Charn McAllister, in a May 30 article at The Conversation (“Scott Pruitt’s Desk Is More Impressive Than Yours,” available at the web address noted below), addresses the silent messages sent by spaces that we’ve been covering in this column for several years.
McAllister’s work is particularly pleasurable to read because he brings the discussion of nonverbal communication from academia to Washington, D.C. Desks selected by Scott Pruitt, the current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, are covered in the first few paragraphs of McAllister’s article.
The meat of McAllister’s piece is summarized when he reports that “How employees, managers and outsiders experience the physical spaces in a workplace or office is greatly influenced by the physical structure of the building and the use of symbolic artifacts. Buildings can send messages and affect behavior through their design…It should be noted that socially savvy managers consciously shape the image they present to their employees. Conversely, it is possible for less astute managers to be quite unaware of the signals they are sending to employees through the choices they make in their office.”
Fewer and fewer people have a workplace desk that is theirs on a continuing basis – at least officially. But not all desks in any office are equally desirable, and all the people sharing a set of desks know each seat’s relative desirability score. Power leads to de facto ownership of better spaces since our brains drive us to sit in the same seat every day.
Sometimes spaces evolve so that the most desirable places to claim aren’t desks at all, but upholstered armchairs tucked into remote corners or prominently placed next to the company president’s official seat, or the unofficial seat or desk or conference room where that president is always found.
Humans are a status driven species. Different groups may determine who has the highest status in different ways, but we all know who outranks us in the groups we’re members of. And we need to know how we fit in because it influences all sorts of behaviors, not just who we flatter to lock in a pay rise. How far we stand or sit from someone depends on our relative status levels, for example, and not knowing where to position ourselves is one of the many things that makes us tense.
When a new space is being designed, it’s important to understand how relative status is indicated in the current one – new plans must recognize and respond, in some way to existing status “rules.” Some of the ways that status is indicated may disappear as a design becomes a re-design. If private offices are being eliminated as one office incarnation leads into the next, employees will work to identify or create a clear and easily seen “non-office” status “symbol” – which might be access to an executive section of a floor or bathroom or something else. In one office redesign, coat racks were randomly distributed around a “status-free” floor plan, but within a short period of time all of the coat racks had mysteriously migrated to locations outside cubicles used by higher status individuals. Building in an opportunity to express relative status streamlines the process of the group getting comfortable in their new home and makes it likely that they’ll perform at a higher level faster.
It’s important to understand how status is currently being indicated when a new workplace is being developed. Employees will be very attentive to how whatever indicates status now is allocated in the new space. If being located near the CEO indicates status before a re-do, the floor plans for a new space will be closely monitored and hotly contested, for example.
Truly status-free workplaces are a great idea, but one that’s incompatible with the human psyche, at least for the next few thousand generations.
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.