its Philadelphia office, entirely eliminating anything resembling a private office or cubicle for the 1,300 employees based there. It already has one such deskless office in Bogota, Colombia. Forbes explains:

GlaxoSmithKline, the global pharmaceutical giant, thinks it has found the cure for the drab, inefficient office: fluid spaces where you do what the moment requires, alone or in groups, moving throughout the day. Each employee has a laptop with a built-in “soft phone,” a locker for personal possessions, and maybe one file drawer. That’s it. Even U.S. head Deirdre Connelly doesn’t have an office….

Why do it? “We found that only 35% of work activity took place in offices and cubes, yet we were dedicating 85% of our space to those,” says Edward Danyo, manager of workplace strategy. “It’s about creating environments so people can do their best work, and we’ve seen a 45% increase in the speed of decision making. But our biggest surprise is that within two weeks most folks say they wouldn’t go back to cellular space.” Bonus: The design saves money by saving space.

Check out the complete article for a visual explaining exactly how these innovative offices are laid out. GlaxoSmithKline is certainly not the only company trying a fairly radical re-thinking of the office. Zappos, for example, has even gone so far as to try to re-imagine the relationship between corporate campus and surrounding city, blurring the line between work and home life in their new downtown Las Vegas space.

Play office futurist – what do you foresee for the office space of the future? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user mark sebastian. 

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That’s what coworking is betting on, as the movement sells itself as providing ideal environments for serendipity, relationship building and nurturing the creative spark. But it’s not just spaces for entrepreneurs and independent pros that are adopting these ideals. “The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” Harvard-trained designer and ParallelCities.com founder Sidi Gomes told GigaOM in the run up to this year’s Global Coworking Unconference (GCUC).

Zappos for one is already embodying this change. The company’s new downtown Las Vegas base is “a great extension of coworking ideals,” another GCUC participant, architect Jerome Chang, told GigaOM. “Zappos is looking to build a whole mini-city community by having encouraged a lot more people to live, work and play all in the same area as their office. The surrounding community becomes the campus itself,” he explained.

But don’t take Chang’s word for it. Recently, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh laid out his own thinking about his company’s $350 million investment in Las Vegas at Venture for America‘s Summer Celebration, giving a presentation explaining just what the company is up to in the city. The plan includes $50 million for local small businesses, $50 million for technology startups, $50 million for education and $200 million in real estate. Business Insider has posted the entire 60-slide presentation.

Or for the short and sweet round-up of Hsieh’s thinking look to Las Vegas Weekly, whose reporter J. Patrick Coolican met with Hsieh recently and was converted from his previous skepticism about Zappos’ plans. “Is he building a Burning Man encampment Downtown?!” Coolican wondered, but after speaking to the Zappos boss, he understands there are pragmatic business reasons for the company’s hefty investment in Las Vegas as well as philosophical ones. Coolican writes:

Zappos considered building a new suburban mega-campus, like Apple or Google. These campuses have creature comforts to induce workers to never leave, and/but they can be very isolating.

Hsieh had a radically different idea: Downtown, because he believes, he knows, that workers in cities are more productive. He thinks Zappos will be more profitable Downtown.

Here he leans on the work of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, who notes that per-capita productivity increases by 4 percent as population density rises by 50 percent.

It’s not entirely clear why this is true, but Glaeser calls cities “machines for learning.” Humans have succeeded because of our ability to collaborate, and cities are the best geographical mechanism for doing so. Hsieh refers to “serendipity,” the chance encounters between technologist, thinker, social entrepreneur, artist and venture capitalist to create the new.

More human interaction means more serendipity and happiness, which therefore means higher productivity and profits.

Does this equation seem sensible to you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Moyan_Brenn_I’M BACK NOW. 

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That’s what PSFK pondered recently in a post by Scott Lachut who reports that the PFSK Consulting Team has “noticed that office furniture and equipment is being designed with modularity and flexibility in mind, allowing spaces to be customized in the moment to suit the immediate needs of employees.”

“These designs can shift to accommodate solo work spaces or be expanded into larger arrangements for team meetings, giving workers the option of changing the office environment to match their current work style,” he continues. Examples include Steelcase’s Campfire Screens, which are semi-transparent, corner-shaped dividers that can be used to delineate a temporary “room” in an open area, and Buzzispace’s modular solutions, which the company claims create an “acoustic cocoon” that cuts through chatter and offers privacy in noisy open spaces. There’s even an inflatable semi-circle room from Office in a Bucket that Lachut says, “inflates within eight minutes.”

