'Collaborative' To 'Productive'

Is an individual’s private workspace taking a back seat in modern, collaborative office? Carol Ferrao finds out how designers and suppliers are advocating for a balanced approach in open office layout?

Collaboration’ is the new mantra being fervently adopted in modern office design. Today’s open layout is literally breaking down boundaries, in a bid to provide open and creative environments. Economically it makes sense as it cuts down material costs, in the form of partitions, dividers, etc. But there is a cost still being paid, for in some cases designers might be omitting a key demographic in the process. Not all employees are extroverts – people who thrive well in an social environment and bring out their best work through collaboration.

“Business leaders, many of whom are introverts themselves, are starting to recognise that introverts are a huge and valuable portion of the workforce, and offices need to cater to all kind of work styles,” explains Praveen Rawal, MD, Steelcase India and Southeast Asia. For such employees, a personal space away from the office buzz is where they can focus and provide quality work. Balancing these two demographics will enable an office to be productive.

But does the open office layout – an established norm in office design these days - do justice to such diverse work preferences? Folks at Edifice Consultants believe that crude copies of a good idea have corrupted the essence of the open office plan. “Imagine this: a new way of working, implemented to near perfection by one; an attempt to replicate by another; and the deterioration of it by many more. Think of this as the open office plan, drafted by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Johnson’s Wax building in the 1930s, and blindly imitated for decades on. The end result was cookie-cutter like applications of the open plan, without thought of context, worker sensitivity, and the changing way of work,” opines Laxmi Menon and Marika Mascarenhas of Edifice Consultants.