An office move is on the horizon for Captura. While TheManagement™ is considering location and cost, I’ve been thinking about workspaces and interior design. Having recently gone through an office move back with EMC, I learned a few lessons about creating collaborative work environments.
- Even a highly collaborative team doesn’t collaborate 8 hours a day. We need to accommodate personal work spaces.
- When some desks are better than others, the team dynamic is disrupted. Level the playing field as much as possible when considering desk arrangments.
- There’s a difference between scheduling time with a handful of people to rock through something (i.e. a meeting) and spinning your chair around to pull a couple friends in on a problem you’re working through or sitting down with a colleague to chat. That’s the kind of collaboration we want to facilitate.
Personal Work Spaces
This above setup from Nothing’s Cardboard Office is a nice (albeit rickety?) example of a personal workspace in an open environment. Intel offers a more minimalist approach in the image below. Granted, this is a public seating area, but the quasi private seating could be easily modified to accommodate a work station.
Leveling the Playing Field
Portland based ad agency, North, is the epitome of an equal seating employer. A long table placed in the center of a gorgeous agency interior exemplifies a less personalized workstation, but one that gives everyone an equally awesome space to GTD.
Collaboration ≠ Meetings
Aussie architectural firm, Bark, strikes a great balance between equal seating and providing personal workstations.
Additionally, this shot from Facebook’s Palo Alto Headquarters shows a relaxed seating area for colleagues to chat. It’s not a private room for serious conversations or long-ish meetings, but it’s also set apart from the general workspace, making it ideal for short side conversations.
