I’ve worked in offices, and I’ve worked in cubicles. (I’m actually writing this in a double-wide that I share with another writer. Thankfully, she’s busy transcribing a tape, so I have a moment’s peace.) And I’m here to tell you: Collaboration is great, but sometimes I’d kill for a door.
I will confess: Once, I almost did. I got into a loud bar fight with an architect on the topic of cubicles. Fittingly, this outburst took place just down the road from the University of Colorado, where in 1968, a fine-arts professor named Robert Propst came up with the “Action Office.” Propst’s vision was to give white-collar workers, then toiling amid rows of desks in huge open spaces, both more privacy and a way to individualize their space. By that measure, cubicles were an improvement. But in the hands of space-mad facilities planners, the idea was perverted to justify an officescape that resembled the Chicago stockyards. Dilbert was born. Scott Adams got rich.
The vogue for one-size-fits-all offices reached its apotheosis in the dotcom years, when Intel CEO Andy Grove famously foreswore his suite for an 8-foot-by-9-foot cubicle. Endearing as that egalitarian gesture was, nobody has yet been able to prove that shoehorning knowledge workers into . . . (Young colleague plunks himself down on my desk. Wants advice on an upcoming story. Go away!) Where was I? Oh, yes. Productivity. Lost. Right.
Like many problems in the work arena, this one turns on numbers. The savings that accrue from jamming employees into cubes rather than offices, particularly in high-rent markets, can be huge. The productivity gains that come from giving workers a space where they can do uninterrupted, heads-down work — those are harder to quantify.
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