Lachut suggests several ways these types of innovative furnishings might suit current office reality by, for example, by balancing the need for collaboration-encouraging openness with the need for “speech privacy.” But is anyone actually putting the modular office idea into practice in the real world? Boulder, Colorado-based project management tools company Rally Software is one early adopter. The company recently explained to Inc.com how their R&D division designed their own office. Steve Stolt, a product-line manager in the R&D organization, told Inc about his department’s move to new premises:

The folks in R&D knew exactly what they wanted: flexibility. The tough part about space planning, typically, is dealing with the constraints: walls, power and network hardlines. To solve the walls problem, we decided to have “t-walls” built. These are “T” shaped walls on wheels. They come in a variety of different heights, and some have transparent portions like windows, while others have white boards built in. We chose these because someone had seen something similar at the Stanford d.school. To handle the power and network challenges, we ran power grids on the ceiling. These grids allow us to drop a power line anywhere we need it. We also use these grids to run network hard lines. Our desks and chairs are all fairly portable as well.

On move-in day, our desks, chairs and computers were there, carefully piled in the corner. We also had our t-walls and power grids ready to go. Remember when you built forts as a kid? That’s pretty much what this was like. The R&D teams love the new space.

Interested in more ideas on how offices design is shifting to accommodate the future of work? Check out MIT Technology Review‘s gallery of innovative offices for a more mobile and collaborative workforce.

Could a modular approach work for your office?

Image courtesy of Buzzispace.

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If you have a huge pad then keeping your spaces for work and for chilling physically separate is a non-issue – just locate them in different parts of your home and simply close the door on your home office when you’re done for the day. But what if you’re an urban dweller or otherwise living in tight quarters for budgetary, environmental or lifestyle reasons? How can you keep your work life from invading spaces that should be used for chilling?

Design site Apartment Therapy tackled this issue recently, citing a clever strategy an Australian design firm used to solve this issue in a Melbourne apartment. Nexus Designs created what the blog dubs, “a top secret slide-open home office,” using a moveable door that’s artfully camouflaged to appear like just another wall when closed (pictured — check out Apartment Therapy for a full slide show of images). The result is a secret space both James Bond and design aficionados would be proud of. The flexible space solves the issue of being “forced to work in the place where you normally relax and kick back to watch zombie flicks,” as well as doubling as a guest bedroom.

Of course, professionally designed secret walls don’t come cheap, so Apartment Therapy notes that the general principals that make this solution successful can be applied to come up with cheaper alternatives. The blog boils it down to three essential considerations:

• Keep it subtle
• Create fine lines between spaces
• Never underestimate the power of lighting

The post suggests curtains might replace fancy sliding doors for those on more modest budgets and goes on to double underline the lighting issue, stressing that you should “be judicious with lighting. Make sure when the walls are down that both rooms can flow into each other, but when separated, they can function independently as well.”

How have you used design to keep work and relaxation separate?

Images courtesy of Earl Carter for Nexus Designs.

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As more and more workers take up the promise of technology and get out of the office to work where and when it suits them, employees’ needs for their company’s office change radically. Cubicles fall in importance as many opt to stay away from the office when they want to grind out work in isolation, and the remaining spaces increasingly need to be designed to foster collaboration. Enter coworking, whose very existence is predicated on the idea of providing spaces to break down isolation and get workers’ creative juices flowing. What lessons does the movement have for corporate types looking to create spaces that foster collaboration?

GCUC is featuring a panel entitled “How to Design, Build and Grow your Space for Collaboration” and to get a sense of what answers it might offer for those providing corporate spaces to increasingly nomadic teams, we spoke to two panelists — architect Jerome Chang, who is also founder of BLANKSPACES coworking in Los Angeles, and Harvard-trained designer Sidi Gomes, who is the founder of ParallelCities.com – for a sneak preview. Both said those interested in the future of office design should pay plenty of attention to coworking.

“The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” said Gomes. “One space that was able to host 100 permanent workers can now hold 300 mobile workers working different hours, half the time from home, or the coffee shop. Therefore, corporate offices should be learning everything they can from coworking spaces, especially how to still keep ‘community’ when the population suddenly triples in size.”

Chang agrees, calling Zappos’s new campus  for example, “a great extension of coworking ideals.” How so? Change explains that “Zappos is looking to build a whole mini-city community by having encouraged a lot more people to live, work and play all in the same area as their office. The surrounding community becomes the campus itself.” That’s an idea more companies may want to explore.

Not only are the ratio of workers to square footage and the relationship between campuses and their surrounding communities set to change, but so too is the balance of private to public spaces within offices, according to both Chang and Gomes. And coworking has something to teach companies here too, they feel.

Collaboration is all well and good, “but true creativity really comes from privacy and reflection,” according to Gomes. “Imagine Frankenstein being developed in a public lab. You need the privacy of a basement to do that.” But this creativity-protecting cocoon of privacy needs to be balanced with idea-sparking sociability. “If you were always locked up in a basement, you would never get the idea to create Frankenstein to begin with,” he continues. Coworking can provide a template for corporate offices looking to get this fine balance right.

“The cool thing about coworking spaces is that ‘privacy’ is achieved in an open floor plan setting, because you are surrounded by people you don’t know, and therefore are not expected to talk to, so you can put your head phones on and go heads down,” explains Gomes.

Could a bustling corporate campus housing three times as many folks as a standard office and with people coming and going at less regular hours offer the same advantages of meeting stimulating (relatively) new people combined with the privacy of proximity to near strangers that coworking does?

Image courtesy of Flickr user .dh.

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So how does the fact that “no one has ‘a room of one’s own’” these days affect the coworking movement, which is predicated on the notion that getting together in social spaces improves work? Are coworking spaces the enemy of the “more nuanced approach to creativity,” Cain advocates for, an approach that encourages “casual, cafe-style interactions” but allows people “to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone”? Or can spaces accommodate both needs? We asked a number of coworking space owners for their thoughts.

Don Ball, the co-founder of CoCo coworking in St. Paul, Minn., was unruffled by Cain’s piece, seeing it as directed more toward “ham-fisted” corporate collaboration efforts than the environment at coworking spaces like his. Like several members of the coworking movement who emailed in, Ball felt coworking was actually well positioned to allow the balance of solitude and sociability Cain is championing:

Some of the writer’s assertions actually jibe with our experience at CoCo. Our most popular membership option is what we call a part-time membership, in which members work in our space one day per week to get their social group time. And then stay at home (or who knows where else) to get their heads-down time. So, it’s a sanity insurance policy, if you will.

David Moffitt, the founder of Coworking Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., was equally unruffled, agreeing that coworking allows an ideal situation for workers to regulate their own need for human contact (or lack thereof):

From observing our members in the context of coworking, the thing that strikes me is that people here are able to self-regulate their level of intro/extrovert or community involvement.  Some members will pull others into discussion and spend half an hour on tangents ranging from database architecture to preferred coffee or beer brewing methods, while others are perfectly content to make their desks their own bubble or personal island.

But he does stress that it is incumbent on coworking spaces to help members get away by providing private spaces. Cain may feel that the current fad for open-plan offices and collaboration may be bad news for introverts, but Liz Elam of Link Coworking in Austin, Texas, feels that while quiet-craving personalities may be common, those that desire to work in complete isolation aren’t.

“Steve King and I discussed yesterday ‘Hermitpreneurs’ — people who like working from home because it allows them to avoid other people. We guesstimate this is less than 5 percent of the population,” she says. “Most people are not Hermitpreneurs.” Like Ball and Moffitt, Elam thinks coworking provides a good balance for the remaining 95 percent of the population. “Many of my Link Members are introverts but they work from a Coworking space because it allows them to be amongst people and they can interact when they want/need to,” she says.

Like Ball, Moffitt underlines the point that while corporate mania for collaboration obligates introverts to attend more meetings and listen to more office chatter than they would naturally want to, coworking allows complete control over your level of interaction.

At least as long as you have a good pair of headphones. “I think noise cancelling headsets are wonderful,” says Elam. “Why do you need walls to isolate? You can choose to isolate in the workplace.”

Do you think coworking is a symptom of our mania for collaboration or a solution to it?

Image courtesy of Flickr user clagnut

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And that, according to a recent post by former Harvard Business School professor and partner in FutureWork Forum Jim Ware on the WorkSnug blog, isn’t just bad interior decorating, but may also be bad psychology. He writes:

I, like most “knowledge workers” spend almost all my work time in a fairly traditional office environment – four walls, a desk, some filing cabinets, and shelves full of books. Sure, there might be a family photo or two on the wall, and maybe a picture drawn by a child, but the fact is that no matter what I am trying to accomplish on a given day, the place where I am is almost always the same (yes, I usually hold team meetings in a conference room, and sometimes I even have a meaningful “meeting” in a cafeteria or a coffee shop, but let’s face it, most of the time I use the same place to read, write, analyze, list, sort, file, talk on the phone, and even meet with colleagues – at least when I’m not on airplane or in some drab hotel room far from home).

