By Dawn Borden
From the August 2024 Issue
Facilities managers truly see it all. One of my favorite memories of office staff ingenuity was several years ago when cubicles were popular. A big selling point was how quickly the installers could build these rows of workstations and how interchangeable the parts and pieces were. Seems so efficient, right?
Now put this scenario in a crazy high-tech company in the 1990s where employees were often looking to blow off a little steam and have some fun with one another. An employee came to me on a Monday morning to say that they could not get to their cubicle. I gave them a temporary access card for the day, assuming they meant they couldn’t access the building. But no — that wasn’t the problem. The cube physically had no opening! Over the weekend someone had dismantled the interchangeable parts of his cubicle to build a doorless cube at the occupant’s location. Yep, a big 8-foot-by-8-foot gray fabric and metal framed box. Office shenanigans at their best!
This story showcases how goals can be subjective. We all set goals that we think are best for the organization, or best for staff, or best for a budget. In this cubicle example, our facilities team had a goal of efficiency. But our staff perhaps wasn’t looking at it that way. So how does one determine which “best” is the first-line best?
A Shift In Energy
What is “best” for whom has been turned on its head since the post-COVID return to the office. Collaboration is a presumed goal for the business and for employees. But getting there in a way that makes everyone happy has proven challenging. The boom of cubical land in the ‘90s brought everyone out of the offices into cubicles, which provided more “privacy” than a bullpen. People were prairie dogging to check out what was happening four rows away or to ask a quick question of a neighbor. Quiet mentoring was happening when teams sat together, and junior employees could overhear conversations and learn how to manage a situation or understand what the team was up to.
While noise was a concern at first, the colored fabric cubicle walls provided at least some sense of sound baffling (when people were seated) and the benefit of visual privacy. As years passed, computers became smaller, paper became less utilized, and the cube walls got smaller until there were none at all. Now smaller and less private individual worker spaces are the norm. Employees are given a couple monitors, a small storage container for some personal belongings, and a surface to plug their laptop into. Oddly enough, with all the openness, the offices have become quieter. The way we communicate has shifted. Communications are done in written word—texts, messaging apps, and emails. Even phone conversations are largely a thing of the past. Music and podcasts in peoples’ ear buds keep the buzz inside their heads, completely changing the energy in the office.
What’s Your Draw?
The company vibe is very difficult to maintain when collaboration isn’t evident—when it’s just as quiet, or in some cases quieter, then working from home, without the burden of commuting time and costs. Offers of food can work. Not that people can’t make their own bagels at home, but the effort an organization makes to drawing people together can make a difference. People may work quietly at their desks, but can at least meet up for one-off interactions at the office pantry filled with snacks. In another bit of creative office fun, I have come upon an entire office set-up built out of the office snacks. Soda and snack cases were stacked in the forms of cube walls, office chair, desk, CPU, monitor, phone—the whole set up! But in this new era of office life, people may come in every day, just some days, or not at all.
If there is no rhythm to the occupancy of the office, how does the organization manage this sway of people and meet its collaboration goals? Some companies institute hybrid rules, like three days a week in the office or others particular teams on certain days. Some places group people by teams, others promote interaction by constantly mixing things up by not allowing people to book a desk in the same area of the office two times in a row. This approach can really help employees get to know each other—and if they are accustomed to working remotely anyway, having a set desk or work area next to the same people really shouldn’t matter all that much.
What it boils down to is today’s facility manager needs to keep the office environment nimble. We had a big surge for benching workstations where everyone was out in the open office with a quick redirection to COVID times where if everyone wasn’t home, they were surrounded by plexiglass in their own bubble in the office.
Companies need to work hard to make their real estate move with the changes. And whether employees rearrange the office space out of the parts and pieces the facility has provided or build a new set up for office snacks, if it’s bringing them together and fostering the culture your organization wants to promote, it’s a win for everyone.
Borden is a Senior Project Manager at Structure Tone in Boston and is a former facility manager in the high-tech space.
Do you have a comment? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below, or send an e-mail to the Editor at jen@groupc.com.
