Around the cubicle? Post-pandemic offices seek silence

Employees at Levenfeld Pearlstein, a Chicago law firm, are gearing up for a January move – from the middle of the city’s business district to the waterfront – by getting rid of the clutter on their desks and taking it home. your personal belongings.

Not only will the new workspace be smaller (from around 5,000 m² to 3,500 m²), but there will also be fewer individual offices.

It’s a move Kevin Corrigan, the director of operations, predicts could be disruptive. “Some people are going to think, ‘I worked hard for my office, I’ve worked my way up through the ranks, and now they’re going to downsize the space. Maybe I don’t even have one.’ It will be a change for people.”

It’s not just a matter of ego. The company wants to encourage employees to return to the office part-time as, like many employers, it is moving to hybrid work, a mix of home and office work. Typically, time at home is dedicated to focused work, while the workplace is the destination for collaboration, face-to-face meetings, and socializing.

Advertising firm McCann, for example, has opened new offices in the City of London and sees them as a hub for “creativity, collaboration and connection” with hack rooms, pitch rooms and creative zones, according to Lucy d’Eyncourt-Harvey, its managing director. of operations. However, she says, there are also quieter areas in the new workspace.

This is because, inevitably, workdays are not always easy to break down into focused, collaborative time, and therefore the office will also need private and quiet spaces.

For some, the office is a refuge from the distractions at home — employees with young children or living with an elderly relative, or those sharing apartments and cramped quarters. Kristin Cerutti, lead designer at Nelson Worldwide, says, “You can’t generalize. A lot of people need the office to work focused.”

Corrigan says Levenfeld Pearlstein will still provide individual offices, but the vast majority will not be assigned to one person, so that staff — secretaries and lawyers — can focus between meetings, training sessions and orientation.

After two years of lockdown and remote working, many white-collar workers are finding it harder to focus in open offices.

Jeremy Myerson, professor emeritus at the Royal College of Art and co-author of “Unworking: The reinvention of the modern office” [Destrabalhando: a reinvenção do escritório moderno]says, “When you spend two years alone, you become very sensitive to noise. What we hear from HR departments is that people are hypersensitive to their environments.”

Furthermore, the proliferation of Zoom calls means that people are more likely to be having a fun meeting at their desks, rather than being holed up in a room out of earshot.

Corrigan of Levenfeld Pearlstein says much attention was paid to the acoustics in the new office. However, some people will have to be asked to close their doors and use headphones instead of making teleconference calls over the loudspeaker. “We can build the infrastructure, but we need to encourage people to use it.”

Acoustics are one of the biggest challenges, says Mark Kowal, chairman of the British Council for Offices. “Pink noise” is an increasingly popular option for masking background noise — in fact, he uses it at his own workplace, an architectural firm. He describes it as “an artificial mix of frequencies, which masks what you can hear [e] adapts to the number of people in the space”.

It’s not just about delicate sensitivities after the pandemic. Even before lockdowns, workers faced tight spaces in open offices. According to the British Council for Offices, in 2001 there was around one desk per 15 m² in UK offices, and in 2018 it was one per 9.6 m².

In response to Zoom demands and pandemic sensitivity, some designers and employers are creating quiet areas away from the hustle and bustle of open-plan floors.

At coworking group WeWork, global head of design Ebbie Wisecarver says they will provide two types of tranquil spaces. Pop-in areas will be available for transitional members who come in a few days or hours. For corporate members, there will be private spaces with internal offices, meeting rooms, lounges and kitchens.

“Coworking may not traditionally be equated with privacy, but as more organizations rapidly rethink their real estate footprints – particularly in sectors such as law, healthcare, financial services or data, which typically require more formal and private settings – we are seeing a need growing,” says Wisecarver.

This isn’t quite the cubicle renaissance, created in the 1960s by Robert Propst at the design firm Herman Miller. Conceived as a flexible and individual workspace that offers employees privacy, abandoning the rows of heavy desks, it soon became a symbol of alienated white-collar professionals, writes Nikil Saval in his book “Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace” [Encubados: a história secreta do local de trabalho]🇧🇷

Writer Douglas Coupland described the cubicles in “Generation X” (1991) as a “calf fattening pen: small, cramped workstations built with collapsible fabric-lined wall dividers and inhabited by young workers. -slaughter used by the livestock industry”.

Propst himself was disillusioned with how the cubicle was interpreted: “Not all organizations are smart and progressive,” he is reported to have said in 2000. “Many are run by rude people. They make tiny cubicles and cram people into them. Places barren, rat holes.”

This means a proliferation of phone rooms, crowded spaces or private offices that are either shared or unassigned. Technology group Microsoft recently created a new prototype for the Flowspace Pod, a fabric-encased cocoon designed for focused work.

At Cisco, another technology group, which describes offices in the post-pandemic era as “talent collaboration hubs,” designers envision employees using different areas appropriate to their work throughout the day, including huddles (rooms for three people) or quiet rooms (for one or two people).

Bob Cicero, Cisco’s Smart Building Lead, says, “When we rebuild space [durante a pandemia]we were very sensitive to acoustics.” That meant creating floor-to-ceiling walls and sealed door frames that prevent sound from escaping. “We measured ambient noise everywhere.” That included filtering out “the crying baby, dog barking, leaf blower at home: we’re filtering that noise out to the remote participant so we can have a productive meeting.”

Janet Pogue McLaurin, global director of workplace research practices at Gensler, a global design firm, sees more demand for libraries in the workplace, “creating technology-free, quieter zones like the silent train car. In this zone, conversation or technology may be prohibited. A library has softer lighting. It allows people to shift from a group meeting to deep focus.”

However, like many things in the workplace, these rooms need approval from the top. Anne-Laure Fayard, professor of social innovation at the New School of Business and Economics, talks about a company that had invested heavily in a library but couldn’t figure out why employees weren’t using it. “We started talking to people and asking. They were saying, ‘We’re an innovation company, we have to be in the room, in the energy. It doesn’t feel good to be there. [na biblioteca] too often’.” It turned out that the board never used the room either.

Fayard believes they lack imagination when it comes to design. At a recent meeting, she was depressed to learn of plans to install phone booths to provide privacy. “Imagine the office of the future is couches and phone booths. Wow, that’s not what we were creatively envisioning.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves