After working from home for a long time, the days have been comfortable from the beginning to become a bit boring, and even feel more tired than working at work. I’m starting to miss the noise of the office, the gossip among colleagues, and being able to rush to the desk to communicate directly instead of having to endure the intermittent signal for a phone call. It was also at this moment that the office, which used to feel like a cage, became a little more lovely.
In fact, the evolution of the office is a history of the search for communication efficiency and comfort. On the one hand, this space turns people into tools, hoping to squeeze out the last drop of benefits, on the other hand, it carefully balances the needs of human nature, hoping to create an open and relaxed environment. In the constant pulling, the office gradually grew into what we are familiar with today.
Stuff the assembly line into the office?
The office, a love-hate place today, really took off in the late 19th century. An American engineer named Taylor (Frederick Winslow Taylor) brought efficiency and management into the office. Since then, the office is no longer a small room next to the factory for processing administrative documents. It has its own responsibilities and becomes a space that can generate benefits alone.
The word “office” comes from the Latin word for “responsibility”, which implies “a series of responsibilities”.
Taylor believed that when work was divided into different parts, and the efficiency of each part was the highest, the overall efficiency rose. So he divides the interior space of the office according to the work flow, and arranges closely related departments in adjacent locations to reduce unnecessary space movement. At the same time, the layout of the offices is strictly classified according to grades, and supervision is emphasized. He also hired stopwatches to time every operation of each worker, setting a standard speed for each module. The worker’s compensation depends on the number of modules he completes. Familiar, yes, he invented KPIs.
Even office furniture was in the service of efficiency. There was a mail opener table in the Taylor era that could increase the amount of envelopes by 20%. This is the result of the designer’s research on the work behavior of office workers. Similarly, which jobs should use soft pencil leads and which should use hard pencil leads, and how far the water dispenser should be from the employees are included in the calculation. The research on these turtle feathers has led to the birth of a number of professional office tools.
In a serious, fixed, and constantly monitored atmosphere, people in the office at that time didn’t dare to say anything even if they sat together. Rather than “sit in the office”, they are more like assembly line workers in a different location.
By the 1960s, however, a boom in production and consumption stimulated job markets in the West, especially in the United States. At that time, the company urgently needed a large number of employees. In order to attract more people to engage in clerical work, the casual and comfortable working environment became the main selling point of office work, and it became the biggest source of identity for employees when facing workers with similar salaries. The development of communication and network technology has also narrowed the division of labor, and more jobs that require inspiration and creativity appear. Offices began to develop in a more flexible and open direction.
Improving communication became the mainstream improvement direction at that time. The Bell Labs office building, which started from the telephone industry, deliberately built a lot of corridors. “On the way back to the office, or on the way to the restaurant, physicists meet chemists, chemists meet mathematicians, and mathematicians meet developers,” reads an article describing the scene at the time. This chance encounter is considered one of the most important sources of inspiration for Bell Labs. Later, far-reaching inventions such as transistors, solar cells, and the C language were the first to make breakthroughs here.
More companies are putting effort into the interior of the office. Germany, which became rich through manufacturing, began to practice an open and equal design concept in the office in order to quickly get rid of the bad image it brought to the world during World War II. Abandoning the regularity and closure of the Taylor era, the office became a large room with no walls and only desks, boxes, cabinets, occasional screens and plants to divide the space. Designers are re-dividing where employees are located by workflow rather than position. This human-centred design, with an emphasis on flexibility and aesthetics, is known as the “office landscape” (Bürolandschaft).
Although such an open office design was later proved to partially hinder communication, for example, Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School, found that some employees would think that an open design would expose themselves to the entire office space, making it difficult to guarantee For privacy, I had to pretend to be busy to avoid communicating with people, but that’s something else. The point is, at that early stage, we had open-plan offices.
While Germany is pursuing open office space, a product with a similar concept has also appeared on the American market. Called the Mobile Desk, the product consists of a roll-up writing desk that encourages standing, a small telephone station with partitions, and a small round table for impromptu meetings. The designer hopes that this office furniture can help employees move, so that employees can stand up and work at any time, turn around and have a cup of coffee on the small table when they are tired, chat with colleagues, or move to the table to make a phone call.
But the design concept of this set of things was too advanced at the time, and it took a little while for the management to accept that the office changed from an orderly office to a “chaotic” appearance where anyone can walk and talk at will. So the second generation of mobile desks appeared, which consisted of three partitions placed at 120 degrees to ensure the privacy and space needs of employees; shelves with different heights beside the table forced employees to stand up and sit constantly; it There are also notice boards and a wall of push pins to help employees show their individuality.
The second mobile desk was immediately well received, and it was thought that it still maintained the need for movement and flexible communication, but was more structured. For a while, a large number of similar designs appeared on the market. One of them was quite special. It reduced the three walls that were originally open at an obtuse angle by 30 degrees and became surrounded by 90 degrees.
The most infamous cubicle in office history was born.
Smash the cubicle!
The cubicle, adjusted just 30 degrees from mobile desk work, immediately went from encouraging open office design to small boxes that insulate people.
But the cubicle is well-received by managers, adapting to almost every stage of the economy. It was born in 1968, when the United States developed rapidly after World War II and the society was prosperous. At that time, the number of white-collar workers surged, and the lattice room became the first choice of office furniture with high cost performance and more people in less space. After the U.S. economic downturn in the 1970s and 1980s, the cubicle has become a flexible tool that can be dismantled cleanly at once. Even today, we can still see the grid in many companies.
The cubicle brings the open and flexible office back to before liberation, but it is more cunning, designing colleagues to be the most familiar strangers. You must know that since the 1930s, companies have been wary of alliances and revolts among employees, but Taylorism overemphasized the instrumental nature of employees and went against their nature; the office landscape was too extravagant and full of noise at the time.
