Why personal space is a workplace essential
13 July 2017
Office spatial dynamics have changed dramatically in recent years. As a result, the modern office serves significantly more people per square foot than ever before.
Originally this tightening was largely down to the growing ubiquity of flat screen and the mobile devices, but more recently the major driver of change appears to be the gradual disappearance of personal workstations in favour of more shared space. The upshot is that the amount of space allocated to each individual in a building has fallen by over a fifth in a few years and the very idea of using the number of employees to determine and their individual space requirements without other considerations seems less relevant.The typical space allocated to an individual in a building has shrunk dramatically in the last few years, while the provision of public and meeting space has increased. But, just because getting more people into a building is easy, is it the right thing to do?
The father of proxemics, which is the study of personal space, cultural researcher Edward T Hall, claimed that people typically have up to four zones of comfort. These are dependent on the level of intimacy with the other person, and are classified as ‘intimate’, ‘personal’, ‘social’ and ‘public’. Get these wrong in an office and you add to the stress people feel about being around their fellow humans.
It’s important to know where to draw the lines. Supposedly collaborative working environments based on throwing everybody together are not always conducive for particular tasks, but favour certain types of people more than others. In part the solution can be a variety of spaces and an awareness that organisations should not be based on the needs of the extroverts who make the most noise.
This model of the workplace based on task-oriented zones is not new and dates back at least to the time of the combi-office, a mixture of cellular and open plan, that was a common feature of European offices long before we even knew what a smartphone was. While there may be a good economic argument for the open plan and an admission that some privacy must be sacrificed in the interests of communications, there is a tug back in the other direction that has its own logic and its own business case.
The challenge is to make informed decisions based on the variety of office design models and workplace cultures we can now apply in order to get the balance right.
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