From cramped cubicles to collaborative open-plan setups, a lot has changed since the creation of the modern office – but it doesn't stop there.
In this episode, we'll be exploring the question of why and how the modern office was created and look at some of the developments that led us to this place.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a place you probably know: the office.
[00:00:29] Perhaps you’re on your way to an office now, perhaps you’re on the way back after a long day at work, perhaps you’re even listening to this episode while sitting at your desk at an office, hoping your boss doesn’t see you.
[00:00:43] Perhaps you don’t work in an office, and never have.
[00:00:47] If so, you’re in a minority, as literally billions of people around the world go to an office every single day. So in this episode we are going to explore the question of why and how the modern office was created, and look at some of the developments that led us to this place.
[00:01:07] OK then, the creation of the modern office.
[00:01:15] If you were to travel back in time, let’s say to 500 years ago, find someone from the year 1523 and tell them about life in 2023, no doubt they would have lots of observations, plenty of questions.
[00:01:31] You wear funny clothes, you have huge objects that fly in the sky, you all seem to live so long, and you live in tall buildings in big cities.
[00:01:43] And what do you do all day?
[00:01:45] You get in something you call a car, or maybe you take a bus with other people, maybe you walk or you get on a bicycle.
[00:01:54] And you go to sit in a big room with other people all day long, looking at something you call a computer, stopping only to sit around a table and talk to other people.
[00:02:07] And you do this for…40 years? Almost all of your adult life?
[00:02:12] What is this mysterious place you go to all day, what do you do there, and…why?
[00:02:20] Of course, this person from 1523 would be no stranger to the concept of work, they might even spend more of their lives working than you, but the idea of a dedicated indoor space for working, the so-called “office”, would be most unfamiliar to them.
[00:02:40] So, in this episode we’re going to explore how we got to this point, how the idea of an office has developed over the years, and what lies ahead for how and where we work.
[00:02:53] If you look up the term “office” in a dictionary, you’ll find a definition that’s something like this: “a room, set of rooms, or building used as a place for commercial, professional, or bureaucratic work.”
[00:03:09] The key terms there are those three adjectives: commercial, professional or bureaucratic. If you are not involved in this sort of work, an office is something you probably don’t need.
[00:03:22] And for our person in 1523, and pretty much any period in history until relatively recently, the vast majority of the population were simply not involved with this sort of work.
[00:03:36] There were some notable exceptions - Chinese imperial bureaucrats or Medieval monks in Europe, for example, but the nature of work for most people was manual: growing or making stuff with their hands, or buying and selling things to other people directly.
[00:03:56] Monks might have had a separate room or cubicle where they would copy religious texts at a desk, but this was independent, solitary, work; there was little need for any kind of collaborative space.
[00:04:10] And even for people involved in more commercial activities, buying and selling goods, their place or work would have typically been, in Europe at least, also where they lived.
[00:04:23] The first real “offices”, in the sense of a large space dedicated to bureaucratic work, are thought to have arrived on the scene in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
[00:04:37] What is thought to be the first large office was built in 1726 in London, and was called The Old Admiralty Office. If you recognise the word “Admiralty” there, you might be able to guess what it was used for. An admiral is the most senior naval officer in the army. it’s the person who commands the navy.
[00:05:04] So, The Old Admiralty Office was the headquarters of the British Navy.
[00:05:10] And this word, combined with the date that this was built, 1726, gives us some indication about why this new “office” might have been required.
[00:05:23] It was just as the British Empire was starting, as British ships sailed around the world looking for new territories, new people to colonise, new dominions to rule over.
[00:05:35] We’ll skip over any discussion of the morality of this, but what is undeniable is that it was a very large, gargantuan, sprawling, organisation. Lots of people were involved, information needed to be shared, documents written, decisions to be made, orders to be given.
[00:05:57] There needed to be a centralised physical location where all of this would take place, and this was The Old Admiralty Office in central London.
[00:06:09] Strangely enough, the office is still standing, it’s used by the British government as the headquarters of the Department of International Trade, so funnily enough not all that much has changed in the almost 300 years since the building was first used.
[00:06:27] Shortly afterwards, The East India Company, which you can learn about in episode number 279, by the way, The East India Company opened its own dedicated office in the City of London, using it as a base to manage the huge bureaucracy involved with essentially governing an entire country, India, from thousands of kilometres away.
[00:06:50] So, what was actually happening in these early offices?
[00:06:55] Well, paperwork, essentially. Writing and copying letters, all by hand. It must have been deadly boring, and there is actually plenty of evidence of early office workers feeling exactly the same boredom and tedium that people do today.
[00:07:14] Here’s a short poem from an East India Company employee from 1852:
[00:07:21] “From twelve to one, think what’s to be done;
[00:07:24] From one to two, find nothing to do;
[00:07:27] From two to three, think it will be
[00:07:30] A great bore to stay till four”
[00:07:34] And here’s another quote, again from an East India Company employee in a letter complaining about his job: "Thirty years I have served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day."
[00:07:59] So, if you have had a bad day at work and you write a cross email to your colleague or your partner about how you can’t take it any more and you’re going to quit, well you will be following in a tradition that dates back as long as anyone has ever worked in an office.
[00:08:18] And in terms of the first 150 years or so of “office life”, of the existence of the office, the actual tasks required in an office were fairly similar and straightforward: writing letters, that was it, mostly.
[00:08:35] But in the late 19th century, there was a technological development that would revolutionise office life and would bring many more people into the office. Whether this was for better or worse, well you can be the judge of that.
[00:08:52] In 1868, an American inventor called Christopher Latham Sholes patented a machine for typing on paper. He had invented the typewriter.
[00:09:05] The effect of this was to greatly increase the speed at which letters could be written, and in so doing, greatly increase the number of letters being sent, therefore the number of letters that needed to be responded to, essentially ballooning the bureaucratic class.