The cubicle provides a space where colleagues are close at hand but difficult to talk to. Especially when there is a computer in front of the employee, the world in the machine is much more open than the one next to it. The cubicle maximizes the “individual” in the office. People’s dissatisfaction is no longer a collective strike, but smashed computers and swept documents to the ground, and resistance has become an individual behavior in a small cubicle.
Fortunately, the office is still evolving. In 1993, when mobile phones and laptops had entered the office space, advertising mogul Jay Chiat (whose company famously did a 1984 ad for Apple) had an epiphany while skiing—technology makes The original office is outdated, it’s time to create the office of the future. He plans to do an office experiment in his company: say goodbye to walls, desks, cubicles, desktop computers and landlines, leaving only lockers for personal belongings in the office. No personal items are allowed in public spaces, and employees can sit anywhere with a mobile phone and laptop. The company hopes that this will break down barriers and class divisions in office communication, making the office a team event.
Employees called it a virtual office, but the experiment failed because people couldn’t find where to sit, and there were so many people fighting for lockers. People had to put personal items in the trunk of the car, and an employee brought a trolley to the office to move her stuff around.
Chat was not discouraged and continued to remodel the office. This time employees have their own desks, but the space is open enough, restaurants, pool tables, coffee bars, any space can work. The interior of the company is like a playground, with colorful designs and leisure places, where people turn around, switching between returning to their personal space and communicating at any time. Later, with the emergence of co-working spaces like WeWork, communication is no longer limited to one company, and different companies and industries gather in the same office space.
Although Chat’s experiment did not achieve the expected results, his idea was right. Technology has indeed driven changes in the way of working, but its best carrier is not an advertising company, but a technology company.
In the 1980s and 1990s, technology companies in Silicon Valley skyrocketed, not only driving the development of the entire business society, but also driving the reshaping of office culture and space. Silicon Valley’s star founders dropped out of college to play their part, but brought the liberal culture of college into the Silicon Valley office space.
The rapid development of technology has brought high frequency of personnel movement, and new companies in Silicon Valley are emerging with each passing day. These companies have requirements for offices that are flexible, rebellious, fast to expand and change, and open space and removable furniture become the most sensible choice. . In addition, rather than relying on ranks to maintain teams, Silicon Valley companies prefer to use options to bring employees together. Randomly placed tables replace the hierarchical layout. There are flying papers and wires everywhere, and rock music is playing in the space. , but very lively. These companies also encourage flexible work, internal job transfers and outings and drinking together. Employees are both colleagues and classmates in a dormitory. All conversations and ideas can be developed here.
An interesting tidbit is that because of the rapid development of Silicon Valley, the studios that designed their offices are all working together day and night.
Cherish the colleague who is always talking
Today, the office seems to have reached another point of change. Whether voluntarily or forced by the epidemic, working from home has become an office experience that many people are experiencing. We no longer struggle with whether the layout of the office is reasonable, whether colleagues are too noisy or too quiet, because face-to-face communication simply disappears.
Face-to-face communication is very important in the office. There is a concept of “structural hole” in social network research, which considers the homogeneity of information, thoughts and behaviors within a group. If there is an intermediary role between two different groups, information from different groups can be introduced, which facilitates innovation and information flow. The vernacular is that the colleague in your department who loves to gossip is very important.
Cherish the colleague who keeps talking
And working from home breaks all that. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed the work communication data of more than 60,000 Microsoft employees in the first 6 months of 2020 and found that after working remotely, the most intuitive impact was a significant drop in the proportion of cross-departmental communication. This means that the communication network in the enterprise becomes more static, divided into sub-networks that are not connected to each other.
For enterprises, the creation and transfer of knowledge is the basis of competitive advantage, and the flow of information in different departments is beneficial to enterprise development. For individuals, these weak connections also have significant effects on information sharing, mood regulation, and inspiration. Those gossips circulating among the groups have a lot to do with your physical and mental health.
A lot of communication is good for body and mind
In addition, the study found that after working from home, there was actually more communication between employees, most typically with almost triple the number of calls without prior appointments and a 50% increase in instant messages. However, these communications did not translate into work benefits, because the total working hours only increased by 10%, which means that most of the additional working time at home was spent communicating with colleagues, and even crowded out normal working hours.
Face-to-face communication in the office also fosters long-term trust among employees. A study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that when remote, communication is often initiated based on specific tasks, and the parties involved will mostly establish a rapid trust based on the urgency of the task. Less emotional component. After that, the continuation of trust will enter an unpredictable stage. When face-to-face, the communication of non-verbal information can also help the communicator to more accurately receive the true intention of the other party.
Face-to-face communication fosters long-term trust among employees
But looking at history, every social change will promote changes in the way of working, and we are no exception today. In fact, without the pain points of communication, working from home provides many unprecedented opportunities, individuals have greater freedom and flexibility, work and life are no longer limited to specific space and time, and we have greater imagination .
Rather than nostalgic about the old days, it is better to do something to try to find a balance in the change. Here are some tips on how to improve effective communication with colleagues when working from home, I hope they can help you:
· Still distinguish between work and life, take off pajamas at work, set working hours, and try to switch states even at home
· Shorten meeting time and reduce non-essential meetings
· Video conference > conference call > email communication, multi-dimensional information display is better than a single one
· Choose the appropriate communication method according to the task situation, such as announcing a notice or not needing a timely response, email is more direct than video conferencing
· Create some informal communication, such as cloud chat, cloud game, cloud small gathering, or chat for a while before the official meeting
· Pay more attention to activities, less activity at home, easy to accumulate stress and unhealthy, you can also choose to stand up for meetings
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