THE Workplace

Workplace design is a major industry with implications to clients of worker productivity, retention, and happiness. Workplace design styles have been heavily influenced by research-based guidelines that have taken many different theoretical perspectives in the past but have been dominated by Positivistic and Reductionistic thinking. I have been working on how to incorporate holism as a way forward in research-based design for workplaces. I believe that the nature of workplaces in a Post-COVID, Globalized and Digitized world requires holistic perspectives for design. First, to understand where workplace design is going, we need to outline the origins of workplace design, Fedrick W. Taylor.

History of Workplace Design

As long as people have been around, they have created workspace to carry out tasks. These workspaces have often been dictated by the economic age and activity taking place. Figure 1 outlines how societal orders have impacted workplaces. Starting in preindustrial times, the first workplaces were the people using the land to do sustainable farming and gathering. The modes of work changed over time with economic advancement, but as people began to create settlements and live as collectives, it allowed for the specialization of economic activity by trading with your neighbor. As soon as trade begins to exist, economic forces can influence human behavior and workplace design. People with specialized skills could create cottage industries that would provide services to neighbors, and the neighbors would be able to provide services for trade. Specialization led to the first workshops, where creations could be made more precisely than working in ad-hoc ways. Once the network of trade routes could be formed between organized settlements, complex production systems could be created with specialized workers creating components for high orders goods. This led to industrialization and the industrial revolution, which quickly reinvented all work with factories, etc.

Figure 1 - The Evolution of the workspaces over time. The workplace is constantly adapting and changing over time. Each era has produced a different workplace. These Eras have been defined by technology, social systems, and economies. The constantly changing workplace results from market forces, both external from the organization as in customer demands and internal from employee demands.

As industrialization took hold, a service-based economy emerged, where services were sold as products instead of physical goods. This was when workplace design started in earnest in the 1920s with heavy influence from Federick W. Taylor’s (1913) work on industrial management, where he applied a scientific approach to creating efficient workplaces (Waring, 2016). Taylorism’s motto is ‘working smarter, not harder.’ Taylorism’s approach is based on Science and is reductionist. Workplaces under Taylorism took a form of a large room with rows of desks, putting employees next to each other, and arranging them to increase the efficiency of workflows.

Figure 2 shows the evolution of the thinking behind workplace design from Taylorism on. Workplace design changed with economic evolution. In the 1950s and 1960s, an answer to Taylorism came from the Burolandschaft approach, which took a holistic design in creating office landscapes (Hassanain, 2006). While providing an alternative to the reductionist approach of Taylorism, it did not survive the economic pressures of technological advancement and the change of the way work took place. Burolandschaft was ahead of its time, looking at creating work environments to foster teamwork and interactions. Providing privacy is not part of Taylorism, and Burolandschaft looked at creating the Action Office with the invention of the cubical. This flexible modular wall would break up the large open offices under Taylorism and provide different work environments for different tasks. However, this quickly morphed into cubical farms, and Taylorism once again dominated workplace design, adapting workplaces to maximize efficiency. The rise of the cubical farm and modular design came from an evolution of Taylorism as more information technology types of work required computers and concentration.

Until the recent disruptions of how people work due to COVID, globalization, freelancing, and the rise of the Start-Up, Taylorism-based thinking dominated. In other words, reductionistic approaches to the design of workplaces are based on efficiency. Today holistic design approaches are starting to take root in the workplace. Workplaces are starting to take into account people in design. There is Holistic design in activity-based offices, coworking environments, and even home offices.

Figure 2 - Timeline of Workplace Design Theories from the Early 20th Century to the present. Starting with a reduction approach of Taylorism, the workspace followed a very linear progression with a temporary deviation with holistic principles of Burolandschaft Design. However, the modern economy quickly led back to a Taylorism approach as work was still very procedural. In the modern digital age, where innovation and creative economy dominate production, a new need arises for workplace design. In the 2010s, some competing evolutions of the workplace arose from Activity-based working - Wellbeing Design, Coworking, and Remote working. I postulate that these design theories are transitional from a reductionist approach to a holistic one and will unite under a new design theory of Holism.

Holism Thinking and Workplace Design

Performance is an emergent quality of a system. When designing a workplace, the overall main goal is to provide a workplace, and the measure of that success is the performance of that work. Taking a systems-based approach to the workplace, the inputs would be materials needed, tools, and people. The output would be the production of saleable products. With a reductionistic approach, the workplace’s performance would be based on the talent you hire, the quality of the materials, and the sophistication of the machinery. These are the components, but having the best of those three components does not result in the best performance. Why? Well, first, let us talk about materials and tools. Yes, better materials could result in better products, but people working with those tools would have to be good as well. While materials and tools are easy to reduce and take and optimize, they work as a system with people who themselves need systems to support. First, how do you recruit the best people? Recruiting is about feeling for people. Many people do not work the highest-paying job they can get. They work the highest paying job that they want. Recruiting top talent requires giving prospective employees a feeling of satisfaction in the possible work they will be doing. Then once you have the employee, you will need to create systems supporting that employee, like human resources, time management, health care, and others, to get the employee to operate at peak performance. This collection of systems to support the employee is complex. In many cases, they have been standardized through policies. One aspect of the work environment that is highly flexible and is a major variable in the system is the workplace design itself.

Figure 3 - Reductionism versus Holism. The chart above shows the different work environments and places them on a scale from more reductionist to more holistic. Except for Burolandschaft, most workplace design that is holistic has been developed in the last 20 years. This shows a transition from a reductionist workspace to a holistic one, and at the end of the transition, workplace design will take a fully holistic system-based approach.

Figure 3 shows that the new workplace design concepts have been moving more towards and holistic approach. I propose looking at a workplace with a holistic lens and seeing how design can be used to increase the performance of the organization as a whole. Individual happiness and stress can lead to different performance, but also how the individual interacts with co-workers. What design concepts are needed to create peak performance. Ideas like creating feedback loops in the design plans, thinking about the system as a whole, following information as it passes through the system, and looking at user interaction and experience. Optimizing the workplace for social behaviors will have more impact on performance than the best tools and materials.

Citations

Aristotle 980a Metaphysics, Translated by W. D. Ross

Berliner, H. S., & Salmon, J. W. (1980). The holistic alternative to scientific medicine: History and analysis. International Journal of Health Services, 10(1), 133-147.

Cohen, S. Marc and C. D. C. Reeve, "Aristotle’s Metaphysics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/>.

Descartes (1637), Discourses, Part V.

Hassanain, M. A. (2006). Factors affecting the development of flexible workplace facilities. Journal of Corporate Real Estate.

Smuts, J. C. (1926). Holism and Evolution. United Kingdom: Macmillan.

Taylor, F. W. (1913). The Principles of Scientific Management. United Kingdom: Harper.

Verschuren, P. J. (2001). Holism versus reductionism in modern social science research. Quality and Quantity, 35(4), 389-405.

Bertalanffy, A. R., Boulding, K. E., Ashby, W. R., Mead, M., & Bateson, G. (1968). L. von Bertalanffy, General System Theory. New York: George Braziller.

Waring, S. P. (2016). Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945. United Kingdom: University of North Carolina Press.