Arrgh! Not The Smelly Socks Again

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 31, 2008

Peter Munro

It's 40 years since the arrival of the biggest change in office life: the cubicle. Peter Munro examines the consequences.

IT'S just another day at the office; right up to when he pushes his computer keyboard into a colleague's face and hurls his monitor at a woman in the next cubicle.

Someone screams as he pounds a desk with a coffee cup, then dashes a computer against the wall. The sudden violence is shocking but, as you watch him bash a photocopier over and over, it is almost liberating. When he stands on a desk to kick down the walls of an office cubicle, I feel like cheering - right up to the moment he's dragged to the ground and shot with a taser gun.

The purported security camera footage of this anonymous worker's violent flurry, dubbed "office freakout", was posted online in June. It's fake, staged viral marketing for a new action film. But it captures the impotent fury of the working stiff trapped in the three walls of an office cubicle.

Reviled and ridiculed in equal measure, that seemingly innocuous feature of office furniture marks its 40th anniversary this year. The cubicle started out as a beautiful dream, the promise that partitions would bring down the walls that stopped the free flow of ideas and human interaction. The boss would move from his corner office into the cubicle next door, its partitions painted tan or orange.

But the dream soured as workers were cooped up in smaller and cheaper cubes like battery hens. Forty years on, cubicle is a dirty word. Now, as technology enables us to work better at home and on the road, there is talk the wide-open workstation of the future could put the cubicle out of business.

Already, it is the source of much grim humour. The finalists in this year's coolest cubicle contest, run by the Lifehacker Australia website, included cubicles kitted out like log cabins with fake wood panelling and stuffed animal heads on the partition walls, a "Forbidden Cubicle" modelled on China's Forbidden City, and a "torture chamber" designed by a community relations manager for Sony.

The top prize went to the "Cubes of War Cubicle", decorated like a fox's den with netting on the ceiling and camouflage covering on the walls.

"The war on terror is second only to the war on boredom," wrote the winner, Mark MacAskill. "And my cubicle was definitely boring before I transformed it into a weapon of mass destruction."

It was never meant to be like this. The cubicle was actually designed to be a force for good when in 1968, in the small community of Zeeland, Michigan, office furniture company Herman Miller released the world's first "Action Office". Unlike workplaces with offices along the walls, or rows of desks lined up like a typing pool, it boasted moveable partitions, mobile desks and pin-up boards. The boss of computer firm Intel famously took up a cubicle in a corner, moving among his fellow workers in his open-necked shirt and gold chains.

A recent article in The New Atlantis, titled The Moral Life of Cubicles, detailed its utopian origins: "Cubicles seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul."

That soul was conceived by inventor Robert Propst, who believed his flexible, adaptable office would improve productivity, motivation and interaction between workers. His early sketches of the Action Office show desks and chairs arranged in organic patterns like flower petals.

But his dream ultimately became every office worker's nightmare. Companies opted to shrink down each cubicle to cut costs and maximise floor space, arranging them in tight groupings under the watchful glare of management. Propst, who died in 2000, described what had become of his creation as a "monolithic insanity".

"The dark side of this is that not all organisations are intelligent," he said in an interview in 1998. "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them."

From such lofty heights, the cubicle became easy fodder for The Office and Dilbert comic strips. "In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream", was the title of one Dilbert collection. Of course, it's so much worse than that. Sitting in a cubicle you can hear all about your neighbour's marriage problems or smell what someone three rows over is having for lunch. Some horrid soul has their shoes off. And then there's that guy who whistles while he works - the one whose face you want to staple.

"I (know) more than I ever wanted about everyone else in my team, who had what disease, who's picking up the kids and the shopping, who's sleeping around and who is drinking on the job," writes one person to The Age blog Management Line. "Battery farming of chickens gets all the publicity, what about 'battery workers'?"

WORKSTATION supplier Matthew Power acknowledges the cubicle carries a lot of baggage. "It gives me a feeling of being a bit battery hen-ish, of stockfeed - come in, get fed, get slaughtered at the end," he says. But he argues the cubicle has fundamentally changed the way we interact with our colleagues, whom we often spend more time with than our families.