[00:09:24] The office became a place dominated by the tapping of typewriters, as workers spent their days typing letters.
[00:09:33] The typewriter also revolutionised the demographic makeup of the office.
[00:09:39] Up until then, so we’re talking about the late 19th century, the office had been dominated by men, with only 2.5% of the office workforce in the United States being female in 1870.
[00:09:55] By 1930, over half of American office workers were female, reflecting the number of women who were employed tapping away on the typewriters.
[00:10:06] Although you can look at the typewriter and conclude that it was something of a slavemaster to tens of millions of women over the years, with offices being sexist places where women were thought capable of nothing more than mindless bureaucratic work, it did give women a socially acceptable shot at independence.
[00:10:29] Up until the invention of the typewriter, employment options for women in places like the US and the UK were pretty limited.
[00:10:39] Becoming a typist was a respectable job that a well-educated woman could do without damaging her marriage prospects. Before this, really the only other socially acceptable option for an educated woman, in the UK at least, was to become a governess, a sort of live-in teacher.
[00:11:01] So, strangely enough, the typewriter did offer new opportunities to women who were forced to live in a society that still considered them second-class citizens.
[00:11:12] Right, so the typewriter was invented in the late 19th century. It made written communication much faster, with some estimates having it tripling productivity of workers versus handwritten notes.
[00:11:26] Of course, this didn’t mean that people did one third as much work, they worked for one third of the amount of time, or the number of office employees shrunk by a third.
[00:11:38] Quite the opposite. It resulted in an increase in bureaucracy, more letters needing to be written, and more people spending their days working at the office.
[00:11:50] As to the layout of the typical office of the era of the typewriter, well, this will no doubt be familiar to fans of TV series from this era, and perhaps if you are one of our older listeners, you might remember this era yourself.
[00:12:06] Offices were typically divided into large central areas, more like a factory floor, where the mainly female secretarial work was done - the typing of letters, essentially. And then smaller, private offices where the men worked.
[00:12:22] And as the office class continued to grow, and there was an increasing scientific interest, we could say, in the efficiency of offices, there were some radical new proposals about how these spaces should be structured.
[00:12:39] Probably the most influential came in 1964, with an invention from the furniture company Herman Miller.
[00:12:48] Now, you might know the name Herman Miller from its very expensive office chairs, but its revolutionary invention was not a chair, or at least it was not only a chair.
[00:13:01] Two designers from Herman Miller had looked at how modern offices were set up, with their big factory-like banks of workers in the middle, they had realised that work was increasingly knowledge work, it required thought and some level of creativity, and decided that the set-up of modern offices wasn’t conducive to this kind of work.
[00:13:25] So, they designed something called “The Action Office”.
[00:13:31] The Action Office was essentially a series of desks and pieces of furniture that got a worker moving around, physically doing stuff, rather than sitting at one simple desk all day long. The idea was to give the worker more freedom of expression, and thus lead to productivity increases.
[00:13:53] Although it was well-received by the design community, office bosses didn’t like it. It was too expensive and took up too much space.
[00:14:04] The designers went back to the drawing board, taking the best parts from “The Action Office”, and they came up with “The Action Office II”, the revamped model. The Action Office II was similar in many ways, but it was cheaper and packed workers more closely together.
[00:14:24] You might be able to imagine what The Action Office II would come to be called.
[00:14:29] It was the office cubicle, the set of moveable low walls that creates a kind of mini private office within a larger room.
[00:14:40] It sold like hotcakes, it was incredibly popular, and this “cubicle” format became the dominant form of office design in most American offices, and in many offices around the world.
[00:14:55] It was loved by bosses, because it was cheap and meant that workers could be packed into relatively small spaces, while still having some sense of privacy.
[00:15:06] And as for workers, well, perhaps if you work or have worked in a cubicle you’ll have your own idea about whether it’s a pleasant experience or not, but cubicle-based offices are often criticised as being hostile and impersonal work environments, factories pretending to be offices.
[00:15:27] But as more and more offices subscribed to this “cubicle” design, there were differing proposals for alternatives, other visions of how offices could be arranged.
[00:15:40] Cubicles had been popular because they were cheap ways of creating semi-private offices for everyone, but they stood criticised of creating unnecessary walls, barriers, between employees, with one architect going so far as to call them “fascist and totalitarian”.
[00:16:01] So, what was the alternative?
[00:16:04] Well, tearing down the walls, returning to something more akin to a factory-style set-up of banks of desks, workers sitting side by side, able to see one another and talk to each other without anything in the way.
[00:16:21] The name for this was the “open-plan office”, and the logic for laying out offices in this way was to increase communication between employees, to facilitate collaboration, to enable better decisions, and ultimately to make workers more productive.
[00:16:40] These open-plan offices were first proposed, in fact, shortly after the arrival of the cubicles, but they too were not without their fair share of critics.
[00:16:52] If you work or have worked in an open-plan office, no doubt you’ll be familiar with some of the criticisms of this set-up. Big banks of desks with no partitions between people, you can see everyone else, overhear conversations, people can see your computer screen, you have no privacy.
[00:17:13] Of course, this is the point, the entire idea is to break down the barriers, but half a century after the invention, or at least the popularisation of the open-plan office, there are plenty of questions about whether it actually works.
[00:17:31] Is it a better set-up, are employees more productive, do they collaborate more in an open-plan office?
[00:17:39] As you might imagine, there has been plenty of research into this. And the results are often surprising.
[00:17:47] Strangely enough, there was one study done that suggested that people working in open-plan offices have 70% fewer face-to-face interactions than in offices where workers work in their own private areas.
