Description
What makes the new work environment different? Seductive slogans like “Work where you want to, when you want to!” and “Your office is where you are!” draw the abstract concept ‘new work environment’ into the individual’s experiential purview. However, each slogan describes a different phenomenon – “Work where you want to, when you want to!” focuses on the increasingly important organisation of work, while “Your office is where you are!” refers to the work tools and accessories, which in combination with the technology enable spatial independence. Both slogans play on the age-old human fascination with the dream of freedom and independence.
It has only been in the last few years that spatial independence has become technically possible through the mobilisation of the computer and the telephone and through data networks like the Internet and intranets in conjunction with the miniaturisation of the corresponding devices. As counterweight to this spatial independence, dependence on the organisation of work has increased. The technical possibilities are only a precondition for the “workability” of the new workplace. They are accompanied by tighter control of planning and the organisation of activities within organisations.
The changes in social structures and social services that have taken place in the western world are also significant. People put their own well-being first, and tend to go for short-term, purpose-oriented relationships rather than long-term commitments in the context of society’s institutions and their social circles. Unity of time and place is in the grip of a radical transformation. Social structures are dissolving and being replaced by structures of change, like information and communication structures.[1]
Accessories and access privileges
In the public sphere, this new work environment finds expression in the media and in advertising, being selectively labelled as “pointing the way to the future” and “avant-garde.” Successful people work all the time, everywhere. Equipped with the requisite mobile work tools and the access privileges to offices and networks, they are in a position to work when and where they want. In addition to mobile work tools’ real suitability for everyday use, through their design and the material of which they are made, are associated properties such as flexibility, durability, affluence and mobility, which – according to the advertisements – are supposed to be passed on to the user. Ultra-flat laptops, for example, are enclosed in titanium and carbon fibre envelopes, materials that through their use as jewellery or in the aerospace industry virtually postulate the equation of “useless beauty” with “uncompromising functionality.” Mobile work tools became fashion accessories.
Access privileges to the new sites where mobile work is done – in vehicles, in business lounges in airports, at conventions and in hotels – are just as important as the accessories. In addition to site access, one also has the possibility of accessing the virtual space, the network. Privileges are expressed in terms of bandwidth of the communication medium and access to information.[2] In addition to the offices, these are the places where mobile office workers permanently on the road can meet and synchronise their status with each other.
The individual
The daily routine presents a contrast to this exemplary image of the office worker who is successful because he or she is flexible. For businesses, the new work environment offers the clear economic advantages that they need in order to remain competitive in the global markets, while for the individual, it means great changes. Flat hierarchies in corporate organisations require not only decision processes and communication processes and therefore flexible adaptation to market situations, but they also enable the avoidance of high surplus costs when demand decreases, by rendering individual employees rapidly interchangeable. Non-territorial office concepts have been introduced, as workplaces that go unoccupied are uneconomical. Concomitantly, highly specialised knowledge work no longer has to be carried out entirely at central sites with high rents, but instead, can be done from “satellites” in suburban areas or from home. This leads both organisationally and spatially to the office nomad, who follows the work at his or her own risk, but also to new corporate strategies for retaining the mobile knowledge worker. Accountability, old-age pension provisions and risks are transferred to the individual; the company exerts its power without accepting any of the responsibility.[3] The individual office worker is now more directly dependent on the company and the market situation than he or she was ten years ago.
The new work environment’s demands on the individual change the patterns of social behaviour. Portfolio relationships and trade-offs characterise modern partnerships. The to date love/ sexual relationship is described as a continually changing portfolio with a variety of possibilities. Tasks and opportunities are being detached from gender-specific roles; people operate in dependence on events, changing jobs and roles as required. The term “flexible team” – which derives from the new work environment – also characterises today’s love/sexual relationships.[4] One of the partners foregoes a career in favour of the other, expecting to be able to pursue one at a later date. It goes without saying that success is dependent on careful planning. Ideal traditional roles like the family breadwinner are exchanged without difficulty. Trade-offs between career, relationship, family and place are becoming increasingly important, and different priorities are set in different stages of the individual’s life.[5] Developments in an individual’s private life and in his or her career that formerly took place in parallel are being decoupled and organised sequentially, although work usually remains in the foreground. For example, families were not started until specific professional goals had been achieved.
On the other hand, office work organised with spatial flexibility requires a stronger social bond among the employees of a work organisation. Some companies require it in order to remedy social deficits and to strengthen commitment to the company and motivation as well as to encourage social interaction. It is for this reason that in certain of life’s development stages, social networks tend to be made up of colleagues and work partners rather than friends in other professions.
Increasing autonomy at work is resulting in the breakdown of that spatial separation of the work sphere from the private sphere which took place with the Industrial Revolution. The screen of the palmtop or laptop has thereby become the virtual home among the different spheres, themselves becoming typologically blurred in the process. At the same time, it forms the interface to the work organisation, with its user’s status in the hierarchy being reflected by varying model or version. This is all the more important since status is no longer reflected spatially. In contrast to a permanent workplace or one’s own office, it is now the accessory that is allocated to the individual; it is individualised and contributes to individualisation. It is partly also through the seductive image of accessories that those office workers who still have permanent workplaces are persuaded to take a positive attitude towards the increasing flexibility and absence of security in their own work environment.
Footnotes
Roemer van Toorn, “Frischer Konservatismus, Landschaften der Normalität,” In Archithese 3/97, p. 23.
William J. Mitchell, City of Bits. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995.
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.
Adrian Leaman, “The Logistical City,” In John Worthington, Reinventing the workplace. Architectural Press, Butterworth & Heineman, Oxford, 1997.
Petra Pfaller, “Stabilität durch Flexibilität,” In Crosstalk 9/2001.
Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.