Making Sense of It All

By the first week of May, I had completed 32 interviews. Identifying the theme that held these all together was not going to be simple. Over the course of 6 weeks, I learned a ton about how people work and feel and think. I talked to people in small companies and in large corporations. I talked to a lawyer, doctor, software developer, artist, architect, chief of police, school director, firefighter, and people in many other professions. Distilling these interviews to a pinpoint theme that ties the entire study together was going to be tough especially with only 4 weeks left to finish the project. I continued to digest the information gathered and to think about my experiences and research in a bigger context.

When I started this project, I wanted to know what makes a great workspace. Are there some common characteristics that people need in their space to be happy? What makes people most satisfied about their space? I was searching for themes, approaching the project with a broad scope to allow those that I interviewed to tell me what was important to them. I thought about the importance of things like flexibility, natural light, square footage, plants, location, and color schemes.

It turns out there wasn’t any one factor that predicted whether people were happy in their work spaces. Instead, it was the suitability of the workspace to the type of work being done that seemed to drive worker satisfaction.

How do you judge functionality? When it comes to figuring out what the best workspace for a job, division, team, or company the important thing is the work itself. The space needs to reflect intentions, processes, and ultimately the kind of work that takes place. An artist’s studio is different from a software developer’s desk and a firefighter is going to have a different workspace and set of tools than a doctor. Each space is optimized for the work they do.

I met with two people from SKB Architect; Emily Moses, a Designer, and Shannon Rankin, the Senior Principle Architect. They say that talking to people is really the only way you can hone in on a person or company’s work type. You can create an endless amount of surveys or questionnaires but to understand what is important, what kind of work needs to be done and how it is done, you need to have a conversation. They explain to me that when they have a client in a particular industry, though they may seem to follow industry norms, at the end of the day there is almost something different added into the picture.

Some of the most common factors that can influence the design of a workspace are culture associations, generational differences, whether a company has a strong sense of hierarchy or is more democratic, industry differences such as the tech industry and a marketing company who need very different things from a workspace, perceptions, and attracting people to a certain work culture. A company has the ability to create a work culture that draws on the kind of workers they are looking for. An open space with music playing will attract, or avert, particular kinds of work styles in the same way that a quiet closed-door office setting will.

Employees can almost always find something to improve in their workspace. In many of my interviews, people listed several aspects they didn’t like or that they wished were different but still concluded that they really love their workspace. A company or designer can encourage, attract, and push for certain work styles like collaboration. Shannon Rankin tells me that for a lot of open office plans it is a way of pushing people into working collaboratively. She says that while someone may run into difficulties in the space, like the noise distraction, the designer or company is looking for the workspace that will draw the best work out of you and sometimes that means pushing people forward to create a different kind of work culture. Emily Moses tells me how in their open office plan information travels much quicker and there is a certain amount of professional eavesdropping that is required and expected in order for people to collaborate on projects and stay on top of things. Sometimes it isn’t about what is the most comfortable; it is about what is the most effective.

Workspaces that encourage collaboration often don’t work well for solitary work. Open spaces tend to create a more causal environment that invites interruption which is appropriate in many industries. However, it may take time for new social rules to develop that guide when someone is reception to being interrupted and when they would prefer to focus on a task. During an interview with Ken Fry who works in a completely open workspace with connected desks, he tells me about the subtle communication of headphones, how when someone puts their headphones on it sends a signal to everyone else working there that they are doing focused work and don’t want to be interrupted unless it’s important. Visual and audio privacy are the top two design considerations that influence how people will work together. Each type of design comes with its own advantages, and disadvantages. An open office plan encourages collaborative and may create a sense of teamwork, or unity within a division, but there is little visual or audio privacy which can create distractions. A closed-door office setting encourages people to do focused work often times solitary work so the space allows for an individual to focus only on their tasks or projects, but the closed-door setting can also discourage communication and collaboration. An artist’s studio could be a place of solitary, focused, meditative work, or a place where many artists gather together to offer feedback on each other’s work. There are collaborative, focused, and creative workspaces and these can be organized, separated or integrated in various ways. What is most important is to find the workspace that best fits the nature of the work needing to be done. This can be done by understanding the industry, doing your research, and by talking to people that work there.

What is it about a job that attracts people to it? Is it the work, the cultural status that comes with the job? Is it only a function of pay? Is it their ability to contribute in the context of that job? Should a workspace be designed in strict accordance to the functionality of a position or division" I ask Architect and operating firm owner Ross Chapin if there were any universal design principles that could be applied to work space design. He tells me people are like leaves or snowflakes. You can tell by looking at a leaf what kind of tree it is from and what season it is, but find a leaf that looks the same? Impossible. This makes me think that everybody wants and needs a leaf. A leaf is a leaf no matter what tree it’s from or what season it is and a workspace is a workspace whether it has walls, windows, desks, computers, or canvases. There are some universal design features that work well, but we are all so different that it creates an endless amount of combinations.

People may find their ideal design with their home, but at work there needs to be a balance. The balancing act is between the need or desire to design a space specifically for one group’s needs and making the space interchangeable. The people will change, grow, and perhaps move into another space so designing a workspace is an interesting challenge because it needs to be a multipurpose and flexible space that works well for the intended group or team but can also be used well by others. Figuring out what works means understanding how they interact, what they need to get done, and the nature of their work.

Everyone I spoke with told me they were happiest with their space when they felt they could work effectively. Obviously there are some personal preferences and added perks that people came up with, specific things they did or didn’t like, but overall the common theme was their ability to do their work—the space’s functionality. I’m still not sure exactly what the relationship between workspace and job satisfaction is. In fact, the 32 interviews I did for this project suggest that they may not be correlated at all (see chart1). This tells me that there are a lot of other factors that go into job satisfaction and a future study could explore additional factors that influence job satisfaction.

One of the things that I like most about this project is the very aspect that prevented my ability to gather information from those who are dissatisfied with their work—anonymity. I enjoyed this because it allowed me have a creative approach as well. I took photographs and listened to the interviews I recorded and spent a lot of time creating these windows into how each person feels about their work and their workspace. This prevented me from gathering information from dissatisfied workers because I didn’t find anyone that would like to publically say, with their name and photograph next to them, how much they don’t enjoy their job. For this project, I was interested in hearing people’s stories and creating windows into their experiences with their workspace and their jobs; but because of this personal aspect I was unable to find willing participants who weren’t happy with their work. I am now interested in what it means to like your job and how you can measure that but that is a whole other area for examination. There are too many ingredients to come to a quick conclusion. Ask someone if they like their life and you’d probably get a complicated picture which was also present in many of these interviews because someone may love the flexibility of their job but hate certain tasks or someone may love the teamwork attitude that is created in an open office plan but dislike the distractions. Through this project I have been able to look at workspace and glimpse at job satisfaction.

Another relationship I would like to further research is functional suitability for the job and job satisfaction. I would have loved to do this, but similar to the job satisfaction dilemma my approach doesn’t incorporate all the variety of research methods needed to unveil those relationships. Standing in the middle, coming at this project with many different approaches highlights how complicated these relationships are. Next time I might include a questionnaire to answer after the interview that asks them to rate things like: the aesthetic quality of your workspace and then how important that is to you, how functional the space is, the relationship with employees or coworkers, audio privacy, visual privacy, flexibility. This would be interesting because it would help unveil the importance of specific characteristics quantitatively. Through this project my metric has been qualitative- talking to people and asking them open-ended questions. Dimensions of satisfaction are difficult to pinpoint in a workspace. One of the reasons I didn’t go into this direction of survey approach was that I wanted to connect with people on a personal level and hear their stories.

(chart 1)