The Office Ecosystem Challenges Our Conception of Modern Office Design

From commercial real estate to furniture design, the metaphor of the ecosystem appears ubiquitously in discussions of the office in the post-COVID era.  Cushman and Wakefield titled their research on the post-pandemic office “Workspace Ecosystems of the Future,” and Knoll uses the phrase “ecosystem of work” as a key concept in their research on furnishing the office, establishing it as “The Thriving Workplace.”

I believe that this metaphor developed in response to long-simmering social and economic pressures in the world of work. The COVID pandemic, furthermore, has merely amplified the urgency of resolving these problems.  Understanding from where and why the term “ecosystem” emerged as a dominant metaphor can help us place the dramatically changing form and meaning of the office ecosystem into a broader historical context.

The term “ecosystem” has a long history of usage in a broad range of fields. The British botanist Arthur Tansley was one of the first to use the term in his article “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms” in 1930.  In defining “ecosystem” Tansley sought to take the physical factors of the surrounding environment into account – including temperatures, precipitation patterns, air, water, and soil – when describing biotic communities. The word “system” in Tansley’s term was deliberate:  he saw ecosystems as having an organizational principle in which the components of the system were engaged in an ongoing process of interaction and mutual adjustment. As an operative metaphor, the term found its way into business strategy in the 1990s, where James Moore’s 1993 article in the Harvard Business Review advocated that business leaders envision their firms not as members of a single industry but as part of a broader “business ecosystem” that crosses a variety of industries that includes suppliers and customers whose needs are ever changing.

The themes of broad interconnection and complex but discernible organizational principles – the hallmarks of the term “ecosystem” – also describe the internal dynamics within firms. This characterization of how a business operates emerged in the 1990s as an alternative to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s mechanistic vision of the workplace.  In “Principles of Scientific Management” (1911), Taylor envisioned a hierarchical workplace where managers supervised employees with the goal of maximizing efficiency in a machine-like system. The metaphor of the workplace as a machine was powerful, and the fundamental premises of the paradigm only began to be questioned nearly a century later. In their 1999 essay on complexity and the workplace, Roger Lewin and Birute Regine referred to the workplace as a “complex adaptive system” in which employees and supervisors were engaged in interdependent and ever-changing interactions that responded to both internal and external imperatives.  While Lewin and Regine do not refer to their characterization specifically as an “office ecosystem”, they describe the complex adaptive system in comparable terms. In their series on the future of the office, Cushman and Wakefield subsumes the mechanistic model into the workplace ecosystem, noting that the Taylor-like office – as a place of “centralized command and control” – remains a key driver in the purpose of the office.

The Office Ecosystem and The Ways in Which We Work

Two basic logistical questions about the office help to reveal the social imperatives that shape the ways in which we work and the workplace ecosystem.

1.  Where do we work?

At the onset of COVID 19, office workers everywhere were forced to work from home.  With employees working from home, the office suddenly ceased to be a contiguous spatial envelope and was transformed, literally overnight, into a geographically dispersed network of workspaces that needed to function as if each employee still shared the same physical work environment.   

The prospect of working from home on a permanent (or semi-permanent) basis was not a new development. The potential of working from home was identified by Allan Kiron, a staff scientist at the US Patent office, in 1969:  by bringing work tasks into the home of an employee through electronics, Kiron envisioned the science “dominetics” – a term derived from domicile, nexus, and electronics.

The NASA engineer Jack Nilles coined the term “telecommuting” in 1973, and IBM began to send a select number of workers home to test the effectiveness of telecommuting. IBM’s release of the ThinkPad in 1992, furthermore, presented the specter that the work of the office could transpire anyplace beyond the confines of the office.

The pandemic shifted the possibility of remote work from elective choice to mandatory reality; and with it came the possibility that the residence could become a permanent feature of the workplace. Working from a series of focus groups that included owners and tenants, Cushman and Wakefield observed that hybrid work, or splitting time between the office and the home, would become a permanent fixture of the workplace.  A corollary to this trend would be that both owners and renters of commercial real estate needed to be flexible as they adjusted to what could be highly labile demands for commercial square footage.

2.  How does work fit into a new approach to lifestyle?

The strains of working full-time at the office have long been a source of social tension – especially for families with children.  Considering the effects of rigorous work schedules on women raising children, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote of the “Taylorization” of home life, where the push to optimize the daily routines of the home, even the simple routine of cooking breakfast has assumed the unrelentingly fast schedule of the office machine.

The promise of flexibility presented by the hybrid work schedule has a counterpart in how employees themselves developed a new ethos of work itself, regardless of where it transpires. Instead of the home turning into the office machine, workers are now prioritizing emotional fulfillment and physical health in both the home and the office. In a survey conducted in October 2020, Jones, Lang, LaSalle (JLL )observed that employees began to expect that the workplace itself should foster health, emotional well-being, and nutrition.

Furniture designers have also taken up the new interconnection between work and well-being. Knoll has introduced the concept of “The Thriving Workplace”.  In important respects, they have synthesized the thinking of real-estate developers and employees:  they describe the thriving workplace as “one that leverages a multi-layered ecosystem of work and the power of design to facilitate conversation, togetherness and a sense of belonging”.   GKV has also re-envisioned the workplace in response to Covid. 

In its different uses by different work sectors, development, real estate, and design, the office ecosystem metaphor has shown flexibility in helping us grasp the logistical challenges of the post-COVID workspace from lease contracts for office space to how a team project can transpire with participants in different physical locations.  Just as an ecosystem has amorphous borders, the office ecosystem challenges our conception of the spatially contiguous workspace. As the members of an ecosystem interact in an ever-changing and interdependent manner, renters and lessees will be rapidly adjusting to the changing and amorphous needs of the office or office ecosystem.

Perhaps more importantly, the office ecosystem metaphor reconnects us to a deeper continuity of how offices function and of how work transpires. While the metaphor of the ecosystem may have supplanted the Tayloristic machine, Taylor’s paradigm conceived of the office as a place of convergence of people and ideas. The metaphor of the ecosystem has allowed us to see the ever-changing nature of interaction between people and ideas, to understand the centripetal and centrifugal forces at constant play in the office, to situate the office in the spatial and urban contexts of home and work, and to place work in the social contexts of professional fulfillment and well being.

By: Nick Napoli, GKV Architects

View Office Ecosystems Designed by GKV

MIC.COM

iCROSSING