[00:18:03] This is probably exactly the opposite of what you would think would happen, as if you can see someone it’s much easier to lean over and ask them a question, but what this survey found is that open-plan offices actually mean that people tend to send instant messages or emails more if they can see someone than if they can’t.
[00:18:26] Perhaps you can recognise this in your own behaviour. I certainly can with mine, as the offices I’ve worked in have almost always been open plan, and with instant messaging and email, if I can see someone is concentrating hard it’s easier to send them a message rather than go over and tap on their shoulder to ask them a question.
[00:18:49] In a cubicle or personal office environment, as you can’t see what the other person is doing, it’s much more common, so this study suggested, to physically go over to that person.
[00:19:02] So, somewhat counterintuitively, breaking down the physical walls puts up an imaginary wall, and it is worse for collaboration, according to this study at least.
[00:19:15] Right, this brings us to the modern day.
[00:19:19] Clearly, the internet and software have meant that many jobs that would previously have required people to go into offices now can be done without an office: from home, from a coffee shop, from anywhere.
[00:19:34] If you worked in an office in 2020, you probably only did so for a few months before you were sent home to see this for yourself.
[00:19:43] All of a sudden, offices lay empty, kitchen tables or spare bedrooms became “offices”, and remote work became the norm, not the exception.
[00:19:56] When it seemed clear that, yes, most companies could function like this without imploding, and obviously it is cheaper to not pay for every employee to sit at an office, there were a plethora of articles announcing the “death of the office”, imagining a world where everyone worked from home.
[00:20:17] On one level, it sounded like it made sense.
[00:20:21] Many employees liked the flexibility of being able to work from home. Whether it was being able to spend more time with kids or on your own activities, given that you didn’t have to commute, or whether it was simply being able to be in your own environment, clearly remote working was popular with many employees.
[00:20:42] What’s more, office space, especially in prime city centre locations, is really expensive.
[00:20:50] Even for a relatively small company, 100 people let’s say, office costs can easily reach €100,000 a month in a city like London, so if this really was an unnecessary expense, and people would prefer not to go to the office, well sure, the office was dead.
[00:21:12] But fast forward three years, as you’ll know, many companies have gone the other way, forcing employees to come back to the office. No doubt you have seen headlines or videos about this, with bosses complaining about workers being less productive, or simply not working when they are “working from home”, and their company cultures suffering when everyone is in a different place.
[00:21:40] Now, this isn’t the place to comment on the extent to which this is true. I’ve worked in an office, and I’ve also worked remotely, both for other companies and for myself. I can see both arguments.
[00:21:54] If you’ve worked in an office, you’ve probably also worked remotely over the past few years, so you no doubt have your own perspective on your preference and how COVID affected your working environment.
[00:22:07] Bringing it back to the creation of the modern office, and the evolution of the place in which we work, the point to underline is that many companies are now opting for some sort of hybrid situation, allowing employees to work from home for a few days of the week, while perhaps reducing the size of their office or turning it into more of a collaborative space rather than a place to come every day and sit to do independent work.
[00:22:37] Google searches for “hybrid working” increased by 500% between November 2020, at the height of lockdowns in many countries, and February of 2022, when employees were being called back to the office en masse.
[00:22:53] So, is this the future of the office, some mix of in-person working with the flexibility of being able to work from home, or from anywhere in the world?
[00:23:04] Who knows.
[00:23:06] People have been working in offices for almost 300 years now, and the nature of what actually happens in an office, and how it should be structured, has been changing ever since.
[00:23:19] The final thing I’ll say is that, were I a betting man, I’d certainly put money on the office of the future looking very different from any office of today.
[00:23:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Creation Of The Modern Office.
[00:23:38] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are a die-hard cubicle lover, a devotee of the open-plan office, or you have never spent a day of your life working in an office, well, I hope this episode gave you a bit of background about how we got to this situation.
[00:23:55] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:58] What do you think the office of the future will look like?
[00:24:02] What do you like or dislike about cubicles or open plan offices? What is the best and worst office you have ever worked in? I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:24:15] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:22] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a place you probably know: the office.
[00:00:29] Perhaps you’re on your way to an office now, perhaps you’re on the way back after a long day at work, perhaps you’re even listening to this episode while sitting at your desk at an office, hoping your boss doesn’t see you.
[00:00:43] Perhaps you don’t work in an office, and never have.
[00:00:47] If so, you’re in a minority, as literally billions of people around the world go to an office every single day. So in this episode we are going to explore the question of why and how the modern office was created, and look at some of the developments that led us to this place.
[00:01:07] OK then, the creation of the modern office.
[00:01:15] If you were to travel back in time, let’s say to 500 years ago, find someone from the year 1523 and tell them about life in 2023, no doubt they would have lots of observations, plenty of questions.
[00:01:31] You wear funny clothes, you have huge objects that fly in the sky, you all seem to live so long, and you live in tall buildings in big cities.
[00:01:43] And what do you do all day?
[00:01:45] You get in something you call a car, or maybe you take a bus with other people, maybe you walk or you get on a bicycle.
[00:01:54] And you go to sit in a big room with other people all day long, looking at something you call a computer, stopping only to sit around a table and talk to other people.
[00:02:07] And you do this for…40 years? Almost all of your adult life?
[00:02:12] What is this mysterious place you go to all day, what do you do there, and…why?
[00:02:20] Of course, this person from 1523 would be no stranger to the concept of work, they might even spend more of their lives working than you, but the idea of a dedicated indoor space for working, the so-called “office”, would be most unfamiliar to them.
[00:02:40] So, in this episode we’re going to explore how we got to this point, how the idea of an office has developed over the years, and what lies ahead for how and where we work.
[00:02:53] If you look up the term “office” in a dictionary, you’ll find a definition that’s something like this: “a room, set of rooms, or building used as a place for commercial, professional, or bureaucratic work.”
