[Real Beat] 'Irregular Arrangement of Partitions'... The Future of the 'Office' in the Era of Remote Work [Office Shift] ⑪

Cubicles, Originating in the 17th Century and Spreading After the 19th Century Industrial Revolution
A Major Success in the History of Modern Offices

Editor's Note[Jjinbit] is a shortened form of 'Jung Hyunjin's Business Trend' and 'Real Business Trend,' a segment that showcases trends in the changing nature of work. The segment within Jjinbit called 'Office Shift' closely examines the changes in offices triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and aims to lay the groundwork for finding answers to new work styles through experiments we have experienced together. It will be delivered to you every Saturday and Sunday morning. After 40 installments, it will also be available as a book.

"It feels like a ghost town."

Sundar Pichai, CEO of the leading big tech company Google, recently said this during a meeting with employees. This remark described the situation where spacious desks were left empty as employees who experienced remote work during COVID-19 significantly reduced their office attendance. CEO Pichai emphasized that "we are currently using space inefficiently and need to manage resources well," noting that only about one-third of the workforce comes to the office more than four days a week.

What measures did Google take to solve the 'ghost town' problem?

Google's CEO Sundar Pichai
[Photo by Reuters]

According to CNBC and other outlets, Google announced last month that it would implement a policy where employees working in a hybrid model (combining office attendance and remote work) would share desks on alternating days when they are not in the office. The policy changed some employees' office attendance from three days a week to two days and assigned pairs of two employees to share the same desk. For example, employees coming to the office on Monday and Wednesday would share desks with those coming on Tuesday and Thursday. About 25% of the company's total workforce was part of this experiment.

COVID-19 has transformed the appearance of offices. The new work environments of remote and hybrid work, combined with an economic slowdown, have influenced office changes.

In short, an office is a dedicated space for administrative work. Its appearance changes according to the era and values under the goal of improving productivity. Since offices gather anywhere from a few to tens of thousands of people to work together for a certain period, the demands of various stakeholders converge to drive change. Especially, the communication and value conflicts between the company providing the office and the employees using it are fully reflected in the office environment.

◆ When Did Dedicated Office Spaces First Appear?

When did offices first appear? First, the English word 'office' is said to derive from the Latin word 'officium,' which combines 'opus' meaning 'work' and 'facere' meaning 'to do.' Officium originally referred to a working space in a broad sense, including places where priests performed rituals in ancient times, rather than a dedicated space for clerical work as we understand today.

The concept of a dedicated space for office work, as we know it now, began to emerge from the 17th century. According to Fast Company, a U.S. business media outlet, Witold Rybczynski, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in his 1987 book "Home: A Short History of an Idea" that professionals such as lawyers and civil servants who previously worked from home began working in offices in cities like London, Amsterdam, and Paris.

Former Royal Navy Headquarters Building in the UK (Photo by UK Government Website)

The first dedicated office building in the UK was the former Royal Navy headquarters building in London, built in 1726. This office served as a space for handling the Royal Navy's paperwork and meetings. Following this, in 1729, the British East India Company established its headquarters in London to manage affairs related to its then-colony, India. The increasing volume of paperwork necessitated a centralized space to handle it.

According to an article reported by Lucy Kellaway, former deputy editor of the Financial Times, on BBC in 2013, Charles Lamb, a 17-year-old employee of the East India Company at the time, recorded that "I was in the office from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Friday. Yesterday, I worked until 9 p.m." Kellaway explained that when documents arrived from India, work piled up, making overtime unavoidable. Even in the 18th century, office workers suffered from overtime just like modern employees.

The appearance of the British East India Company London headquarters in 1796 (Photo by the British Library website)

In 1854, official British government documents recorded the need for offices. Alexi Marmot, a professor at University College London (UCL), introduced this anecdote in a 2015 post on the official UK government blog. A record left by Sir Charles Trevelyan, who served as the British Assistant Secretary from 1840 to 1859, stated in 1854 that "a separate space for office work is necessary so that 'a person who works with his head' is not disturbed," adding that "it is appropriate for several employees to cooperate in one space under proper management."

