Significant indicators in workspace design

Expert

These tools produce a variety of management indicators, but not all are equally important. In fact, some will appear as "prominent indicators", i.e., they "play the role of banners with which an organization or groups of actors assert and consolidate their positions" (Boussard, 2001, p.533).

These indicators reveal the stakes involved in transforming our workspaces. As part of my research with space-planning and general contracting companies, I took an interest in the indicators prevalent in office design.

1. Functional links as indicators of productive performance
The main function of the "open-plan offices" invented in the 1950s was to improve employee productivity by enhancing the flow of information between them (Pillon, 2016). This quest for performance is still important today in design models.

To grasp this issue in the design of workspaces, office designers will conduct interviews with team leaders and certain staff representatives to determine which teams need to work together. These functional links will be a key indicator in the design of macro-zoning plans. On these plans, space-planners seek to position teams with functional links between them next to each other, to facilitate their exchanges.

2. Office occupancy and workstation activity as real-estate performance indicators
Historically, office layouts were designed to improve production performance, but they also allowed for a degree of flexibility, with workstations that could be adapted to meet specific needs. Today, with the financialization of real estate (Nappi-Choulet, 2013), companies are looking for building flexibility (Pillon, 2016). New developments are designed to optimize office use, but also to enhance the value of real estate assets by encouraging the construction of new buildings, considered a more profitable investment (Duros, 2022).

To take this financial performance into account, developers measure office occupancy (using occupancy surveys or sensors) to determine the occupancy rate, i.e. the average number of workstations occupied in a building or on a floor. This indicator is used on flex-office projects to calculate the office flexibility rate, i.e. the number of available workstations per employee. On certain occupancy measurement applications, it is also possible to indicate employee activity: telephone calls, computer activity, discussions, etc.

Occupancy rate and activity appear to be key indicators when designing micro-zoning. Designers use this data to define the number of workstations and types of space (meeting rooms, shared offices, work cubicles, etc.) according to the task or tasks performed by employees.

As we've just seen, functional links, occupancy rates and workstation activity enable layout professionals to design workspaces that meet a company's production and real-estate expectations.

However, these performance objectives sometimes appear to be at odds with each other. My research into design work shows that financial performance is sometimes achieved at the expense of productive performance (Butin, 2022).

One of today's major challenges in workspace management is to offer companies decision-making tools that reconcile the financial and productive performance of workspaces.

Bibliographic references

Boussard, V. (2001). Quand les règles s’incarnent L’exemple des indicateurs prégnants. Sociologie du travail, 43(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.4000/sdt.35527

Butin, A. (2022). L’organisation spatiale du travail à l’épreuve de la financiarisation. Sociologies pratiques, 44(1), 93‑104.

Duros, M. (2022). L’édifice de la valeur. Sociologie de la financiarisation de l’immobilier en France (fin des années 1980-2019). L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Nappi-Choulet, I. (2013). La financiarisation du marché immobilier français : De la crise des années 1990 à la crise des subprimes de 2008. Revue d'économiefinancière, N° 110(2), 189‑206.

Pillon, T. (2016). Retour sur quelques modèles d’organisation des bureaux de 1945 à aujourd’hui. La nouvelle revue du travail, 9,

Release date: July 2023