The Baird's Tale

<div class="page photo" style=""> <article> <header style=" background-image:url(/uploads/53d6efb5318e8.jpg); "> <div class="box"> <div class="intro" style="color: #fff;"> <h1 style="color: #fff !important;">Office Space</h1> </div> </div> </header> <div class="main"> <div class="container"> James Rimmer We spend alot of the day at the office - many more  hours than our home. Yet there is little on pinterest about how to create that perfect workspace. To help you find that cozy, yet very fresh workstation here's the Baird's review of the four major work stations:<ol> <li>The Home.</li><li>The Casual Co-Working space.</li><li>The Professional Virtual Office.</li><li>The Cubicle</li></ol>I am ignoring coffees shops because they are such obviously terrible work places I refuse to believe  anyone actually gets anything done at them.HomeHome is nice. It’s easy. There is no commute. It is comfortable. It is stable – your work station, empty beer bottles and all - is right there. There are advantages – social media is not blocked, you can make phone calls easily and loudly, and do it all in your underwear!But there are some strong downsides. You don’t need to put on pants. You aren’t forced into a work ‘zone’ making focusing difficult. The home is filled with distractions, including positive ones. That hour spent cleaning the bathroom gives your brain those yummy feelings of completion but is not actually paid work. Worst of all is the lack of social interaction. Cashiers become your human contact of the day and that is just a bad, bad scene. The Casual Co-Working spaceRising to solve these problems is the casual co-working space. Cheap, geared for individuals, it has all the wifi, free range coffee of a coffee shop but with better desks. It has the sweat-pants-are-ok of home but with more inter-human contact. It’s come and go. There are networking and social events - wine downs, TED-talks, brown bag lunches. There is generally a community manager whose job is to be the personification of the double edge sword that is this office space. On one hand the openness and forced socialization allows for easy networking. Need to meet a contact in an industry you have never had to deal with before? The community manager is amazing at breaking down those walls. The other side is that the community manager’s job is to create a whole lot of events that are not real work. Casual co-working spaces operate in a vicious, complex cycle. Designed to be open, casual, friendly, low-barriers-to-interaction, the only way to get real work done in the open concept shared desk design for any amount of time is to put up very high barriers – big, noise cancelling headphones, serious face, a ‘do not disturb sign’ The result is a less friendly, high barrier workplace. Thus is created the community manager. They are to smash those high barriers. But the more effective they are, the higher the barrier is to get any work done. Casual co-working spaces are better than coffee shops, needed if your only other option is to work at home, but keep you there hours limited – there are only so many TED talks worth watching. The Professional Virtual OfficeNext is the professional virtual office. Very similar to the casual working space, it has a mix of open concept, shared desk space, and tiny micro-offices for very small firms.Unlike the casual working space the professional working space is for individuals and small for profits, pulling full 9-5 shifts. It’s for a full day of serious work and makes no bones, no organic-cardboard-tables, about it. While it has a great, serious, focus atmosphere, the workspace leaves something to be desired. The tables are old and beat up, and the walls in-between-tenants white. They have phone calling rooms that are converted closets with dented walls and the worst, most broken chair. An amazing place to make calls, but also very sensory deprivation. You leave at the end of the working day squinting in to the sun reeling from the natural light. Fundamentally this is the problem of the professional virtual office. It is a productive space, it is an effective space to get stuff done, but it is also a sad, resource-less space. You have to pay for a printer. You have to bring your own pens. You have to set up your own workstation each day and take it down at the end. The office is a physical reminder that you, and your company do not have real resources. It is a physical reminder of how much more work you have to do to get established. The Cubicle Much maligned, much hated, the cubicle is incredible. After two years of working in libraries, classrooms, reading rooms, coffeeshops, shared workstations, the cubicle is fantastic. One of the fundamental benefits of the cubicle is that it is a stable working space. I cannot overstate the benefit of this. In a cubicle if you put a paper down it is there the next morning, your pens are always where they were left, your notes-to-self still stuck to your monitor. You don’t need to pack up your whole working world at the end of every shift, every lunch, every time you go to the bathroom. This permanence allows for some optimization. You get to organize your files perfectly, not just in a way that is easy to transport. You have the time to invest in getting the right angle for your monitor, for your chair because tomorrow when you return nothing will have changed. Thus in many ways the cubicle is like home. Further, you cann not ever lose stuff or forget it on the bus. All papers, documents you need to work are right there, always. On top of this a workplace that can afford cubicles can afford printers, scanners, pens, paper, landlines – a whole range of resources that make life easier. The third benefit is that a cubicle is a great focus space. It has no other goal than work. It puts you in the zone. It has the privacy of the home, allowing for calls, but without the distractions of dishes like in the house. Most importantly, the biggest benefit of cubicles is they get socialization and social barriers right. By assuming you want a quiet, private space to work first and want to socialize second it creates productive spaces while at the same time creating incentives for socialization.Stepping back for a moment, the problem with the home is that it is too private and the problem with the co-working space is its too public. Co-working spaces’ default is that that you want to be social and to be productive you have to build your own barriers – which will naturally be very strong as you are invested in holding them up. The cubicle solves these problems by defaulting as a private productive space. This private space is then connected to public spaces – hallways, meeting rooms, water coolers, photocopiers. These public spaces are never workstations thus can be dedicated entirely to interactions, small talk, smiles and ‘good days’. Further, because it is design, not force of will that holds up the walls of privacy the barriers are lower. I don’t mind when someone walks into my cubicle because they are not attacking my own focus. Lastly, because the cubicle errs towards privacy it is just anti-social enough to make me want social interaction. To make me seek it. To go for lunch with co-workers, to say hi each morning and goodbye when I leave. By not being overwhelmed with social forces I seek them out, creating better, stronger bonds with those around me. Ultimatly you work where you can work. If your resources are low, the professional virtual office will work. If on your first day you see a cubicle, smile, for a man's cubicle is his castle. </div> </div> </article> </div>

Share

Issue 3