Virtual reality

The scandalised response to the role of the bonuses culture in the recession has followed a familiar trajectory. The initial outrage was focused on the size of the bonuses, the rewards for failure. Now a more circumspect attitude is taking hold as people look more at the role of the bonuses in twisting the decisions of individuals, making them focus primarily on their own interests, even when it conflicts with the objectives of their own employers and the wider world. The problem in many people’s eyes is rather less about the scale of the bonuses than the culture that generates them, less about the voracity of the City, more about the effect the structure of their bonus packages has on the rest of us.

That culture is of risky decisions, taken by individuals on the basis of short term gains, both for individuals and the organisations for which they worked. Yet short-term thinking was not only evident in the decisions of the financiers who helped us into the recent downturn but also the response of some other businesses to the recession.

Tough decisions have been taken by many companies, not least those that involve letting staff go. Yet business media has been full of appeal from commentators and business leaders not to lose sight of the longer term picture. Investment in training and research and development has been the focus of many of these appeals but it is equally apposite for investments in facilities.

The economics are clear. After staff, buildings are easily the second highest item of expenditure for the majority of organisations.

One of the more obvious ways thus to save money is to reduce the size of the organisation’s property requirement. In one regard, this is possible by reducing the size of workstations.

This has already been going on for some time, driven not by the recession but by new technology. In the latest edition of its Guide to Specification, the British Council of Offices (BCO) reported that the average density of the office workplace had increased by around 40 percent since 1997. The survey prompted the BCO to up its density standard to 8-13 sqm per person from the previous 12-17 sqm. The new average benchmark for the office environment has been set at 10 sqm.

Even the government has been keeping up. The subject has been debated in Parliament and the Office of Government Commerce has produced a report with DEGW on the subject and another report from IPD Occupiers has advocated new recommendations for workspace efficiency standards in government buildings, Efficiency Standards for Office Space.

According to the IPD report: “Current indicators show that public sector offices have not seen the scale of floorspace efficiencies observed in the private sector. On average government offices are occupied about 25 percent less efficiently with a sixth of them occupied at more than 24 sqm per person. This position needs to change. Departments should aim to provide a maximum of 12sqm 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 sqm. At present many schemes with design densities of 10 sqm per person or less meet business needs and are popular with staff.”

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 percent of organisations – and 87 percent of companies with a turnover over £1bn – are cost cutting at head office, 34 percent have no plans for the future shape of their organisation.

The research, in association with Egremont, also found that by 2014, 23 percent of respondents hope for more decentralised approach to head office power and 14 percent hope for a ‘virtual’ head office, staffed by flexible workers, homeworkers or global workers. This means the days of the archetypal boss giving orders from his head office, could be numbered.

And although 91 percent of respondents see ideas for improvement in their organisation coming from the top today, just 18 percent 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 workstations have diminished in size, desk sharing is not as prevalent as we once thought.

Similarly, the predicted army of homeworkers 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.

The major factor that has diverted workplace culture away from the predictions of the 1990s futurologists has been 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, homeworking 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 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. 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 including designers and architects, and it will become increasingly difficult to create the contemporary office without a holistic approach to design and management.

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.

For more information: Ann Clarke is design director of Claremont Group Interiors. Visit: claremontgi.com