[00:03:09] The key terms there are those three adjectives: commercial, professional or bureaucratic. If you are not involved in this sort of work, an office is something you probably don’t need.
[00:03:22] And for our person in 1523, and pretty much any period in history until relatively recently, the vast majority of the population were simply not involved with this sort of work.
[00:03:36] There were some notable exceptions - Chinese imperial bureaucrats or Medieval monks in Europe, for example, but the nature of work for most people was manual: growing or making stuff with their hands, or buying and selling things to other people directly.
[00:03:56] Monks might have had a separate room or cubicle where they would copy religious texts at a desk, but this was independent, solitary, work; there was little need for any kind of collaborative space.
[00:04:10] And even for people involved in more commercial activities, buying and selling goods, their place or work would have typically been, in Europe at least, also where they lived.
[00:04:23] The first real “offices”, in the sense of a large space dedicated to bureaucratic work, are thought to have arrived on the scene in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
[00:04:37] What is thought to be the first large office was built in 1726 in London, and was called The Old Admiralty Office. If you recognise the word “Admiralty” there, you might be able to guess what it was used for. An admiral is the most senior naval officer in the army. it’s the person who commands the navy.
[00:05:04] So, The Old Admiralty Office was the headquarters of the British Navy.
[00:05:10] And this word, combined with the date that this was built, 1726, gives us some indication about why this new “office” might have been required.
[00:05:23] It was just as the British Empire was starting, as British ships sailed around the world looking for new territories, new people to colonise, new dominions to rule over.
[00:05:35] We’ll skip over any discussion of the morality of this, but what is undeniable is that it was a very large, gargantuan, sprawling, organisation. Lots of people were involved, information needed to be shared, documents written, decisions to be made, orders to be given.
[00:05:57] There needed to be a centralised physical location where all of this would take place, and this was The Old Admiralty Office in central London.
[00:06:09] Strangely enough, the office is still standing, it’s used by the British government as the headquarters of the Department of International Trade, so funnily enough not all that much has changed in the almost 300 years since the building was first used.
[00:06:27] Shortly afterwards, The East India Company, which you can learn about in episode number 279, by the way, The East India Company opened its own dedicated office in the City of London, using it as a base to manage the huge bureaucracy involved with essentially governing an entire country, India, from thousands of kilometres away.
[00:06:50] So, what was actually happening in these early offices?
[00:06:55] Well, paperwork, essentially. Writing and copying letters, all by hand. It must have been deadly boring, and there is actually plenty of evidence of early office workers feeling exactly the same boredom and tedium that people do today.
[00:07:14] Here’s a short poem from an East India Company employee from 1852:
[00:07:21] “From twelve to one, think what’s to be done;
[00:07:24] From one to two, find nothing to do;
[00:07:27] From two to three, think it will be
[00:07:30] A great bore to stay till four”
[00:07:34] And here’s another quote, again from an East India Company employee in a letter complaining about his job: "Thirty years I have served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day."
[00:07:59] So, if you have had a bad day at work and you write a cross email to your colleague or your partner about how you can’t take it any more and you’re going to quit, well you will be following in a tradition that dates back as long as anyone has ever worked in an office.
[00:08:18] And in terms of the first 150 years or so of “office life”, of the existence of the office, the actual tasks required in an office were fairly similar and straightforward: writing letters, that was it, mostly.
[00:08:35] But in the late 19th century, there was a technological development that would revolutionise office life and would bring many more people into the office. Whether this was for better or worse, well you can be the judge of that.
[00:08:52] In 1868, an American inventor called Christopher Latham Sholes patented a machine for typing on paper. He had invented the typewriter.
[00:09:05] The effect of this was to greatly increase the speed at which letters could be written, and in so doing, greatly increase the number of letters being sent, therefore the number of letters that needed to be responded to, essentially ballooning the bureaucratic class.
[00:09:24] The office became a place dominated by the tapping of typewriters, as workers spent their days typing letters.
[00:09:33] The typewriter also revolutionised the demographic makeup of the office.
[00:09:39] Up until then, so we’re talking about the late 19th century, the office had been dominated by men, with only 2.5% of the office workforce in the United States being female in 1870.
[00:09:55] By 1930, over half of American office workers were female, reflecting the number of women who were employed tapping away on the typewriters.
[00:10:06] Although you can look at the typewriter and conclude that it was something of a slavemaster to tens of millions of women over the years, with offices being sexist places where women were thought capable of nothing more than mindless bureaucratic work, it did give women a socially acceptable shot at independence.
[00:10:29] Up until the invention of the typewriter, employment options for women in places like the US and the UK were pretty limited.
[00:10:39] Becoming a typist was a respectable job that a well-educated woman could do without damaging her marriage prospects. Before this, really the only other socially acceptable option for an educated woman, in the UK at least, was to become a governess, a sort of live-in teacher.
[00:11:01] So, strangely enough, the typewriter did offer new opportunities to women who were forced to live in a society that still considered them second-class citizens.
[00:11:12] Right, so the typewriter was invented in the late 19th century. It made written communication much faster, with some estimates having it tripling productivity of workers versus handwritten notes.
[00:11:26] Of course, this didn’t mean that people did one third as much work, they worked for one third of the amount of time, or the number of office employees shrunk by a third.
[00:11:38] Quite the opposite. It resulted in an increase in bureaucracy, more letters needing to be written, and more people spending their days working at the office.
[00:11:50] As to the layout of the typical office of the era of the typewriter, well, this will no doubt be familiar to fans of TV series from this era, and perhaps if you are one of our older listeners, you might remember this era yourself.
[00:12:06] Offices were typically divided into large central areas, more like a factory floor, where the mainly female secretarial work was done - the typing of letters, essentially. And then smaller, private offices where the men worked.
