Cutting the Cubicle Out of Office Design
Offices today are more than just a place to warehouse workers: they’re a statement about corporate culture and commitment to staff and customers. What does your office say about your company?
Few offices in the world are as famous as the companies they belong to. The Googleplex, for one, is known for offering Google employees everything from swim-in-place pools and volleyball courts to children’s play areas and catered gourmet meals. And before he passed away last year, Steve Jobs presented plans for his company’s new spaceship-like headquarters, as innovative and design-savvy as any Apple product.
While these examples are exceptional for their scope, corporations everywhere are paying close attention to architectural and interior design today. “There was a time when office space was really a liability,” says Sarah Nelles, head of strategic facilities and planning at the Vancouver office of Kasian Architecture Interior Design and Planning Ltd., which counts Telus, TransLink, and the UBC School of Population and Public Health among its recent clients.
“It was a place to warehouse staff,” she continues. “Now, it’s an asset and needs to perform as such by effectively supporting four major pieces: the company’s business goals, its organizational culture, its processes and operational requirements and its technology strategy.”
Niles Spiro, director of corporate interior design at B+H BuntingCoady, elaborates: “A business’s space is an effective way of branding what they’re really about, and how they really are,” he says. “It’s a marketing tool that says, ‘We value you’ to staff and to the client.”
Case in point: “It was critical that Telus be strongly represented within their new space,” says Nelles. “They wanted there to be significant alignment between the product the customer holds in their hand, the bill they get at the end of the month and their experience there.”
Compare this to office design philosophies of decades past, and things have clearly changed. “It’s a huge aesthetic leap all around – a rebellion against the Dilbert culture of the work world,” says Cynthia Penner, principal at Box Interior Design Inc., a firm known as much for its award-winning hospitality portfolio (Market by Jean-Georges, Coast restaurant, the Adara Hotel) as its commercial projects, which include the ongoing design of Kal-Tire’s new office in Kelowna and the recently completed Prima Colombia Hardwood Inc. office on Alberni Street.
“There are many messages that an office sends: how much has been spent, how the space is used and whether it’s an open-concept office,” she continues. “These are all cues to the outside world and prospective employees about the company, for better or worse.” In other words, where lavish reception areas might impress visitors, poorly designed individual offices with bad lighting and unattractive furniture tell employees that they aren’t as important. The exception? The person sitting at the large, L-shaped desk in the corner office. And yet even that has changed. “The private office used to be the carrot of your career,” says Penner with a laugh. “We’re seeing now with younger people that that’s not a motivator.”
The focus on office design as a function of employee satisfaction is true even in more traditionally conservative law offices. In fact, law is perhaps the sector that has most embraced this new frontier. Most of Vancouver’s largest interior design firms have completed redesigns of many law offices, including Counterpoint Interiors Inc. (Bacchus Law Corp., Singleton Urquhart, Bell Alliance Law), Kasian (Bennett Jones LLP, Meyers Norris Penny LLP), B+H Architects (Heenan Blaikie LLP), and Group Five Design Associates Ltd. (Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, Bull Housser Tupper LLP, Harris & Co. LLP).
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