your favorite products and what you love about them. Is it the style? Maybe they are particularly practical or intuitive. Do they serve their purpose well? Do they provide great value?
They are probably easy to access and increasingly interoperable, or at least compatible, with other products you use. If they are innovative and entertaining, too, you may find it hard to live without them. And, depending on your shopping preferences, you may find they are made by companies committed to environmental sustainability, fair labor practices, and other public benefits.
Your favorite products likely engage you in a personal way by responding to your needs. They probably aren’t custom-built for you, but rather developed in a way that feels personalized or configurable for your needs. Such products don’t dictate when you use them, but instead draw you to them. They often offer the ultimate flexibility in how, when, and why you use them.
Think about your iPhone, your Peloton, your favorite pair of jeans, or even your favorite fancy latteccino made just the way you like it from your local coffee bar. When you feel like changing things up, you can consider additional options like a new mobile app, a different yoga or cardio workout, an of-the-moment accessory, or a passionfruit beverage from your friendly barista.
Now think about your workplace – that is, the one you frequented before the pandemic. Would you characterize it the same way you describe your personal items? Probably not. Yet, believe it or not, it’s actually possible for a workplace to be all of those things – personalized, responsive, beneficial for public good, experiential. In fact, workplaces are going to have to become more like consumer products to meet the needs of workers now. For employers, now is the time to adapt the “product” – the workplace – for a personalized, responsible, and experiential future (see Figure I.1).
We live in a world of seemingly endless options and instant gratification. To stand apart, consumer brands have had to find ways to create emotional connections with their customers, almost instantly. Why should the workplace be any different?
People have more options than ever in where, how, and when they work, including more opportunities to work with companies located around the world, or even to start their own business as a freelancer or gig worker. Organizations must find ways to spur affinity, create community, and engage workers far beyond their daily tasks.
Figure I.1 The Personalized Workplace The personalized workplace is responsive to employee needs and preferences, and will empower talent with a choice of workplaces and spaces.
Like a product, the workplace must be designed, measured, and marketed. It must meet the essential needs of its customers – your workforce – and embody your brand promise and values. It must be continually optimized and proven effective, from both a space and social perspective. And, finally, it must draw in talent and keep them engaged and productive.
This isn’t the workplace of the past, or even of one year ago. A new world of work is emerging. Are you confident you’re creating the workplace you need now?
1 The Origin and Evolution of Workplace
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana, Philosopher
Today, most C-suite leaders recognize that great workplaces and workplace strategies can help win the war for talent and provide competitive advantage. That recognition is a relatively recent development, however. With a few notable exceptions, organizations historically have viewed the workplace as a location to get work done and a necessary expense. Today, a more sophisticated view of workplace is emerging.
To understand where we’re headed, let’s understand how we got here. The first dedicated corporate office buildings began to pop up in London in the early eighteenth century, housing the likes of the Royal Navy and the East India Trading Company. With the British Empire expanding and creating trading routes across its empire and the world, the concept of a centralized and dedicated physical space in which to administer a growing enterprise – and all its paperwork – began to take shape.i
In the United States, the corporate office dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when railroads expanded economic and geographic prospects. The complexity of growing businesses demanded a new physical workplace model.
Since that time, the workplace has evolved only incrementally through economic and business cycles, social and military crises, and industrial and technological revolutions.ii In the early to mid-twentieth century, offices were designed with efficiency in mind. Little attention was paid to the quality of the environment for employees. Using the efficiency strategies of mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor, many offices simply squeezed employees together to toil under the watchful eyes of supervisors, in an effort to boost productivity. Meanwhile, offices were growing bigger as advances in architecture, engineering, and construction led to larger buildings. Skyscrapers began to dot skylines of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and other major cities around the world.
The 1960s saw a move away from the endless rows of workstations lined up to maximize space. Post-Taylorism, the concept of “office landscape,” or Bürolandschaft as coined by a German design team, promoted the idea of breaking up rows of desks into smaller, organic cluster of workspaces with small privacy partitions. The goal was to create a less hierarchical workplace that fostered collaboration and socialization, not just productivity.
As buildings grew taller, space design grew more creative, too, allocating space for work, secretarial teams, meetings, and eating. Bürolandschaft eventually evolved into the concept of the “action office,” the brainchild of Herman Miller’s Robert Propst. Propst was among the first industrial designers to recognize that the workplace environment affects the ability to perform mental work. He conceived of the action office as an environment where workers would have the space and privacy to perform their work, instead of being elbow-to-elbow with coworkers. Ironically, what eventually emerged was the modern-day cubicle,iii with fabric-covered walls and modular flexibility – which evolved into ubiquitous and uninspiring “cube farm.”
The widespread adoption of cubicles contributed to generic, albeit functional, office interiors at the same time the growing sophistication of consumer product branding began to influence corporate building exteriors. By the 1960s, companies like IBM were building unique headquarters designed to embody their brands. Completed in time for the 1972 Olympic Games, BMW’s famed world headquarters building in Munich, Germany, resembles the four cylinders of a car engine. However, the brand concept was typically expressed only in the exterior architecture of these facilities, rather than in the experience of the workplaces inside.
By the 1980s, large corporations had mostly shifted once again toward a focus on productivity, with profitability as the primary motive, per economist Milton Friedman’s mandate that the primary objective of business is to maximize returns to shareholders. In an era of junk bonds and leveraged buyouts, Wall Street investment banks became infamous for working their junior associates around the clock. Cubicles shrunk in size while their walls grew higher, isolating workers from everything but the task at hand.
With the focus on profitability and productivity, it’s no wonder that the cubicle rose to prominence. The C-suite viewed workplace as a cost and utility with limited choice, not a creative, inspired, or desired product with a compelling value proposition