[00:12:22] And as the office class continued to grow, and there was an increasing scientific interest, we could say, in the efficiency of offices, there were some radical new proposals about how these spaces should be structured.
[00:12:39] Probably the most influential came in 1964, with an invention from the furniture company Herman Miller.
[00:12:48] Now, you might know the name Herman Miller from its very expensive office chairs, but its revolutionary invention was not a chair, or at least it was not only a chair.
[00:13:01] Two designers from Herman Miller had looked at how modern offices were set up, with their big factory-like banks of workers in the middle, they had realised that work was increasingly knowledge work, it required thought and some level of creativity, and decided that the set-up of modern offices wasn’t conducive to this kind of work.
[00:13:25] So, they designed something called “The Action Office”.
[00:13:31] The Action Office was essentially a series of desks and pieces of furniture that got a worker moving around, physically doing stuff, rather than sitting at one simple desk all day long. The idea was to give the worker more freedom of expression, and thus lead to productivity increases.
[00:13:53] Although it was well-received by the design community, office bosses didn’t like it. It was too expensive and took up too much space.
[00:14:04] The designers went back to the drawing board, taking the best parts from “The Action Office”, and they came up with “The Action Office II”, the revamped model. The Action Office II was similar in many ways, but it was cheaper and packed workers more closely together.
[00:14:24] You might be able to imagine what The Action Office II would come to be called.
[00:14:29] It was the office cubicle, the set of moveable low walls that creates a kind of mini private office within a larger room.
[00:14:40] It sold like hotcakes, it was incredibly popular, and this “cubicle” format became the dominant form of office design in most American offices, and in many offices around the world.
[00:14:55] It was loved by bosses, because it was cheap and meant that workers could be packed into relatively small spaces, while still having some sense of privacy.
[00:15:06] And as for workers, well, perhaps if you work or have worked in a cubicle you’ll have your own idea about whether it’s a pleasant experience or not, but cubicle-based offices are often criticised as being hostile and impersonal work environments, factories pretending to be offices.
[00:15:27] But as more and more offices subscribed to this “cubicle” design, there were differing proposals for alternatives, other visions of how offices could be arranged.
[00:15:40] Cubicles had been popular because they were cheap ways of creating semi-private offices for everyone, but they stood criticised of creating unnecessary walls, barriers, between employees, with one architect going so far as to call them “fascist and totalitarian”.
[00:16:01] So, what was the alternative?
[00:16:04] Well, tearing down the walls, returning to something more akin to a factory-style set-up of banks of desks, workers sitting side by side, able to see one another and talk to each other without anything in the way.
[00:16:21] The name for this was the “open-plan office”, and the logic for laying out offices in this way was to increase communication between employees, to facilitate collaboration, to enable better decisions, and ultimately to make workers more productive.
[00:16:40] These open-plan offices were first proposed, in fact, shortly after the arrival of the cubicles, but they too were not without their fair share of critics.
[00:16:52] If you work or have worked in an open-plan office, no doubt you’ll be familiar with some of the criticisms of this set-up. Big banks of desks with no partitions between people, you can see everyone else, overhear conversations, people can see your computer screen, you have no privacy.
[00:17:13] Of course, this is the point, the entire idea is to break down the barriers, but half a century after the invention, or at least the popularisation of the open-plan office, there are plenty of questions about whether it actually works.
[00:17:31] Is it a better set-up, are employees more productive, do they collaborate more in an open-plan office?
[00:17:39] As you might imagine, there has been plenty of research into this. And the results are often surprising.
[00:17:47] Strangely enough, there was one study done that suggested that people working in open-plan offices have 70% fewer face-to-face interactions than in offices where workers work in their own private areas.
[00:18:03] This is probably exactly the opposite of what you would think would happen, as if you can see someone it’s much easier to lean over and ask them a question, but what this survey found is that open-plan offices actually mean that people tend to send instant messages or emails more if they can see someone than if they can’t.
[00:18:26] Perhaps you can recognise this in your own behaviour. I certainly can with mine, as the offices I’ve worked in have almost always been open plan, and with instant messaging and email, if I can see someone is concentrating hard it’s easier to send them a message rather than go over and tap on their shoulder to ask them a question.
[00:18:49] In a cubicle or personal office environment, as you can’t see what the other person is doing, it’s much more common, so this study suggested, to physically go over to that person.
[00:19:02] So, somewhat counterintuitively, breaking down the physical walls puts up an imaginary wall, and it is worse for collaboration, according to this study at least.
[00:19:15] Right, this brings us to the modern day.
[00:19:19] Clearly, the internet and software have meant that many jobs that would previously have required people to go into offices now can be done without an office: from home, from a coffee shop, from anywhere.
[00:19:34] If you worked in an office in 2020, you probably only did so for a few months before you were sent home to see this for yourself.
[00:19:43] All of a sudden, offices lay empty, kitchen tables or spare bedrooms became “offices”, and remote work became the norm, not the exception.
[00:19:56] When it seemed clear that, yes, most companies could function like this without imploding, and obviously it is cheaper to not pay for every employee to sit at an office, there were a plethora of articles announcing the “death of the office”, imagining a world where everyone worked from home.
[00:20:17] On one level, it sounded like it made sense.
[00:20:21] Many employees liked the flexibility of being able to work from home. Whether it was being able to spend more time with kids or on your own activities, given that you didn’t have to commute, or whether it was simply being able to be in your own environment, clearly remote working was popular with many employees.
[00:20:42] What’s more, office space, especially in prime city centre locations, is really expensive.
[00:20:50] Even for a relatively small company, 100 people let’s say, office costs can easily reach €100,000 a month in a city like London, so if this really was an unnecessary expense, and people would prefer not to go to the office, well sure, the office was dead.
[00:21:12] But fast forward three years, as you’ll know, many companies have gone the other way, forcing employees to come back to the office. No doubt you have seen headlines or videos about this, with bosses complaining about workers being less productive, or simply not working when they are “working from home”, and their company cultures suffering when everyone is in a different place.
[00:21:40] Now, this isn’t the place to comment on the extent to which this is true. I’ve worked in an office, and I’ve also worked remotely, both for other companies and for myself. I can see both arguments.
[00:21:54] If you’ve worked in an office, you’ve probably also worked remotely over the past few years, so you no doubt have your own perspective on your preference and how COVID affected your working environment.
[00:22:07] Bringing it back to the creation of the modern office, and the evolution of the place in which we work, the point to underline is that many companies are now opting for some sort of hybrid situation, allowing employees to work from home for a few days of the week, while perhaps reducing the size of their office or turning it into more of a collaborative space rather than a place to come every day and sit to do independent work.
[00:22:37] Google searches for “hybrid working” increased by 500% between November 2020, at the height of lockdowns in many countries, and February of 2022, when employees were being called back to the office en masse.
[00:22:53] So, is this the future of the office, some mix of in-person working with the flexibility of being able to work from home, or from anywhere in the world?
[00:23:04] Who knows.
[00:23:06] People have been working in offices for almost 300 years now, and the nature of what actually happens in an office, and how it should be structured, has been changing ever since.
[00:23:19] The final thing I’ll say is that, were I a betting man, I’d certainly put money on the office of the future looking very different from any office of today.
[00:23:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Creation Of The Modern Office.
[00:23:38] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are a die-hard cubicle lover, a devotee of the open-plan office, or you have never spent a day of your life working in an office, well, I hope this episode gave you a bit of background about how we got to this situation.
[00:23:55] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:58] What do you think the office of the future will look like?
[00:24:02] What do you like or dislike about cubicles or open plan offices? What is the best and worst office you have ever worked in? I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:24:15] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:22] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a place you probably know: the office.
[00:00:29] Perhaps you’re on your way to an office now, perhaps you’re on the way back after a long day at work, perhaps you’re even listening to this episode while sitting at your desk at an office, hoping your boss doesn’t see you.
[00:00:43] Perhaps you don’t work in an office, and never have.
[00:00:47] If so, you’re in a minority, as literally billions of people around the world go to an office every single day. So in this episode we are going to explore the question of why and how the modern office was created, and look at some of the developments that led us to this place.
[00:01:07] OK then, the creation of the modern office.
[00:01:15] If you were to travel back in time, let’s say to 500 years ago, find someone from the year 1523 and tell them about life in 2023, no doubt they would have lots of observations, plenty of questions.
[00:01:31] You wear funny clothes, you have huge objects that fly in the sky, you all seem to live so long, and you live in tall buildings in big cities.
[00:01:43] And what do you do all day?
[00:01:45] You get in something you call a car, or maybe you take a bus with other people, maybe you walk or you get on a bicycle.
[00:01:54] And you go to sit in a big room with other people all day long, looking at something you call a computer, stopping only to sit around a table and talk to other people.
[00:02:07] And you do this for…40 years? Almost all of your adult life?
[00:02:12] What is this mysterious place you go to all day, what do you do there, and…why?
[00:02:20] Of course, this person from 1523 would be no stranger to the concept of work, they might even spend more of their lives working than you, but the idea of a dedicated indoor space for working, the so-called “office”, would be most unfamiliar to them.
[00:02:40] So, in this episode we’re going to explore how we got to this point, how the idea of an office has developed over the years, and what lies ahead for how and where we work.
[00:02:53] If you look up the term “office” in a dictionary, you’ll find a definition that’s something like this: “a room, set of rooms, or building used as a place for commercial, professional, or bureaucratic work.”
[00:03:09] The key terms there are those three adjectives: commercial, professional or bureaucratic. If you are not involved in this sort of work, an office is something you probably don’t need.
[00:03:22] And for our person in 1523, and pretty much any period in history until relatively recently, the vast majority of the population were simply not involved with this sort of work.
[00:03:36] There were some notable exceptions - Chinese imperial bureaucrats or Medieval monks in Europe, for example, but the nature of work for most people was manual: growing or making stuff with their hands, or buying and selling things to other people directly.
[00:03:56] Monks might have had a separate room or cubicle where they would copy religious texts at a desk, but this was independent, solitary, work; there was little need for any kind of collaborative space.
[00:04:10] And even for people involved in more commercial activities, buying and selling goods, their place or work would have typically been, in Europe at least, also where they lived.
[00:04:23] The first real “offices”, in the sense of a large space dedicated to bureaucratic work, are thought to have arrived on the scene in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
[00:04:37] What is thought to be the first large office was built in 1726 in London, and was called The Old Admiralty Office. If you recognise the word “Admiralty” there, you might be able to guess what it was used for. An admiral is the most senior naval officer in the army. it’s the person who commands the navy.
[00:05:04] So, The Old Admiralty Office was the headquarters of the British Navy.
[00:05:10] And this word, combined with the date that this was built, 1726, gives us some indication about why this new “office” might have been required.
[00:05:23] It was just as the British Empire was starting, as British ships sailed around the world looking for new territories, new people to colonise, new dominions to rule over.
[00:05:35] We’ll skip over any discussion of the morality of this, but what is undeniable is that it was a very large, gargantuan, sprawling, organisation. Lots of people were involved, information needed to be shared, documents written, decisions to be made, orders to be given.
[00:05:57] There needed to be a centralised physical location where all of this would take place, and this was The Old Admiralty Office in central London.
[00:06:09] Strangely enough, the office is still standing, it’s used by the British government as the headquarters of the Department of International Trade, so funnily enough not all that much has changed in the almost 300 years since the building was first used.
