offices workplace


a sixth of them occupied at more than 24 square metres per person. This position needs to change. Departments should aim to provide a maximum of 12 square metres per person in all their buildings and across their estates. Conversely, where there are opportunities to occupy new or substantially refurbished offices, departments should consider space per person below 12 square metres. At present many schemes with design densities of 10 square metres per person or less meet business needs and are popular with staff.’


Do we need offices?


All this talk of raising densities in conjunction with the economic downturn appears to have resurrected an old debate, namely whether we need offices at all. A recent report in Human Resources magazine typifies the debate as it made the following report: “More than two thirds of employers are carrying out cost cutting programmes in their head office, but more than a third of these have not given any thought to the future shape of their organisation.” HR magazine exclusively polled senior


HR professionals on their ideas of what a head office of the future would look like, and found although 67% of organisations - and 87% of companies with a turnover over £1 billion - are cost cutting at head office, 34% have no plans for the future shape of their organisation. The research, in association with Egremont, also found that by 2014, 23% of respondents hope for more decentralised approach to head office power and 14% hope for a 'virtual' head office, staffed by flexible workers, home workers or global workers. This means the days of the archetypal boss giving orders from his head office, could be numbered. And although 91% of respondents see ideas for improvement in their organisation coming from the top today, just 18% think this will still be the case in five years time. We’ve been here before. I recall


reading in Premises and Facilities Management a few years ago, in the mid 1990s, a feature headlined ‘The Office is Dead, Long Live the Office’. It appeared in the first flurry of interest in what we then referred to as New Ways of Working and was typical of the debate at that time which consisted of extrapolating current trends towards the adoption of flexible working and desk sharing and concluding that the office as we knew it was a goner. What we now see with the benefit of hindsight is that while the world we knew was indeed about to disappear, what has replaced it is very different to many of the prognoses. While personal


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workstations have diminished in size, desk sharing is not as prevalent as we once thought. Similarly, the predicted army of home workers has failed to materialise, replaced by an army of always-on-the-go peripatetic tech- enabled knowledge workers, working from wherever they happen to find themselves.


Human nature


The major factor that has diverted workplace culture away from the predictions of the 1990s futurologists has been (what else?) human nature. People like their own space and firms know that it is no good addressing employees as their major asset, only to see them walk out of the door because they don’t want to sit in a different place in the office whenever they are in. Similarly, home working is not for everybody. We are social animals and while some people have no trouble motivating themselves and developing coping mechanisms for isolation, other people struggle. It is human nature (in conjunction with


the response it elicits from the organisation) that forms the prism through which we must view the results of surveys like that from Human Resources magazine. Indeed the principle question that such surveys beg is expressed in the published results of this particular piece of research. What will the organisation of the future look like if we were to create a ‘virtual head office’ and do away with the clear lines of communication that is inherent in the current structure of the workplace? How will we manage? What is most likely given our


experience so far in addressing these sorts of questions is that while the role


Offices will continue to get leaner, supporting more people from the same or less space. There will be even greater emphasis on space utilisation at the expense of space density. As a result space will be


designed and managed more intelligently, with better, faster and more intuitive technology. There will be even more focus on social spaces.


and the shape of the office may change, it is likely to be in ways we cannot yet envisage clearly. I would argue that the fundamental functions of the office will not change. It will never be fully ‘virtual’ because that would be to erode its important role as a touchstone of identity for the organisation. What I can foresee is the continuation


of current trends, which is always a good place to start. Offices will continue to get leaner, supporting more people from the same or less space. There will be even greater emphasis on space utilisation at the expense of space density. As a result space will be designed and managed more intelligently, with better, faster and more intuitive technology. There will be even more focus on social spaces, in particular to support the needs of mobile workers and visitors to the building. There will be an ever greater emphasis on identity, both for clients and employees as a way of binding everybody to the organisation. It will still be the glue of the business. All of this will inevitably demand a


response from a wide range of professions, designers, architects, engineers, HR, IT and in many ways at the heart of it all; facilities management. Certainly it will become increasingly difficult to create the contemporary office without the sort of holistic approach to design and management that can be offered by the FM profession. These are exciting times but the vital role of the office will not dim for some time yet. Certainly we should never ignore that role for the sake of short term cost savings.


About the author


Ann Clarke is Design Director of Claremont Group Interiors.


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