What if I had lots of places to choose among, and could move from one to another as I moved from one task to another? My instinct tells me I’d be a lot more creative in some kinds of places (rooms filled with art work, or with outdoor photos or large windows – or literally outdoor places), more analytic in others (a library, or a bare-bones office?), and thoughtful and reflective in yet another place (a church? a mountain retreat? a sailboat? a café?).

The interesting post, which is well worth a read, detours into office design before concluding with a question for reflection for all of us knowledge workers with the technical capacity to roam far and wide but work habits that hold us back from taking full advantage of that freedom: “When there are so many different kinds of knowledge work, why do we so often try to do it all in one kind of place?” As 2011 draws to a close, it’s an interesting New Year’s thought to ponder and perhaps spur improvements in our work style in the coming year.

Are you stuck in a rut when it comes to where you do your work? Could shaking things up and getting out of your usual spaces improve your productivity?

Image courtesy of Flickr user mark sebastian.

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As we’ve covered before, when more workers spend more time away from company headquarters, the size of offices may shrink. But will campuses change in any other ways?

It’s a question that the MIT Technology Review tackled recently via a photo gallery of innovative offices built to serve a more mobile and collaborative workforce. The photos are worth checking out at the magazine’s site, but what general lessons can be gleaned from taking a look?

Giant conference rooms give way to smaller collaboration spaces. MIT cites Microsoft’s newly renovated offices in Redmond, Washington as an example of this trend. “Pods” helps small teams there come together for short bursts of creative collaboration. “In these temporary work spaces, teams of two to five employees can collaborate on projects for weeks at a time.” MIT writes.

Small but not cramped. With more workers out of the office, companies may need less space but that doesn’t mean they want things to feel cramped – or for team members to worry about finding space to work at the office when they need it. To solve these issues, “Steelcase, an office design company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is designed to use minimal space but create an open feeling through strategic placement of drawers and privacy panels.”

Privacy amidst collaboration. People may now be coming to the office more for collaboration than to buckle down on individual tasks, but even in the midst of group work, team members still occasionally need privacy to make a call or hammer out a conflict. A “pod-like installation with adjustable privacy screens allows for semi-private meetings in communal areas,” is the answer at Steelcase.

Bringing the outside in. Research shows simply seeing nature is good for your brain and your productivity. Some offices, like Rackspace, an IT hosting company, are taking advantage by bringing the outside in, with spaces that “mimic a garden, complete with decking, swings, and fake grass.”

Is your physical office space ready for the workstyle of the future?

Image courtesy of Flickr user :mrMark:.

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In a highly thought-provoking plea to rethink (again) our approach to design at work, New York Times architecture and design writer Allison Arieff uses that newspaper’s Opinionator blog as a forum to dig deeply into exactly how we should be re-conceptualizing work spaces. In her post, Arieff draws a parallel between those who suggest cosmetic solutions to environmental problems and those whose approach to redesigning our offices only goes skin deep:

In the same way that bamboo floors, hybrid SUVs and eco-couture haven’t done much to curb carbon emissions, designing (and buying) more stuff for offices, no matter how sleek or sustainable it is, likely won’t help reset the culture of work.

Rather than add oriental rugs and comfier chairs to our offices, Arieff suggests we consider redesigning not just the spaces where we work but the whole concept of work itself. There are more fundamental problems to solve than the aesthetic, she contends:

I’m willing to bet that almost any office worker would happily swap Webcam lighting that won’t make you look, when you’re on Skype, like you’ve “been out partying all night” (as Steelcase’s head of design explained in Fast Company), for solutions to more pressing work issues like, I don’t know, burnout or fear of losing health coverage.

So what sort of wholesale redesign of our fundamental conceptions of work does she have in mind? Arieff runs through a slew of design professionals who are wrestling with this knotty problem and coming up with everything from “a co-op babysitting arrangement among working parents in the respective workplace to cover for one another throughout the day” to community-building events at co-working spaces.

The post is lengthy, full of questions guaranteed to get you thinking (Examples: What careers are viable and how should we train people for them? Might companies and their employees be able to re-envision what loyalty looks like in an era where the average time spent in a job is hovering in the range of one to four years?) and is well worth a read in full.

Is redesigning our office spaces just moving around deck chairs on the Titanic?

Image courtesy of Flickr use Ste3ve

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