How does an office setup affect your work?

Have you ever been to an office where there was virtually no room to work? With scarcely any space to move between furniture, where you bump into your co-workers when you push your chair back. In addition there might be piles of paper on the desk with nowhere to go other than a faraway filing cabinet, so the only practical option is to keep everything nearby. Does this sound familiar?

There are a number of classic ‘mistakes’ that office designers tend to make and that render life in that office more difficult than it absolutely has to be. Let’s take a look at common issues.

An office with one occupant: those offices tend to be pretty straightforward. Sadly, its often only the boss or middle management who get that kind of office, and it’s mainly for reasons of prestige (‘corner office mentality’), confidentiality (because the occupant tends to have conversations that cannot be overheard) and the need to seat more than two people for internal meetings on occasion.

An office like this tends to have a single (large) desk, some extra chairs, maybe even a meeting table, a lot of storage in the shape of lockable cupboards with doors or shelves, and – most important of all – a lot of space to move around and be organised in. However, in my experience, those offices are not devoid of clutter at all. It would seem that a lot of available storage space only creates more clutter like piles of paper, very similar to what happens in private households when a large loft is available to dump things in.

Office with multiple occupants: these tend to be cramped, especially if the people put in there together have different roles within the company. There is good reason to share an office with somebody you work with directly, to increase synergies and keep the running distances short – no point in having to run next door twenty times a day, right? If the two people in one room have two unrelated roles, this will likely lead to two sets of paperwork that needs a lot more storage.

Two person offices can have a couple of basic layouts: two desks facing each other, or two desks facing the wall with the people back to back. Sometimes they might sit side by side, especially in very narrow rooms. There seems to be a bit of logic to the choices: facing each other works for people with connected roles, back to back indicates they work on separate things, side by side feels more like a practical solution to place people in the space. All of these have advantages and disadvantages:

Facing each other is good for communication with the other person, but also distractions. Whenever you are on a phone call someone is clearly listening in AND watching you at the same time… slightly annoying. In terms of storage the setup can lead to problems with filing: either the storage cabinets are behind each person, leading to a lot of walking around the office, or the cabinets are to the side, with often makes for a situation where one of the two has to pass by the other one to get into and out of the room. Usually, those setups happen in small spaces, so that is not the best situation, and often leads to interruptions.

The back to back option is less disruptive in terms of being aware what the other person is doing at any given time, especially if they don’t collaborate directly. While filing and storage can be easily separated, the issue of disruptive phone calls remains. I’ve seen a lot of spaces like this were the room was really too narrow for two people to sit back to back and their chairs constantly bump into each other when moving back.

In any case, sharing an office makes it pretty much impossible to conduct meetings, and confidentiality is impossible to maintain, unless both occupants work in conjunction.

Multiple occupancy of a larger office space: this could be a large space with a combination of grouped desks (‘islands’) and/or along the walls, most likely with a number of people doing different jobs and fulfilling different roles within one company. Storage and filing cabinets are often used to create separation within the larger surface. In itself this might be a good idea, and probably works better than building walls and creating smaller spaces.

However, the issue of confidentiality remains, as does the question of distraction by other people working nearby, especially in offices with lots of phone communications. Private conversations are impossible in this kind of setup, as are proper meetings.

Cubicles: A large space with lots of cubicles is similar to the multiple occupancy of a larger office, with one crucial difference: storage and filing is a huge issue here. Usually, cubicles are set up to maximise the number of people in a given space and little thought is given to filing/storage, often to a point where it’s impossible to even hang up a coat, let alone leave any personal items like a change of shoes or your lunch anywhere nearby.

Shared workspaces: this more modern use of office space is often used by self-employed people to avoid the loneliness of home working, and to facilitate exchange with other entrepreneurs. All good reasons to rent one of those spaces. They do hold their own set of challenges, though, as they come in different forms. The many distinction is a crucial one: either you are assigned a space you always work in – and that could be a single office or a desk in any of the setups described above – or you are floating around the space, sitting wherever is free at the time.

A fixed spot in an enclosed office of your own will bring you to a level of single occupancy as you would have as a high level employee, a fixed spot in a shared space is similar to the multiple occupancy in a larger space. The ‘floating’ option has elements of the cubicle option above – lack of storage, impersonal space, no confidentiality. The added advantage is really the avoidance of solitude during the work hours (and the separation of work and private life, of course).

If anything, this short analysis tells us something about office layouts: some are made to fulfil multiple functions well, some are made to not quite fulfil either. All depends on the function of people sharing a space, the available spaces, the sense of prestige (does the boss really need that much meeting space?), and the need for storage and quick access to files, and others. It’s a bit of an art to make offices work, and – sadly – many don’t quite work for their purpose.