◆ Peak Productivity 'Taylorism' vs. Autonomy-Focused 'Burolandschaft'

The modern office spread widely after the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. As industries such as finance and infrastructure rapidly developed and grew, the amount of paperwork increased sharply. The number of clerks grew significantly, and companies needed to gather them in one place for organizational management. Two key concepts inseparable from the early history of modern offices are 'Taylorism' and 'Burolandschaft.'

Taylorism is a scientific management technique created in the 1910s by Frederick Taylor, an American mechanical engineer and management theorist, focusing on maximizing productivity. It aimed to increase the efficiency of employees and space while reducing costs to maximize profits. Taylor proposed standardizing workers' movements and work scopes to improve labor productivity in his book "The Principles of Scientific Management." It was also an open office design where managers could observe everyone.

The office embodying Taylorism looked like a grid. Photos and illustrations of offices from that era show large open spaces without partitions, with desks arranged in rows, minimizing gaps to fit as many desks as possible. Taylor wrote in his book, "In the past, people came first. In the future, the system must come first." Offices focused solely on efficiency and productivity were criticized as inhumane work environments.

This office environment changed significantly in the 1950s, starting in Europe, which had experienced the Great Depression and two world wars. In 1958, German brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle introduced the concept of Burolandschaft, meaning 'office landscape' in German.

According to a 2015 New York Times op-ed by Nikil Saval, author of the 2014 book "Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace" and currently a Pennsylvania state senator for the Democratic Party, the Schnelle brothers considered Taylorism-style offices "stuffy, outdated, and useless." They believed offices should be spaces where smooth communication occurs, organic and interconnected.

An office in the style of Bureau Landstadt from 1975 in the UK (Photo source: University of London British History website)

While Taylorism-based offices were arranged in straight lines, Burolandschaft offices featured curved layouts. Both were open offices, but unlike Taylorism offices, Burolandschaft offices arranged spaces irregularly and placed plants between desks to separate areas, enhancing flexibility and autonomy.

◆ The 'Cubicle' That Was a Huge Success but Abandoned by Its Inventor

The cubicle, which emerged in the 1960s, was a hugely successful office form in modern office history but also faced significant criticism. A cubicle is a type of furniture consisting of three partitions about 1 to 2 meters high that block the sides and front of an office worker, creating a small individual workspace. It is a small, square space occupied by one employee and is commonly seen in Korea as well.

The cubicle appeared in the 1960s to address the drawbacks of open offices. Robert Propst, a consultant for the American office furniture company Herman Miller, created a type of furniture called the 'Action Office,' which led to the cubicle. Propst believed that open spaces actually reduced communication among employees and argued for a furniture-based spatial arrangement that sometimes guarantees privacy while enabling collaboration. He believed this would secure individual autonomy and provide the ability to create diverse work environments.

The cubicle, an affordable version of Propst's Action Office called 'Action Office 2,' was an immediate success after its launch. According to Saval's introduction in the Wall Street Journal, the cubicle was named the most successful design of the past 25 years at the 1985 World Design Conference. By 1998, 40 million American workers were working in 42 versions of Action Office 2. This earned Propst the title "father of the cubicle."

However, Propst lamented seeing the cubicle used in ways contrary to his intentions until his death in 2000. Companies, facing soaring real estate prices and a surge in office hires, used cubicles as a cost-saving measure to efficiently utilize office space. Employees inevitably felt uneasy in so-called 'cubicle farms,' where cubicles were lined up in rows like Taylorism offices. In 2006, the influential U.S. media Fortune criticized cubicles as "The Great Mistake."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Propst said two years before his death in 1998, "The dark side of this (cubicle) is that not all organizations are smart and progressive. In many cases, ignorant people take the same tool and create something very unpleasant." He sadly added, "They created very small rooms and stuffed people into them."