It is said that if you want to get the same results, keep doing things the same way. By inference, if you want new or better results, something has to change. There has to be a shift in one’s thinking, a change in approach, a revision of well-worn strategies.

Such is the case for high performance corporations doing business in the context of the emerging global economy – who recognize the value of the workplace as a strategic asset and also that the traditional workplace does not capture the potential of the knowledge workers who use ideas and information to create organizational value. A well-designed workplace creates a framework for creativity and collaboration; it allows an organization to realize its full potential for innovation.

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The science of the workplace has gained a lot of interest over the last few years, highlighting recurring patterns of human behaviour as well as how organisational behaviour relates to office design. In theory, knowledge from this growing body of research could be used to inform design. In practice, this is rarely the case. A survey of 420 architects and designers highlighted a large gap between research and practice: while 80 percent of respondents agreed that more evidence was needed on the impact of design, 68 percent admitted they never reviewed literature and 71 percent said they never engaged in any sort of post-occupancy evaluation. Only 5 percent undertake a formal POE and just 1 percent do so in a rigorous fashion. Not a single practitioner reported a report on the occupied scheme, despite its importance in understanding the impact of a design.

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Disengagement in the workplace, and the $415 billion dollars it costs the global economy each year, has become an outright epidemic. According to “360 Steelcase Global Report: Engagement and the Global Workplace,” 37% of employees worldwide are highly or somewhat disengaged at work, with the majority of the others surveyed falling somewhere on the low- to middle-end of the curve. In fact, of the more than 12,000 individuals surveyed, just 13% report being both highly engaged and highly satisfied with their organization and workplace.

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The office of the future offers many places to sit and work, but no place to call your own.

As it has for at least a decade, the struggle to define the office of the future will be played out in the context of the open floor plan, a partitionless space with desks in facing rows or clusters of four, six, or eight. It would be reductive to blame Dilbert for the death of the semi-enclosed cubicle, but the name of the comic strip, which came up frequently in interviews for this essay, serves as a convenient shorthand for everything workers, especially young ones, find soul-crushingly oppressive about traditional office design. Some variation of the open plan is the overwhelming choice for organizations with any pretense of hipness—which today is almost all of them, from Brooklyn start-ups to the General Services Administration, whose million-square-foot headquarters in Washington is being renovated (by Shalom Baranes, with Gensler doing interior design) to achieve what Janet Pogue, Gensler’s head of global workplace research, describes as “a more open and energetic workspace reflective of GSA’s sense of transparency and shared organizational culture.”

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Say good-bye to cubicles—and even your own desk—in the activity-based office of the future.

I am writing this letter in a setting that is soon to be obsolete—a small private office assigned just to me, sitting at an L-shaped desk, with a few photographs, mementos, and the odd quotation pinned to the wall. I also confess to having quite a few magazines, folders, and books strewn about, which seems normal and cozy to me.

Read the article on architecturalrecord.com >