The Behavioral Economics Behind New, Less Distracting, More Comfortable Offices

The trend away from personal offices - or even desks - continues. But in an economy driven by competition for talent, companies have heard the complaints about the noise and discomfort of open office plans.

New designs may provide less personal space, but they reflect the demands for quiet, flexibility, team collaboration and personal comfort of their necessarily expensive human capital, whose enhanced or decreased productivity can be measured and optimized. JL


Chip Cutter and Rachel Feintzig report in the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. job market has been on a hot streak and keeping workers happy at the office is one of the most important facets of retaining talent, recruiters and management experts say. More companies are taking employee complaints seriously, often spending millions on gleaming offices that incorporate their ideas. Office workers want more natural light and views.(But) amenities don’t distract from the fact that many workers’ dedicated personal spaces continue to shrink inside open offices.
When American Airlines Group Inc. AAL -0.73% polled its corporate staff on what they wanted in new office space, workers responded with a priority familiar to anyone who has flown recently: more legroom.
Design firm Herman Miller Inc. MLHR -1.59% created special desks that allow for more room to spread out at American’s new Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters, which employees fully moved into last month.
There are no private offices, but more than 1,000 meeting spaces, said Jonathan Pierce, American’s director of culture and change. A lap pool and cricket pitch are planned, and outdoor meeting areas are wired so PowerPoint presentations can be beamed on large weatherproof monitors. Piped-in white noise helps tamp down auditory distractions inside the open office.
“It’s like wearing a pair of Bose headphones,” he said.
The U.S. job market has been on a hot streak and keeping workers happy at the office is one of the most important facets of retaining talent, recruiters and management experts say. More companies are taking employee complaints seriously, often spending millions on gleaming offices that incorporate their ideas, and no detail seems too small in some employers’ quest to please.
When McDonald’s Corp. opened its new Chicago headquarters last year, it rolled out a workplace app with a temperature feature so employees could designate by mobile phone whether they were too hot or too cold. The feature shows workers their floor plan and location in it, along with three prompts: “warm my space,” “cool my space” or “I’m comfy.”
Based on someone’s selection, the app will trigger what are initially slight temperature modifications in the heating and air-conditioning system. People adopted the app en masse, said Sheri Malec, senior director of workplace solutions at McDonald’s. “When people are uncomfortable, they’re not as productive,” she said.
Before Expedia Group Inc. opened the first phases of its $900 million Seattle campus on the banks of Elliott Bay last month, the travel company built a small office in the city to test lighting design, furniture choices and an open office plan. The research informed the new headquarters, which embraces an increasingly popular design approach known as biophilia, which aims to bring workers in closer contact to the outdoors, said Mark Nagle, the company’s vice president of global real estate.
Large sliding-glass doors open to the outside when the weather cooperates, turning an indoor corridor in the new building into a breezy seating area. Public hike-and-bike trails line the perimeter of the 40-acre campus, where the company will have as many as 20 Wi-Fi access points hidden in fiberglass rocks so employees can work on a large lawn or near one of the company’s fire pits.
Expedia’s research indicated that office workers overwhelmingly wanted more natural light and views. The company incorporated a grass-roofed conference space called the prow that resembles a ship and includes a wall of windows directly overlooking the water.
“These are simple human needs that we haven’t been great at in the workplace,” Mr. Nagle said.
Nature is in, but assigned seating is out. Archana Singh, Expedia’s chief people officer, said employees had dedicated desks at the old office. In the new space, workers are assigned what are known as neighborhoods and generally take a seat wherever one is available. They can store their belongings in nearby lockers.Open offices are a popular choice for many companies because they pack in more people per square foot. Ms. Singh said Expedia communicated about the new communal arrangement for months before the move to prepare employees; if someone insists on having the same desk each day, that person can talk to a manager or colleagues and will get it, Ms. Singh said.
Beyond the steel and amenities, real-estate development can be fraught. Fancier amenities don’t distract from the fact that many workers’ dedicated personal spaces continue to shrink inside open offices. Issues as diverse as tax breaks and increased traffic for local residents spark controversy. Amazon. com Inc.’s new buildings in Seattle, which opened last year, renewed debate about what a corporation’s social responsibility should be with regard to gentrification, housing prices and homelessness in its community.
Design decisions also are often loaded with subtext and nods to power. For example, how many square feet companies devote to a certain division can signal where they think the market is going.
In Bentonville, Ark., Walmart Inc. started work this summer on a new 350-acre campus designed to house as many as 17,000 employees, some of whom are watching to see which parts of the retail company appear to get priority. The company said its intention is to cultivate a work lifestyle that is far different than its current home office, a former warehouse with few windows and scarce parking at peak work hours. Other employees are scattered around town in separate buildings.
When completed, Walmart’s campus will feature more than 10 buildings, with walking paths around 15 acres of lakes, as well as an on-site child-care center, a gym and a hotel.
Most companies aren’t backtracking from the open-office concept, which allows them to densely seat employees and save on real-estate costs. But employers are finding other ways to try to satisfy demands for privacy and concentration, said David Galullo, chief executive of Rapt Studio, a design firm. “We’re designing more library spaces where there’s more ritual around quiet time,” he said.Rapt recently created an office where the conference-room door has built-in slots for everybody to deposit their cellphones before stepping inside, so attendees can focus better. Other clients are asking that some conference rooms be screen-free to combat “that feeling multitasking might be somehow eating us from the inside out,” Mr. Galullo said.