Offices, and the ways we use them, have continued to evolve
Workplaces are set for big changes thanks to the pandemic but it’s worth looking back to examine their evolution.
In 1868 Christopher Latham Sholes and colleagues patented what would become the first commercially successful typewriter.
At first many people were sceptical of “mechanical writing”; handwritten documents and correspondence were the norm, even in business. But after Remington started mass manufacturing typewriters in the 1870s, and with the rise of scientific office management around 1900, as JoAnne Yates of the MIT Sloan School of Management notes, the machine found a new home: the office.
“You can learn a lot from the typewriter,” adds Agustin Chevez, an architect and a workplace design researcher at Swinburne University of Technology, in Melbourne. “That’s what brought more women into the white-collar workforce, which was a big social change in the fabric of society.”
Offices, and the ways we use them, have continued to evolve. In the 1960s full-service office lunchrooms were replaced by self-service kitchenettes, says Chevez. Around the same time tightly packed rows of desks — a layout borrowed from factory floors — began to give way to the flexible “privacy” of cubicles, a shift that continued over the coming decades. And breakthrough technologies — such as telephones, personal computers, and email — have expanded where, when, and how we work.
All of this brings us to COVID-19, which has up-ended office life worldwide. Given this sudden shift to working from home, we wondered: How can understanding the ways the office has evolved help us frame the changes happening today?
With the help of Yates, Chevez, and others, we identified four key moments in the history of modern offices. Then we asked readers to share their memories of those disruptive transitions and tell us how the changes affected the ways they work.
1960s
Cubicles
In 1964 the Herman Miller furniture company introduced the Action Office, a flexible combination of desks, tables, and walls. It was colourful and elegant, intended to liberate workers by enhancing their freedom of movement and privacy.
But the need for office space was growing quickly in the late 1960s and 1970s. Companies demanded furniture that was cheaper, more adaptable, and required less space. Herman Miller redesigned the Action Office to be smaller and lighter, and other furniture companies introduced copycat versions. The cubicle, writes Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, was born.
The Action Office II aimed to give employees more privacy, according to Yates, who conducts historical and contemporary organisational research. Cubicles eventually became a billion-dollar industry; many companies used them as a way to fit more people into small offices. Robert Propst, the inventor of the Action Office, spent his final years apologising for his creation.
“Not all organisations are intelligent and progressive,” he said in 1998, two years before he died. “Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.”
Here’s what one reader recalls about early experiences with cubicles.
Says Margaret Ricci, who worked in architecture in Minnesota from the late 1970s to the late 1990s: “At work in an engineering company in the 1970s, I witnessed the rows upon rows of back-to-back drafting tables. People yelled across rooms to each other, sometimes crazy mad at others, so that everyone heard them. It was debilitating for people, with nowhere else to go to escape it or to concentrate on their work. Even small cubicles gave the illusion that there was some separation and helped.”
1970s
Telecommuting
The concept of telecommuting was proposed in the early 1970s by Jack Nilles, a former NASA engineer. He offered it as an alternative to resource-draining transportation amid the oil crisis of that era. His vision comprised satellite offices that allowed employees of a firm to work closer to where they lived, helping to reduce traffic congestion in urban areas.
In the 1980s and 1990s, technology improved and its costs fell, making teleworking viable for more jobs. Companies like IBM and J.C. Penney, and even US federal agencies, began experimenting with remote work programs in order to reduce their office expenses and offer employees greater flexibility.
Some readers were among those early telecommuters. Rex Goodman, who has worked remotely throughout his career, was a remote sales rep for United Airlines in the 1980s. He plotted out his sales visits with blue dots on AAA maps and hunted for payphones — armed with a calling card — to check in with the office receptionist for messages from his clients.
By 2013, 2.5 per cent of American workers were working remotely. Since then, however, big companies such as Yahoo, Bank of America, and even IBM have ended their telecommuting programs and brought employees back to physical offices — all in an effort to enhance collaboration, communication, and innovation.
