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September 19, 2014  |  permalink

Harvard Business Review: 6 New Workspaces That Are Killing the Corporate Campus

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(A shorter version of this story originally appeared at Harvard Business Review on September 18, 2014.)

To hear Samuel Pepys tell it, the 17th Century diarist and Royal Navy clerk was the world’s first mobile worker. As the architect Frank Duffy notes in his book Work and the City, Pepys tirelessly traversed London giving and taking orders and trading gossip, whether at the docks, at court, or in one of city’s fashionable new coffee houses. His greatest annoyance? Having “lost my labour” when one lord or another failed to appear for a meeting.

Some things never change, but Pepys’ peripatetic routine underscores just how recent, and how artificial, the modern office is. The notion that a single organization would monopolize a space, often for a single function, is a distinctly 20th century one. The demands of the vertically integrated corporation required tight coordination in both space and time, what Duffy calls “synchrony” and “co-location.” The solution was the skyscraper, and later the suburban campus.

But as workflows and processes moved first into software and then into the cloud, the questions of how and where and with whom we should work are being asked anew. Just as Pepys’ treated London’s coffee houses as an extension of his office, new heterogenous workspaces are emerging that capitalize on these changes. Here’s a short taxonomy:

1. Real-Time Offices
The typical office is designed to last years, leaving teams to struggle against static layouts even as the pace of change and competition accelerates. Real-time offices attempt to flip the script, dynamically reconfiguring themselves to mirror how work actually gets done, rather than forcing workers to conform to its limitations. Facebook will try to do this with the Frank Gehry-designed extension of its Silicon Valley campus – nearly half a million square feet of open space until one roof in which its engineers can rearrange desks at will . But the best example may be the billion-dollar videogame-maker Valve Software, where employees decide to join (or switch) projects by unplugging their desks and wheeling them over to their new team . As a result, very important decision – from who to hire to which games will ship – begins as a choice of who to sit with.

2. Permeable Offices
Instead of retreating into their shells, some organizations welcome other firms and freelancers to work alongside employees in hopes of learning from them. Permeable offices act as a membrane, selectively allowing these strangers inside. Capital One , Rackspace , Steelcase, and Amway have all experimented with this model, but the most successful example may be AT&T’s Foundry network of innovation centers . In those offices, selected startups and entrepreneurs work in cross-company teams with AT&T partners such as Intel, Cisco, and Ericsson along with its own engineers. One of these startups, Intucell, improved AT&T’s call retention and throughput speeds by 10%  and was later bought by Cisco for $475 million . In general, Foundry teams have cut the development time of new products from 3 years to 9 months.

3. Office Networks
Behind the current backlash against the open office and its constant interruptions is the dawning recognition that not one workspace fits all. According to Gensler’s 2013 U.S. Workplace Survey , knowledge workers with choices of when and where to work are significantly more satisfied, effective, and innovative than their peers. Taking advantage of this trend, coworking chains such as Work in Progress and NextSpace have begun offering memberships across a range of location, with each possessing its own vibe, design, and clientele. The Santa Cruz-based headset-maker Plantronics uses NextSpace’s Bay Area branches as its satellite offices, with the company’s software division electing to work from San Jose to be closer to new hires and customers .

4. Office Neighborhoods
Realizing the benefits of urban amenities when it comes to wooing talent, some companies and developers are treating entire neighborhoods as an urban campus. This includes Zappos and the Downtown Project’s goal of building a creative class company town from scratch, but also Seattle’s South Lake Union – where Amazon is building its permeable new headquarters – and Forest City’s 5M Project in San Francisco. The latter couples a Yahoo office with a coworking space, maker space, and arts incubator in a single city block – a major selling point to tenants for the 2 million sq. ft. of office space it intends to build on the site.

5. Office-as-a-Service (OaaS)
The consulting and design firm Strategy Plus estimates workspace utilization peaks at 42% during the workday, meaning more than half of all (technically occupied) offices are currently sitting empty. They comprise a ripe opportunity for the so-called “sharing economy” to transform every underutilized conference room, hotel lobby, or even home into a bookable meeting space or quiet nook. AirBnB would appears to be a natural fit for this role, but the company seems content with overnight stays. Enter more aggressive startups such Liquidspace , which not only allows users to search for usable spaces on its network, but also specific individuals – who would you like to work with today?

6. The New Guilds
Company men not only looked to GE, GM, and IBM for a paycheck and benefits, but also for an identity, too. The same can’t be said of an estimated 53 million American freelance workers , many of whom have had those identities – and their benefits – stripped from them during the long recession. Enter a handful of coworking chains and startup incubators to fill the void for those affluent enough to pay for the advantages of corporate scale without the obligations of drawing a paycheck. WeWork offers its 3,500 members discounted health insurance, hosts an annual raucous summer camp , and touts itself as “the physical social network.” San Francisco’s RocketSpace combines coworking with a tech accelerator, matchmaking tenants with hungry venture capitalists who consider their residency a badge of prestige.

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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