a) 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?
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 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 freeflowing 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.” 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.
a) 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?
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