As some organizations move to cut back on office space and with fewer in-workplace employee hours, there’s lots of discussion about moving from assigned to unassigned seating plans.
From a psychological perspective, this is not a good idea. When people have an onsite workspace/territory that they own (particularly if they can personalize it to some extent, even minimally), research shows that their wellbeing and performance get a boost, they are more committed to their employing organization and are more satisfied with their jobs. Research also shows that workers themselves perceive that they are less productive in unassigned seating, which can encourage them to work elsewhere.
Psychologists do not rule the universe, however, and no matter how great they feel about people having assigned seats, more and more seats are and will be unassigned.
Assigning a seat to an employee for their individual use, whenever they are in the office, ratchets up rent costs and we live in uncertain economic times. There are also sustainability-related considerations related to more office space being in use versus less.
Some of the negative consequences of eliminating personal territories, those assigned seats, can be at least partially overcome by creating team territories. A team territory can be an ordinary conference room that is always reserved for team use, one that’s not available to others, where teammates can leave materials on tabletops and walls (no clean desk policy here) or expect to find others from their team. A team territory can also be a number of other things besides an ordinary conference room, some closely tailored to the assigned group’s actual task-related needs. A team territory should allow members, whether they’re together or using the room alone, to have audio and visual privacy from non-teammates in any case. It should also permit them to change the room a bit, to meet their needs, by putting stuff up on monitors and leaving those monitors on or rearranging furniture, for example.
Unassigned is not good from a psychological perspective, but, realistically, can be inevitable. Dedicated spaces for teams are a good idea when individually owned seats for teammates are not.
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.