Private offices are usually thought of as traditional work spaces that force some difficult trade offs: workers get more privacy but less interaction with others, plenty of quiet concentration but no collaboration, and great image and status but limited function and flexibility. Since private offices usually house a company’s highest paid workers, how effectively those workers are supported in private offices is an important business issue.
Steelcase research shows that new strategies for planning private offices, leveraging technology, and supporting the diverse ways people work today, can make the private office more effective, not only for the people who work in these offices but for the organization overall.
Private offices have changed little over the last century. Four walls, a double ped desk and credenza, a desk chair and a guest chair or two. Yet while the private office has been fixed in place, most everything else about business has changed. The tools people need, the kind of work they perform, and the ways people work are dramatically different from fifty — or even ten — years ago. People have long sought peace and quiet at work, usually envisioned as a private office. Steelcase’s Workplace Survey1reveals that 92% of workers today say it’s important that they have control over the level of privacy in their primary workspace, yet two thirds of those people say they don’t have that privacy.
About one-third of all office workers have a private office, but many of those pricey spaces haven’t kept up with the times. They’re like an expensive dress watch that looks stylish and is fun to show off, but really just shows the time.
Now, wristwatches have evolved into web surfing PDAs. It’s time to apply some innovative thinking to the private office, and there are substantial business benefits for doing so.