Question

At Gerson Lehrman Group, you won’t find an employee working in a cubicle day after day. You also won’t find an employee working in a free-form open office area consistently either. The reason is that Gerson Lehrman is invested in “activity based working.” In this system, employees have access to cubicle spaces for privacy, conference rooms for group meetings, café seating for working with a laptop, and full open-office environments. Where you work on a particular day is entirely up to you.

It may be hard to remember, but office allocations were a uniform signal of hierarchical status and part of organizational culture until fairly recently. As organizations have become flatter and the need for creativity and flexibility has increased, the “open office” plan has become a mainstay of the business world. The goal is to encourage free-flowing conversation and discussion, enhance creativity, and minimize hierarchy—in other words, to foster a creative and collaborative culture and remove office space from its status position.

Research on open offices, however, shows there is a downside. Open offices decrease the sense of privacy, reduce the feeling of owning your own space, and create a distracting level of background stimulation. As psychology writer Maria Konnikova noted, “When we’re exposed to too many inputs at once—a computer screen, music, a colleague’s conversation, the ping of an instant message—our senses become overloaded, and it requires more work to achieve a given result.”

So is the activity-based hybrid described earlier a potential solution? With its constantly shifting workspace and lack of consistent locations, this may be an even less controlled environment than an open office. However, it does signal a culture that values the autonomy of individual workers to choose their own best environment at a particular time. The lack of consistency creates other problems, though. Workers cannot achieve even the modest level of personal control over any specific space that they had with the open design. Design expert Louis Lhoest notes that managers in an activity-based office “have to learn to cope with not having people within their line of sight.” This is a difficult transition for many managers to make, especially if they are used to a command-and-control culture.

Whether a traditional, open, or activity-based design is best overall is obviously hard to say. Perhaps the better question is, which type will be appropriate for each organization?

Sources: B. Lanks, “Don’t Get Too Cozy,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 30, 2014, http://www.businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/271; M. Konnikova, “The Open-Office Trap,” New Yorker, January 7, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-officetrap; N. Ashkanasy, O. B. Ayoko, and K. A. Jehn, “Understanding the Physical Environment of Work and Employee Behavior: An Affective Events Perspective,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 35 (2014): 1169–84.

Discussion Questions

How might different types of office design influence employee social interaction, collaboration, and creativity? Should these be encouraged even in organizations without an innovative culture?

Can the effects of a new office design be assessed objectively? How could you go about measuring whether new office designs are improving the organizational culture?

What types of jobs do you think might benefit most from the various forms of office design described above?

Answer 1

Brief summary of the case:

Company GL group is expert in network that implements activity-based work style in the organization. The company is characterized by open office culture. They have a cubicle space for privacy. The employees are provided with laptop in the workstation and café seating is available in the company.

They follow decent culture and the uniform signal of hierarchy. Company GL has become flatter and the requirement for flexibility and creativity has been fulfilled. It is the best example for the place that makes the people happy.

1. The following are the ways by which office-design influences employees’ social interaction, creativity, and collaboration:

A good office-design makes the organization more effective. Workplace environment is important to increase the productivity, creativity, and collaboration.

• The open office layout helps the employees to interact with one another for clearing their doubts.

• The work friendly design like modern laptops or personal computers, comfortable chairs, furniture, and air conditioner room will reduce the stress of the employees and increase the productivity.

• Designing an office with good culture will increase the collaboration among the employees.

• Designing the best organizational structure will lead to creativity and innovative thinking.

Social interaction, creativity, and collaboration are encouraged without the innovative culture even though it makes these things better than normal culture. It is required for all the organizations to develop new product and services and compete with competitor.

The technology update is quick and most of the products are outdated within a year. Hence, innovative and creative thinking is important to the organization. It is possible where the innovative culture is implemented.

2. Determine whether effects of new office design are evaluated objectively:

The company should measure the effect of implementing the new office design objectively. The effects can be measured by

• Observing the employees behavior

• Performance

• Mannerism

• Working style

• Creativity

• Time taken to complete the given task

These measures help to improve the organizational culture as well as the productivity and profitability.

3. The following are the type of jobs that might be benefited from various forms of office designs:

• The software programmers are required to discuss more to develop creative software

• The promotional team is required to create ideas through discussions

• The new product development team is required to generate more ideas from the employees based on their experiences

These kinds of business get benefits from the activity based office design and open office-working area.

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