Word Choices

Bill Wittland

A starting point for this column is my confession to an unsurprising bias… I treasure words. They have the power to articulate complex thoughts, to inspire new  and innovative ideas, to capture powerful emotions, to make the heart soar, and so much more. Sadly, words can also obscure, deceive, misdirect, and even create unspeakable hurt and harm. Those are likely the extremes. There is also a middle ground… words that are simply bland, poorly chosen, sloppily crafted, and such.

For as much as our industry treasures stunningly beautiful images of products and places, we also rely heavily on words, sometimes even hatching them or certainly elevating them to increased usage and even distinct power. We seem to have invented, for example, the term worksurface. Too often though, some words are chosen hastily, and despite the fact that they may not be the wisest choice, they rapidly become nearly entrenched industry jargon, subsequently a significant challenge to jettison. Some examples.

About the time the office cubicle became one of the most ridiculed places in the world to work (remember Dilbert cartoon strips?) and then at the same time compact benching rows began popping up throughout offices, there was a new focus on the spaces surrounding conventional worksettings. These configurations often included lounge seating, low side tables, and light-weight space division or even white boards. This diverse array of furniture pieces was hastily called “ancillary furniture” and the ill-advised name spread and stuck, alas. With a bit more careful thinking, it might have occurred to the industry that these settings were hardily true to that name… they were not ancillary to the workplace, but they were in fact increasingly crucial to high-performance worksettings. They were certainly “adjacent furniture” since they were so often located next to more typical workstations, but they were not secondary to the effectiveness of the evolving workplace. But “ancillary furniture” became a widely used name and often even an accepted product category. Companies said they specialized in ancillary furniture, and the term lingers even today.

Nearly concurrent to the emergence of these adjacent spaces, another unfortunate word choice took shape. It was born from the fact that these newly popular furniture configurations in the workplace were employing products that were often more frequently seen in residential settings. Lounge seating, sofa sized even, lower-profile tables, and other elements more conducive to comfort than traditional work furniture gave birth to the cringe-worthy term “resimercial”, meant to signal the convergence of residential furniture designed into what was always considered the commercial market segment. The term hung around briefly but unlike some other misguided word choices, it was sufficiently offensive that it faded fairly rapidly, to the relief of many.

The global pandemic created the immediate need for many office workers to stay at home and to work from home. When that period of greatest virus contagion was past, many individuals and organizations considered, and some implemented, work from home options for their people (even spawning an acronym, WFH) and some questioned the need for offices themselves. The debate about the blending of working from home and returning to the office (itself hatching another acronym, RTO) gave us the overused misnomer, “hybrid work”. Hybrid work is a misnomer for this phenomenon because of many variables. First, all work is hybrid, in that nearly all office work is a blend of a variety of tasks, often utilizing multiple types of spaces. Consider the senior sales force members of any large corporation; these road warriors worked all over the place… in hotels, in their customers’ offices, in airport and airport lounges, at home in the evenings; only sometimes in their company office. Work was always a blend of spaces for them, and they are just one example. Another reason hybrid work is a terrible misnomer is that it fails to mention the central issue in this ongoing discussion… place. And the role of place is, or should be, the crucial element in our understanding of how to support work and workers.

The phenomenon of adopting ill-chosen terminology in our industry is not confined to the past. Recently, a promotion appeared that appears to be advocating an approach to the workplace that is being called the “intentional office”. While that might seem a novel way to capture the importance of designing worksettings with deliberation, the core meaning of the phrase is likely another poor word choice. All offices are intentional, in fact. The problem may well be that the intention behind some is not well aligned with the needs of work for today and tomorrow. Regardless, intentionality alone does not seem to provide enough horsepower to envision offices people will want to travel to and to work in.

Finally, in this consideration of word choices and how they suit our industry, here is another possibility. Perhaps it’s time to stop using the word “office” altogether. Maybe that word itself carries an inordinate amount of baggage, too many negative experiences for too many people, too much history that might need to be left behind. Instead, perhaps we would start referring simply to the “workplace” as the fundamental moniker for the focus of our industry. It does, after all, combine the two words that best represent the central ingredients for what we all do, and it applies to spaces that include but also go beyond the traditional corporate building. It’s the place of work. Maybe we have outgrown the usefulness and relevance of the term “office” and need to move to a next word choice.

It does not escape my attention that I am suggesting abandoning a term that is in the very masthead of this publication that happens to favor me with the opportunity to publish some of my questionable thoughts each month. I’ve been this foolish before.