During a number of my recent presentations on innovation, motivation and performance I have referred to office design as a way of encouraging people to be creative and innovative. It started to occur to me that apart from all of the examples I had seen and experienced myself as an employee I wasn’t really sure if office design did assist innovation, motivation and performance. Look at Apple’s new office space which is costing 5 billion. It is a very bold attempt at building an office that stimulates employees and inspires people to come to work and make a difference.
The move over many years now has been towards more open spaces rather than the office or cubicle. I have worked in all of them and to be honest I don’t see any great difference but I do prefer to work at home and maybe that is the new office space. It’s definitely cheaper for the company and more flexible for the employee. Some people though would probably struggle to work at home. They need the social aspects of work.
I have linked to an interesting article on office design.
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