Don’t blame the cubicles
23rd March 2006 by Robert Holland, ABC
A colleague passed along an interesting article from Fortune magazine about cubicles. It seems before he died a few years ago, Robert Propst, the inventor of the cubicle, denounced his creation and all that it had come to represent.
Cubicles have evolved over the years and now Herman Miller, the company for which Propst worked, has introduced the next generation of office space.
As I read the article, I thought about how cubicles often are blamed for poor communication in the workplace. Cubicles separate us from our colleagues and compartmentalize us to the point that we must make an effort to escape their confines and communicate with people. Ultimately, of course, cubicles are just one of many excuses we create to justify our unwillingness to communicate effectively at work. I wrote about it this week in my column published on Richmond.com, “Communication at Work.” Take a look and share your thoughts.
April 3rd, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I remember hating my first work area. I was a reporter at a daily newspaper in Decatur, Ill., where I sat in a row of five desks. Only a 12-in. “wall” separated us from an identical row of five desks across from us. We had zero privacy, and the sound of phones ringing, a half-dozen separate conversations, and typewriters clacking (yes, they were still using typewriters and typesetters) could be very distracting.
In other jobs, I’ve had my own office, but more typically have resided in some form of CubeLand. I remember when one company converted from offices and separate desks to cubes. We grieved over the loss of privacy and storage space.
The high cube walls in my current company discourage the kind of quick communication that I enjoyed at the newspaper. I’d like to be able to see whether the person I need to talk with is sitting at her desk, instead of walking across the floor only to see her empty chair and PC screensaver.
However, regardless of the office furnishings, my ability to communicate and collaborate in person with coworkers has been fairly constant. The truth is that more often than not, we see people sending emails to coworkers in the next aisle, rather than get up and walk over.