Now COVID-19 has forced workers to go remote in record numbers. We heard from a few early telecommuters about what it was like to pioneer a new way of working.
Here’s Prem Ranganath, who worked in technology consulting in Wisconsin in the mid-1990s: “I often think about what telecommuting used to be when my only ‘advanced’ communication device was a pager.
“Since the number of characters per message was limited, the so-called important message would flow through multiple pages, and I had to collate them, decipher what was being requested, and then prioritise actions. Looking back, I can’t believe the time that was lost on a request that could not be sent via email!”
1980s
Personal computers
In 1936 Alan Turing published a paper that proposed an “automatic machine”. If someone could encode a problem on paper tape, Turing’s machine could solve it. In the decades that followed, computers of different sorts made their way to global offices.
One of the earliest — a 27-tonne $US500,000 ($690,000) contraption — was used by the US military to do ballistics calculations during World War II. In the 1950s IBM sold 19 of its Model 701 Electronic Data Processing Machines to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government. The computer could be rented for $15,000 a month.
Many readers remember the arrival of computers in their offices — huge, clunky machines that often took up whole rooms and were shared by workers. Tania Mijas, used a community computer along with 140 of her co-workers at a General Electric office in Brazil during the 1980s. She often spent hours waiting in line for it — where she met colleagues from across her department. “Good times for networking!” she recalls.
If the computer changed everything for business, the personal computer changed everything for workers. Several readers recall the feeling of having “made it” when their companies handed them a personal computer — a machine that made information processing portable and carried enormous prestige.
Other readers remembered the confusion and resistance around this new technology. Cecilia Bergendahl, who worked in consulting in Sweden in the early 1990s, says: “I received my first laptop when I started as a Coopers & Lybrand consultant in 1994. It was a clear professional sign of my new role and I was so proud. However, the laptop was so heavy I always struggled when I brought it to client meetings.”
Andrew Shooks, who worked in the shipping industry in Texas in the early 1980s, says: “My first personal computer was a Compaq, in 1984. It was a pretty big deal, and there was a lot of murmuring and muttering in the corporate office about somebody having a computer. And that was really just part of that whole shift to where there was information and knowledge outside of the corporate office.”
1990s
In 1965 researchers at MIT discovered how to share files and messages between computers. But email as we know it today was invented in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, using the internet’s predecessor, Arpanet. AOL and Outlook were released in 1993, and free email became available in 1996.
Email gave companies instant communication, allowing people to share messages and files in a way they hadn’t before. It also transformed how employees interacted with clients and colleagues. Paper office memos, for example, started to become unnecessary.
Here’s how readers experienced the shift.
Lucy Gill-Simmen, who worked in bioinformatics in Germany in the late 1980s: “I was working on sequencing the human genome in my office in Heidelberg, Germany. The year was 1989. A guy came in my office and said he was going to set up something called email on my computer.
“He sat at my desk for an hour setting it up, then he scribbled something on a Post-it and said, ‘That’s what’s called your email address’. That day I sent my first email to a colleague in his office in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
“That night I didn’t sleep with excitement, anticipating his reply. I got into work early in the morning, fired up my computer, and there were those magical words: ‘You’ve got mail’. My life was changed forever.”
Monica G. Jimenez Moreno, who worked in IT in Mexico in the early 1990s, says: “My first formal job was at an IT company. At the beginning, every time I sent an email I had to be sure it was received by the person. So once I clicked ‘send email’, I ran to my colleague’s desk to ask them to check their inbox.”
None of these four innovations in the office were accidental; even now, leaders have some control over what the future of work could look like. Monumental changes to where and how people do their jobs are still possible. And like the typewriter, these changes can have society-wide impacts.
“The office is an invention — not a natural phenomenon,” Agustin Chevez reminds us. “If we think of the office as an invention, then we can reinvent it.”
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Kelsey Gripenstraw is the audience engagement editor at HBR where Anne Noyes Saini is the senior audio producer
Copyright 2020 Harvard Business Review/Distributed by the NY Times Syndicate