"People forget that pre the cubicle most workers sat in typing pools and banged away next door to their neighbour in rows or went into an office and shut the door," he says. "Cubicles gave us more individuality than we had in the past and brought management closer to the staff."

Power, general manager of the workstation company Iken, has watched the cublicle's rise and fall, along with other fads in office furniture. High-walled cubicles were replaced by open-plan offices, then just as quickly reverted back to partitions when no one liked what they saw. Hot-desking was popular until workers realised they liked having their own space for family photos and their coffee mug.

Workstations grew wider and deeper to host large computer screens, then smaller again as technology improved and city rents skyrocketed.

Now they are smaller than ever, particularly with the rise of flatscreen technology. Under an old L-shaped desk arrangement, a workstation might have occupied six square metres a person, Power says. That has shrunk to about 4.5 square metres under new "snowflake" designs, where desks are set at 120-degree angles to each other. Desk space drops as low as three square metres a person for the straight workstations popular in design and architecture firms - half the minimum space recommended by Worksafe Victoria.

Power says companies are gradually incorporating several types of workstations to suit the space and level of collaboration needed by each worker. Much effort has gone into calculating the optimum height of computer screens. Set them at 1.2 metres from the ground and they're low enough so no one feels alone, but not so low you have to look anyone in the eye.

Power says office communal areas have grown as individual workstations have shrunk. "The traditional kitchen was a tiny room in the back that smelled like shit, now it has a flash machine and nice couches so you don't need as much space at your desk," he says.

The joint winner of Iken's Workspace of the Future 2008 competition was the eRUG, designed by Melbourne firm CobaltNiche. It resembles a futuristic picnic rug, with an inbuilt flatscreen computer and electrical currents to mould it into different shapes, so workers can take it out to the park on a sunny day. Attractive, if a tad uncomfortable. And it neatly grasps the dreams of the future office. Forty years after the advent of the cubicle, industrial designers are again dreaming of bringing down office walls with mobile, flexible workspaces that we can carry around in our pocket or roll up as easily as we might a picnic blanket.

Portable technology every day is giving us good excuses to stay away from the office. But what might that mean for how we interact with each other? Mentors organisational psychologist Susan Nicholson says humans are naturally sociable but that the cubicle has taken away "opportunity for reflection time". "People will often say if they need to do solid work they will stay at home or go to a meeting room and shut the door," she says.

Jodi Oakman, from La Trobe University's Centre for Ergonomics and Human Factors, envisages a new role for the office that could finally kill off the much-maligned cubicle.

As we work more from home and on the road, the office might assume a more social setting - the place we come for important meetings or simply to mix with colleagues, she says.

The ins and outs of cubicle etiquette

? NEVER enter someone's cubicle without permission. Behave as though cubicles have doors. Do not enter without eye contact from the occupant.

? Post a sign or flag at your cube entrance to signal when you can be interrupted. Avoid making eye contact with people if you don't want to be interrupted.

? Don't prairie-dog (or meerkat) over the tops of cubes or peek in as you walk past each one.

? Keep you hands off a cube-dweller's desk. Just because there's no door doesn't mean you can help yourself to their paper clips.

? Try to pick up your phone after one or two rings. Limit the use of speakerphones - if you must use one, keep the volume as low as possible.

? Never leave your mobile phone behind in your cube without turning it off or to vibrate.

? With personal or sensitive calls, be aware your neighbours can hear your end of the conversation.

? When talking, use your library voice.

? Don't yell across the cube farm. Get up and move to the other person's location.

? Don't talk through cube walls or congregate outside someone's cube. For impromptu meetings go to a conference room or break room.

? Eat quietly. Avoid gum-popping, humming, slurping and pen tapping.

? Never eat hot food at your desk.

? Keep an air freshener handy and keep your shoes on!

Source: Bremer Communications (www.bremercommunications.com)

© 2008 The Sunday Age

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