[00:06:27] Shortly afterwards, The East India Company, which you can learn about in episode number 279, by the way, The East India Company opened its own dedicated office in the City of London, using it as a base to manage the huge bureaucracy involved with essentially governing an entire country, India, from thousands of kilometres away.
[00:06:50] So, what was actually happening in these early offices?
[00:06:55] Well, paperwork, essentially. Writing and copying letters, all by hand. It must have been deadly boring, and there is actually plenty of evidence of early office workers feeling exactly the same boredom and tedium that people do today.
[00:07:14] Here’s a short poem from an East India Company employee from 1852:
[00:07:21] “From twelve to one, think what’s to be done;
[00:07:24] From one to two, find nothing to do;
[00:07:27] From two to three, think it will be
[00:07:30] A great bore to stay till four”
[00:07:34] And here’s another quote, again from an East India Company employee in a letter complaining about his job: "Thirty years I have served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day."
[00:07:59] So, if you have had a bad day at work and you write a cross email to your colleague or your partner about how you can’t take it any more and you’re going to quit, well you will be following in a tradition that dates back as long as anyone has ever worked in an office.
[00:08:18] And in terms of the first 150 years or so of “office life”, of the existence of the office, the actual tasks required in an office were fairly similar and straightforward: writing letters, that was it, mostly.
[00:08:35] But in the late 19th century, there was a technological development that would revolutionise office life and would bring many more people into the office. Whether this was for better or worse, well you can be the judge of that.
[00:08:52] In 1868, an American inventor called Christopher Latham Sholes patented a machine for typing on paper. He had invented the typewriter.
[00:09:05] The effect of this was to greatly increase the speed at which letters could be written, and in so doing, greatly increase the number of letters being sent, therefore the number of letters that needed to be responded to, essentially ballooning the bureaucratic class.
[00:09:24] The office became a place dominated by the tapping of typewriters, as workers spent their days typing letters.
[00:09:33] The typewriter also revolutionised the demographic makeup of the office.
[00:09:39] Up until then, so we’re talking about the late 19th century, the office had been dominated by men, with only 2.5% of the office workforce in the United States being female in 1870.
[00:09:55] By 1930, over half of American office workers were female, reflecting the number of women who were employed tapping away on the typewriters.
[00:10:06] Although you can look at the typewriter and conclude that it was something of a slavemaster to tens of millions of women over the years, with offices being sexist places where women were thought capable of nothing more than mindless bureaucratic work, it did give women a socially acceptable shot at independence.
[00:10:29] Up until the invention of the typewriter, employment options for women in places like the US and the UK were pretty limited.
[00:10:39] Becoming a typist was a respectable job that a well-educated woman could do without damaging her marriage prospects. Before this, really the only other socially acceptable option for an educated woman, in the UK at least, was to become a governess, a sort of live-in teacher.
[00:11:01] So, strangely enough, the typewriter did offer new opportunities to women who were forced to live in a society that still considered them second-class citizens.
[00:11:12] Right, so the typewriter was invented in the late 19th century. It made written communication much faster, with some estimates having it tripling productivity of workers versus handwritten notes.
[00:11:26] Of course, this didn’t mean that people did one third as much work, they worked for one third of the amount of time, or the number of office employees shrunk by a third.
[00:11:38] Quite the opposite. It resulted in an increase in bureaucracy, more letters needing to be written, and more people spending their days working at the office.
[00:11:50] As to the layout of the typical office of the era of the typewriter, well, this will no doubt be familiar to fans of TV series from this era, and perhaps if you are one of our older listeners, you might remember this era yourself.
[00:12:06] Offices were typically divided into large central areas, more like a factory floor, where the mainly female secretarial work was done - the typing of letters, essentially. And then smaller, private offices where the men worked.
[00:12:22] And as the office class continued to grow, and there was an increasing scientific interest, we could say, in the efficiency of offices, there were some radical new proposals about how these spaces should be structured.
[00:12:39] Probably the most influential came in 1964, with an invention from the furniture company Herman Miller.
[00:12:48] Now, you might know the name Herman Miller from its very expensive office chairs, but its revolutionary invention was not a chair, or at least it was not only a chair.
[00:13:01] Two designers from Herman Miller had looked at how modern offices were set up, with their big factory-like banks of workers in the middle, they had realised that work was increasingly knowledge work, it required thought and some level of creativity, and decided that the set-up of modern offices wasn’t conducive to this kind of work.
[00:13:25] So, they designed something called “The Action Office”.
[00:13:31] The Action Office was essentially a series of desks and pieces of furniture that got a worker moving around, physically doing stuff, rather than sitting at one simple desk all day long. The idea was to give the worker more freedom of expression, and thus lead to productivity increases.
[00:13:53] Although it was well-received by the design community, office bosses didn’t like it. It was too expensive and took up too much space.
[00:14:04] The designers went back to the drawing board, taking the best parts from “The Action Office”, and they came up with “The Action Office II”, the revamped model. The Action Office II was similar in many ways, but it was cheaper and packed workers more closely together.
[00:14:24] You might be able to imagine what The Action Office II would come to be called.
[00:14:29] It was the office cubicle, the set of moveable low walls that creates a kind of mini private office within a larger room.
[00:14:40] It sold like hotcakes, it was incredibly popular, and this “cubicle” format became the dominant form of office design in most American offices, and in many offices around the world.
[00:14:55] It was loved by bosses, because it was cheap and meant that workers could be packed into relatively small spaces, while still having some sense of privacy.
[00:15:06] And as for workers, well, perhaps if you work or have worked in a cubicle you’ll have your own idea about whether it’s a pleasant experience or not, but cubicle-based offices are often criticised as being hostile and impersonal work environments, factories pretending to be offices.
