Your office was designed for chaos

When the open-office concept was first introduced in the 1960s, architects said they wanted to free workers from the boundaries of walls and doors. Separating people by placing them in cubicles and private offices stifled communication and collaboration, architects said, and workers would build stronger relationships if they had easier access to one another. A few companies got on board with this experimental concept, but it took decades to fully take hold. By the 1990s, computers were a lot smaller, and companies realized they didn’t need as much space as they once did, so more of them started to embrace the open-office layout. Now, two-thirds of office workers in the U.S. work in an open office. Or, at least they did until this year.

The workday hits different now. We wake up to a stream of messages that somehow got sent while we were asleep and feel like we’re spending the whole day just trying to catch up. No matter how much we try, we feel like we’re never fully aware of everything that’s happening within our company and are constantly worried we’re missing something. Relationships we had with our coworkers are now harder to maintain, and a Zoom conversation doesn’t elicit the same feeling that a casual coffee run-in once did. The pandemic workday is now 48 minutes longer on average and has more meetings.

The default for many companies and managers during this time is to add more noise. More emails, more Slack messages, more meetings, more informal Zoom hangouts, more check-ins, more status reports, more more more. And yet… is it helping? Do you feel like you’re getting the same amount of work done than you were before? Do you feel connected to your coworkers? Do you know what’s going on within the company? Does your manager know how you’re really doing? Are you able to make connections between different projects driven by different teams? Why is everything so hard right now (aside from, you know, the world being how it is)?

It’s because your office was designed for chaos.

If you previously worked in an open office environment with rows of desks, very few or zero offices with doors, and meeting rooms that anyone could book, what was that office design really optimizing for? Most likely, it was optimized for saving money. Cramming in rows of desks with no partitions is far cheaper than thoughtfully designing a layout that allows people to focus on work, understand what current work is happening by different teams, and communicate effectively. The people who design these offices will say they’re optimizing for collaboration, but what they’re really optimizing for is cost savings. What they’re getting in return is chaos, and what they’re relying on is people having good-enough relationships across the organization for things to not fall completely apart.

When your company lacks operational prowess, structure, and process, it relies on informal connections between people to move information throughout the organization. These informal connections are known in the sociology world as “weak ties” — relationships that are not as strong or deep as they could be, but important nonetheless. Weak ties make work happen more quickly and seamlessly. When you have an existing relationship with someone, it’s far easier to reach out to that person to ask for a favor or get their thoughts on a project.

In an open office environment, you bump into people all day long. While grabbing coffee, you might see a person who is curious about a project your team is working on, so you take five minutes to update them. Or, you and your project team are moving into a glass-walled conference room, and someone pops their head in wondering what the meeting is about. Turns out, they have something valuable to add, so they join the meeting last-minute and hours of back-and-forth email is avoided. You might even overhear two people talking about their work in the hallway, and you stop to ask a question or offer your perspective. This kind of stuff happens all the time, and it’s because modern (open) offices were designed this way. By eliminating walls, cubicles, and distinct team and project areas, it’s much easier to stumble upon information or collaboration.

Stumbling upon information isn’t a good replacement for good structure and process, however, and now that we’re all working remotely we’re feeling it acutely. The chaos that was already there is now on full display and manifests through a dizzying stream of messages and meetings. Now you might be suffering through an endless workday that starts when you first roll out of bed to check your phone and ends whenever you crash at night.

Since remote work isn’t going away, the only solution to this is to get crystal clear on your team’s priorities and work on the chaos problem. Instead of adding to the noise, consider that this might be a good time to put some structure in place on your team — whether it’s in the form of better tools for organizing, better processes for making decisions, or more centralized places to find information. Creating structures and processes sounds stifling, but structure can actually be quite liberating when it’s designed to help people get their best work done. When people don’t have to guess how to find information, they are free to do the job they were hired to do. Simply hoping that you can make this all work with tons of meetings and messages won’t work. It takes intentionality.

Working on the chaos problem now won’t only make your remote work life easier in the short term, it will also improve everyone’s work lives when (if) people eventually return to the office en masse. Imagine if you didn’t have to fight to get the information you needed to do your job. Imagine if you didn’t have anxiety about not responding to a Slack message you received at 9 pm until the next morning. Imagine if you knew who was running the meeting you’re about to call into, and that the meeting had clear outcomes well-defined in advance. These things are all possible. They just don’t happen by accident.