Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Changing Era

The number of people in the workforce who remember when people as low in the corporate hierarchy as middle managers, and sometimes lower, had their own offices with walls to the ceiling and a door is dwindling.

The furnishings and locations of those workspaces, now fading from memory, varied in quality, of course, and that was inevitable given human nature.

Humans are concerned about the relative rank of those they encounter. This interest in status seems to have been useful when we were a young species, struggling for survival. People who had earned status, somehow, had done something that was useful to the group, whether that was excelling at hunting or gathering or killing an enemy.

Since we evolve slowly as a species, humans still spend a lot of time trying to assess relative rank, and as one status marker disappears, another appears. Sometimes the ways we designate status, such as the color of office accessories or the placement of coat racks, seem a little silly. When accessories of various colors have been randomly distributed, one color inevitably takes on the meaning as “for the higher ranking mucky mucks”, and without a lot of fanfare, accessories are redistributed accordingly. Similarly, sitting close to or far from a coat rack becomes an indication of status and the racks are repositioned, without ballyhoo.

Many today condemn providing separate workplaces for certain employees, etc., as elitist, but those criticisms aren’t based in our fundamental ways of being, which haven’t changed since offices with doors and walls have bitten the dust.

Condemning providing some people with a primary workstation where they can do their job well also ignores the fact that for many, a workspace with acoustic and visual shielding supports higher performance today, as it has in the past. Our brains evolve in geologic time, not from generation to generation, so our brains today are no different in real terms from those of people living centuries ago.

In this era, the most effective way to eliminate audio and visual distractions is a door and walls, just as it has been for eons. Tasks requiring focus are done best in areas without distractions, but the performance of more straightforward tasks is often best completed amid less seclusion. With work that doesn’t require focus, too much isolation leads to what is colloquially known as zoning out and degraded performance.

Having people hop from place to place based on what they’re doing is more desirable and better for the health of their firm than asking people to concentrate in spaces where they simply can’t. But to work at their best, people should do an entire project that requires them to focus in a single location. People are also more comfortable and do better work in a territory they feel they own, where they have some control over their experiences. This was as true in the Renaissance as it is today.

An important repercussion of eliminating offices with walls and a door is that when programming research questions ask people to reflect on spaces where they’ve worked well, an assigned space with true acoustic and visual shielding doesn’t come to mind. This distorts conclusions drawn from data collected.

Providing people who need to do work requiring focus with a primary workspace with acoustic and visual shielding may have become politically impossible. Our species, however, will continue to recognize high achievers, and our brains will continue to do focused work best when people can actually concentrate.

The workplace design option that responds to these conflicting concerns is providing people who need to do work requiring focus with access to a collection of truly shielded locations where they can do just that. Even though this arrangement does not optimize cognitive performance, it does improve it, compared to outcomes achieved in open spaces. Workers who are becoming “old timers” recall a way of working that supported focused, siloed work that is quickly becoming extinct.

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.