快猫短视频

I have serious office envy. Perhaps I shouldn鈥檛 ever google 鈥渨orld鈥檚 coolest workspace鈥� or look at the glossies. All I see are interiors with vast walls covered in plants, flooded with natural light; huge rooms full of sleek, wooden furniture, and not a dangling cable in sight; swing chairs, beanbags, even .

Instead, here I am in 快猫短视频鈥榮 US office, where three of us inhabit a smaller room in a larger co-working space. There is a flimsy wall separating us from the office next door, where the noise level is often beyond the pale (see 鈥�Winning at work: How to stay focused and avoid distractions鈥�). Outside our door, a larger open-plan space is packed with dozens of people with little room to spread out. Workers of the world, unite?

Many of us spend more of our waking hours at work than we do at home, so it is reasonable to want a comfortable, functional and fun place to work in. Trouble is, there are no universal definitions of comfortable, functional and fun. What is clear, though, is that most of the received wisdom about how to design an office is questionable at best.

Two trends have dominated workplace design in the past few decades: open-plan offices, where everyone sits in the same space, and 鈥渘on-territorial鈥� or hot-desking offices, where no one has their own place.

The stated aim of both is to foster creativity and collaboration 鈥� by having everyone within sight in an open-plan office for example. But while there is some evidence that workers , and so benefit from increased physical activity (see 鈥�Winning at work: how to create the perfect desk space鈥�), it seems it鈥檚 not to talk to each other. The lack of privacy makes us retreat into our shells, putting on headphones to block background noise and emailing and instant messaging people just a few desks away, according to a 2018 study.

Open-plan isn鈥檛 necessarily bad, says Casey Lindberg, who researches workplace design at HKS architects in Texas 鈥� it is just that it isn鈥檛 good for all the people all the time. 鈥淲e are only just starting to recognise individual differences, including age, personality, the type of work and more,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his means office design needs to be flexible.鈥�

Hence hot-desking. In principle, this allows people to move to areas best suited to their task and mood: a private room if they need to concentrate hard, an open area if they want to collaborate and be inspired.

But in 2004, Theo van der Voordt at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues surveyed companies that switched from fixed-desk offices to hot-desking. They found no evidence of a productivity boost, but there was a definite minus: animal territorialism. 鈥淯sers often try to claim a familiar place by arriving at work earlier or by leaving items behind during their absence,鈥� . So perhaps I should learn to love my flimsy, shared cubicle.

In the end, few of us have much control over the design of our workplace, but employers might do well to pay heed: according to William Bordass, a London-based building scientist, changes in individual efficiency of up to 15 per cent 鈥渕ight be attributable to the design, management and use of the indoor environment鈥�. And he never had our noisy neighbours.

Take-home message:聽Don鈥檛 sit where you are told