[00:15:27] But as more and more offices subscribed to this “cubicle” design, there were differing proposals for alternatives, other visions of how offices could be arranged.
[00:15:40] Cubicles had been popular because they were cheap ways of creating semi-private offices for everyone, but they stood criticised of creating unnecessary walls, barriers, between employees, with one architect going so far as to call them “fascist and totalitarian”.
[00:16:01] So, what was the alternative?
[00:16:04] Well, tearing down the walls, returning to something more akin to a factory-style set-up of banks of desks, workers sitting side by side, able to see one another and talk to each other without anything in the way.
[00:16:21] The name for this was the “open-plan office”, and the logic for laying out offices in this way was to increase communication between employees, to facilitate collaboration, to enable better decisions, and ultimately to make workers more productive.
[00:16:40] These open-plan offices were first proposed, in fact, shortly after the arrival of the cubicles, but they too were not without their fair share of critics.
[00:16:52] If you work or have worked in an open-plan office, no doubt you’ll be familiar with some of the criticisms of this set-up. Big banks of desks with no partitions between people, you can see everyone else, overhear conversations, people can see your computer screen, you have no privacy.
[00:17:13] Of course, this is the point, the entire idea is to break down the barriers, but half a century after the invention, or at least the popularisation of the open-plan office, there are plenty of questions about whether it actually works.
[00:17:31] Is it a better set-up, are employees more productive, do they collaborate more in an open-plan office?
[00:17:39] As you might imagine, there has been plenty of research into this. And the results are often surprising.
[00:17:47] Strangely enough, there was one study done that suggested that people working in open-plan offices have 70% fewer face-to-face interactions than in offices where workers work in their own private areas.
[00:18:03] This is probably exactly the opposite of what you would think would happen, as if you can see someone it’s much easier to lean over and ask them a question, but what this survey found is that open-plan offices actually mean that people tend to send instant messages or emails more if they can see someone than if they can’t.
[00:18:26] Perhaps you can recognise this in your own behaviour. I certainly can with mine, as the offices I’ve worked in have almost always been open plan, and with instant messaging and email, if I can see someone is concentrating hard it’s easier to send them a message rather than go over and tap on their shoulder to ask them a question.
[00:18:49] In a cubicle or personal office environment, as you can’t see what the other person is doing, it’s much more common, so this study suggested, to physically go over to that person.
[00:19:02] So, somewhat counterintuitively, breaking down the physical walls puts up an imaginary wall, and it is worse for collaboration, according to this study at least.
[00:19:15] Right, this brings us to the modern day.
[00:19:19] Clearly, the internet and software have meant that many jobs that would previously have required people to go into offices now can be done without an office: from home, from a coffee shop, from anywhere.
[00:19:34] If you worked in an office in 2020, you probably only did so for a few months before you were sent home to see this for yourself.
[00:19:43] All of a sudden, offices lay empty, kitchen tables or spare bedrooms became “offices”, and remote work became the norm, not the exception.
[00:19:56] When it seemed clear that, yes, most companies could function like this without imploding, and obviously it is cheaper to not pay for every employee to sit at an office, there were a plethora of articles announcing the “death of the office”, imagining a world where everyone worked from home.
[00:20:17] On one level, it sounded like it made sense.
[00:20:21] Many employees liked the flexibility of being able to work from home. Whether it was being able to spend more time with kids or on your own activities, given that you didn’t have to commute, or whether it was simply being able to be in your own environment, clearly remote working was popular with many employees.
[00:20:42] What’s more, office space, especially in prime city centre locations, is really expensive.
[00:20:50] Even for a relatively small company, 100 people let’s say, office costs can easily reach €100,000 a month in a city like London, so if this really was an unnecessary expense, and people would prefer not to go to the office, well sure, the office was dead.
[00:21:12] But fast forward three years, as you’ll know, many companies have gone the other way, forcing employees to come back to the office. No doubt you have seen headlines or videos about this, with bosses complaining about workers being less productive, or simply not working when they are “working from home”, and their company cultures suffering when everyone is in a different place.
[00:21:40] Now, this isn’t the place to comment on the extent to which this is true. I’ve worked in an office, and I’ve also worked remotely, both for other companies and for myself. I can see both arguments.
[00:21:54] If you’ve worked in an office, you’ve probably also worked remotely over the past few years, so you no doubt have your own perspective on your preference and how COVID affected your working environment.
[00:22:07] Bringing it back to the creation of the modern office, and the evolution of the place in which we work, the point to underline is that many companies are now opting for some sort of hybrid situation, allowing employees to work from home for a few days of the week, while perhaps reducing the size of their office or turning it into more of a collaborative space rather than a place to come every day and sit to do independent work.
[00:22:37] Google searches for “hybrid working” increased by 500% between November 2020, at the height of lockdowns in many countries, and February of 2022, when employees were being called back to the office en masse.
[00:22:53] So, is this the future of the office, some mix of in-person working with the flexibility of being able to work from home, or from anywhere in the world?
[00:23:04] Who knows.
[00:23:06] People have been working in offices for almost 300 years now, and the nature of what actually happens in an office, and how it should be structured, has been changing ever since.
[00:23:19] The final thing I’ll say is that, were I a betting man, I’d certainly put money on the office of the future looking very different from any office of today.
[00:23:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Creation Of The Modern Office.
[00:23:38] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are a die-hard cubicle lover, a devotee of the open-plan office, or you have never spent a day of your life working in an office, well, I hope this episode gave you a bit of background about how we got to this situation.
[00:23:55] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:58] What do you think the office of the future will look like?
[00:24:02] What do you like or dislike about cubicles or open plan offices? What is the best and worst office you have ever worked in? I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:24:15] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:22] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
