The Brattle Group – Image courtesy of CBT
The debate on the presence or absence of barriers between people in the office continues to drive how we as an industry discuss the impact of design on workplace behavior. Barriers, or the lack thereof, are perceived as having the potential to monumentally shape everything from employee communication and culture to wellness and efficiency.
At one end of the design spectrum is the traditional office layout characterized by assigned, enclosed offices, conference rooms grouped front and center near the entrance, standalone cafeterias and siloed print resource areas. Born from the hype around the successes of co-working, at the other end is the “free address” approach where employees build their workspaces anew each day via a first-come-first-serve policy. Both strategies, which aren’t without their merits, have faced significant user backlash; the traditional office has been perceived as maintaining corporate hierarchy and the “free address” model as adding an element of unnecessary uncertainty and stress to the workday.
While the pendulum continues to swing, how design stands to leverage what matters most in the workplace is much more complex than the partitioning of space. Factors like efficiency, wellness and connectivity can instead be improved upon by one simple driving force: access to resources, with one of the primary objectives of “good” design being convenience. That’s where the “50 feet” concept comes in.
The “50 feet” approach reimagines the organization and availability of shared office resources and space. It seeks to ensure that every human, material and wellness-related resource an employee needs is within 50 feet of their individual workspace. If you were to view the application of this concept from a bird’s eye view, the floorplan would resemble individual honeycombs within a hive; a series of self-sufficient clusters that when combined form a whole community.
How Proximity Fosters Employee Interaction
Despite the rise of online messaging platforms like Slack and Google Hangouts, about 80 percent of communication is still non-verbal. In the work environment, where human relationships are conventionally structured according to a hierarchy, face-to-face interaction is a critical component of cultivating efficiency, not to mention team loyalty and company culture.
Spatial organization should encourage employees to engage and trade ideas naturally and spontaneously. The amount of time it takes for someone to peek over a neighboring cubical wall, walk 15 feet to talk to a manager or spark conversation across a table is little to none. When someone is considering whether or not they want to share a thought or idea, time can be the deciding factor, even if the amount of time in question represents only a few seconds. A tactile exchange like this, however, has the potential to propel a project forward, inject creativity into a stagnant thought-process, advance peer mentorship or strengthen workplace bonds. Grouping team members no further than 50 feet from each other makes communication effortless, ultimately saving time and energy, while promoting a more creative and open environment.
Smaller design techniques can further promote off-the-cuff collaboration. Placing a couple of chairs or unassigned worktables in transition areas, such as hallways or underutilized nooks, allows momentary exchanges to grow and settle into something more.