Feel like the walls are closing in around you?

Have you ever gotten the feeling at the office that the walls were literally closing in around you?

That you barely have room to spin around in your chair without bashing into something - a file cabinet, a cubicle wall, or an office door?

That at the end of the day when you climb in to your hip, new, and uber-green Smart Car you think to yourself, 'Man, it feels good to stretch out a bit'.

Well, you are not alone in having that shrinking feeling.  According to a recent report from the International Facility Management Association, the office and cubicle walls are truly closing in on most American workers, with the average office worker seeing their allotment of space shrinking from 90 square feet in 1994, to 75 square feet in 2010.

By way of comparison, the average size of a prison cell in a supermax facility is about 100 square feet. But admittedly, you'd make some pretty serious tradeoffs swapping your tiny cube with bad flourescent lighting and no windows for the extra leg room in the supermax. Not to mention some potentially dodgy neighbors.

So why are offices and cubicles shrinking?

The International Facility Management Association offers some expected explanations; desire for organizations to control and reduce real estate costs, the rise of virtual and telework schemes making larger office spaces less important, and the technological progress that has made computers and monitors smaller, and reduced the amount of paper that is generated and stored in offices and cubes.

Those explanations certainly make sense, costs for real estate are a concern, at least some people have flexible schemes that render permanently assigned large office spaces at least a partial waste of space, and laptops and flat screen monitors take up a smaller footprint that even a few years ago.  

But by shrinking the size of offices, and more importantly cubicles, are organizations sacrificing their employee's comfort and well-being to in order to shave a precious few feet of floor space?  At some point one would think this trend would have to cease, as there does eventually become a minimum amount of space needed to hold even a small desk, chair, and workstation.

But I think the better question is, if organizations are finding it either necessary or prudent to continue to compress and shrink the space assigned to office workers, and technology continues to render the tradtional concepts and approaches of office design antiquated, then when will we see organizations start to eliminate the office altogether?

For back office functions like HR, accounting, communications, legal, etc. is there truly a compelling case for the people in these functions to congregate daily, in a central building, sitting in personal spaces of ever-decreasing size and comfort, while generating excess costs, using energy, and with workers in their cars contributing to traffic and pollution reliably each morning and afternoon. How many days to so many information workers make the commute only to hunker in their tiny cubes all day, headphones on, coats hanging from a hook on the wall not more than a foot away from the computer?

Costs, technology, changes in the attitudes and working preferences, particularly amongst the younger generations really should be changing more of how we work, and how our organizations design and coordinate this work.

Closing in the walls around workers seems to be about the weakest response possible to these trends.

Postscript - The Smart fortwo pure coupe model is 8.8 feet long, and 5.1 feet wide, for a footprint of about 45 square feet.  So at lease most of us can still park one in our cubes.

Comments

[Jennifer Brogee]

I'm with you there, Steve. I've managed a group of telecommuting programmers and job satisfaction was higher, and I felt they worked harder. Not only does it save the company money, but most employees can use the home office tax deduction, which saves them money too.

[Steve]

Thanks Jennifer - I think you make some great points, why not embrace more flexible arrangement as opposed to cramming folks into tiny cubes.

[Trish McFarlane]

All good points Steve, but I think you missed one. Cubicle size is shrinking in some office environments as they move to larger areas for community and collaborative work. I've personally seen a rise in spaces that offer more conference-type rooms. larger kitchen or lounge areas for congregating, etc. These spaces are usually fully wi-fi-enabled and have smart boards and other technologies. I think the need to have an individual cube becomes less important as organizations try to provide space that encourages teamwork. Just another side to the coin.... Thanks for sharing the ideas!