In the age of teleworking, what about individual offices?

Expert

Faced with this double observation, what should we think of the individual office?

On the pro side, a certain number of advantages are recalled: greater concentration, feeling of intimacy, of well-being by allowing in particular to escape from the gaze of the other, better appropriation of space, while avoiding the feeling of being interchangeable.
It is still an anchor point favoring social integration: whoever is looking for you can find you easily.
Finally, the office is tangible proof of professional success.

On the opposite side, the individual office would be mainly an archaic mark of old-fashioned work, not to say "à la papa". Some managers willingly transform their office into a creativity room open to the whole team to demonstrate their modernity. Others voluntarily choose not to have an office and want to be treated the same as their teams.

Space managers are sometimes embarrassed by the individual office and its codes: they have all the trouble in the world to move occupants as quickly as reorganizations follow, they struggle to find additional windows to honor all the promotions and are frequently looking for space to accommodate new employees. All this while optimizing costs and, if possible, reducing surfaces.

Indeed, one of the main flaws of the individual office is that it requires space. An average program in an individual office requires approximately 15m² useful per person. In job sharing, taking into account two to three days of telework, the surface per person is divisible by two. At the time of teleworking, the temptation is great: what good is an office occupied only half of the week? The fight against the individual office is not new and specifically linked to telework. It is concomitant with the advent of NWOWs and their spatial corollary, the dynamic environment.
In the 2010s, some large users began to seriously limit it and set maximums (10% of posts for example).
Then, gradually, this maximum decreased to approach total suppression. These programs have had mixed success, depending on the type of site (particularly head office site versus production site), the different organizational and managerial practices, but also the culture of the work environment, in particular with the notion of setting an example.

Beyond these difficulties, what are the good reasons to reintroduce ersatz desktops in work environments?
Surveys and field feedback show that there remains a quality of the individual office that shared environments struggle to offer: the appropriation of a place, the possibility of recreating a protective cocoon for the less good days as well as the best. These offices, which become places of teams, are not only aimed at working in interaction. They must allow photos of the team to be displayed or an event to be celebrated in complete privacy. They are landmarks, places of reunion and shared moments. These are not necessarily large spaces: they must make it possible to bring together a close-knit team, a team that is therefore often relatively small. It remains to determine the right number of these spaces and to ensure the exemplarity of the managers to guarantee their operation. Investing in such spaces questions the vocation of the workplace: place of meeting, of socializing, did you say?

Release date: April 2022