The folk at 37 Signals (if you’re a PM, you might know them for Basecamp) have a new office. It looks, on a shaky handheld video, like a nice space. They’re doing with the new space what everyone should start doing: making exterior walls and windows open for working spaces, not conference rooms or offices. It’s nice to see companies make that transition.
I remember working at a small company back in 2000ish that was so very proud of the fact that everyone had an office. It was ok – the best part of it was sharing an office, actually, with a peer who was also a close friend and collaborator. Good for us, not so good for interacting easily with our teams. The worst part was the few months I spent sharing an office with someone I never worked with, who turned out to have a in-office porn habit.
Around that same time, large companies had mostly shifted to exterior-wall offices with sprawling, top-lit cube farms from there to central bathrooms and stairs. That might be the most depressing office configuration anyone has ever constructed. It’s slightly improved by replacing the cubes with open-plan offices, and improved another small step by replacing the conference rooms with team spaces (basically, large spaces with high cube walls or some other designation of team boundaries). Most of those places maintained the hierarchy of People in Offices, still along the exterior walls & windows – and you can tell a lot about an organization by its office configuration.
I’m working in a building right now where office size is clearly tied to a person’s rank, and if you don’t rank highly enough, you get a cube with no natural light, no collaboration space, and next-to-no privacy. The only places for teams to gather are conference rooms (with light) and grey, open spaces with only overhead fluorescent light. It’s not a nice way to work together.
Back to the 37 Signals office! Props to them for ditching offices entirely, though that’s not entirely new. Giving people near-infinite possible configurations of space, allowing teams to form and disperse, is even better for people who need to work together.
I’d like to see more of how their teams use the space – do they reconfigure? Are there temporary “walls”? Can tables and power supplies be moved easily? All those things reduce barriers to collaboration.
They also appear to have taken one of the open-space-office problems very seriously: the need for occasional privacy. Some of their spaces appear to be both soundproof (is it pervy of me to want to feel up their soundproof walls?) and seeing-in-proof. I like that – it’s one of the frustrating things about asking teams to radically co-locate; you do lose privacy, and many office arrangements aren’t designed to give you an alternative. So! All told, a good space & a good example, if not an earth-shattering reimagination of space and time.