Recently, several articles in the New York Times have indicated that the pressure under which professional employees are working is growing, dramatically. The first of the articles that appeared in the NYT profiled the work climate at Amazon, which is competitive and tension-packed, on the Amazon-ians’ least stressful workdays. The second article, on August 17, “Data-Crunching Is Coming to Help Your Boss Manage Your Time,” profiles a growing and Orwellian trend: employers and coworkers continually monitoring and judging an individual’s performance, mostly at work and sometimes away from it, as well.
Continual data gathering and assessment will push workplace stress levels to “smoke-coming-out-of-employee-ears” levels. Although these new monitors are promoted as ways to enhance performance and build engagement, it seems unlikely that they’ll produce these effects. We’ve all heard of those teachers criticized for teaching in ways that prepare their students to do well on the standardized tests on whose scores those teachers will be judged, at the expense of all else. With the introduction of continual data collection on professional employees, we’ll be introduced to “managing for the test” and “working for the test,” at the expense of all else.
This push for monitoring and assessment has repercussions for workplace design.
It is imperative now, even more than before, that designers learn about the work that professional employees are doing and create spaces that support that work, whatever it is. They must design to support what people need to do, even if the spaces to be developed can’t be re-worked until they’re the look that finds its way into industry magazines.
This drive to create actually useful workplaces means that discussions of trends and benchmarks will become even less important and less useful than they already are. Trends are current patterns in design, and are interesting to think about, but generally only peripherally relevant to the design of an effective new workplace as long as designers have the freedom to talk with client decision makers who’ve seen trendy spots profiled in magazine spreads and want to emulate those pictured environments in their offices in a fit of architectural determinism.
Designers need to let these executives know that having the same sort of workplace as a pictured organization doesn’t mean they’ll be able to mirror its successes. There’s a lot more involved in having the same sort of success as another firm than simply copying its physical environment; think culture and compensation, just for starters. Benchmarking is similarly interesting from a voyeuristic perspective but rarely truly useful in actual practice. Client specific design is key.
With the increase in on-site pressures, it’s important that workplaces become more calming places to be. Workplaces will need to include more solo person de-stressing pods, retreats, whatever you want to call them – as long as the culture at the client firm permits their use.
Building-in opportunities for professional employees being continually micro-examined to have some control over their workspace will be important as the momentum for continual assessment builds. In the space where they can actually work on their work, these employees need to be able to modify lights and temperatures and furnishings to help them re-establish the levels of self-efficacy they need to truly do their jobs well. This push to re-establish self-worth will also motivate more people to work outside the office, since in the larger world they’ll no doubt generally be treated with more respect than they are by employers who feel a continual need to assess what they’re up to. The shift of workplaces to interaction hubs will be expedited by increased measurement.
Designing for monitoring is designing to support professional work, defuse stress, and signal some trust in the employee. Don’t let the rise of the monitors crush your clients’ employees.
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.