| Most organizations have a physical footprint, and someone in those organizations makes choices about the physical place with an expectation for the effects it will have. Some highprofile companies commission dramatic buildings from leading architects, such as the new Apple Park in Cupertino, California, designed by Lord Norman Foster, with the goal of creating a “wonderfully open environment for people to create, collaborate and work together”. Even high-tech start-up companies with low budgets make considered choices about the work environments they provide, to attract employees, to encourage teamwork, and to send a message to customers and investors about their capacities to innovate. Business and design magazines alike publish glowing descriptions of these design features as the workplace opens, but very rarely do they feature long-term evidence about how well — or poorly — the design succeeded. This creates an information gap in which organizations remain unaware of the full benefits — or the hidden costs — of their capital and operating expenditures for spaces. One reason for this may be historical. Every undergraduate psychology student has heard about the now ninetyyear-old Hawthorne experiments, which famously observed that work output in an electrical manufacturing facility increased in response to increases in light level, decreases in light level, and replacement lamps that left the levels unchanged. Arguably, these findings led to the belief that lighting and other working conditions are irrelevant to job performance, and slowed down research into these effects for decades, whereas research into other aspects of management-employee relations has flourished. Similarly, Frederick Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene theory (published in the 1950s) suggested that job satisfaction emerges from the work itself and job dissatisfaction develops in response to contextual influences, known as “hygiene factors”. Herzberg believed that once the basic hygiene requirements are in place — enough light to see, space for materials, sufficient cleaning to prevent disease — working conditions ought not to matter very much to employee motivation. One sense in which Herzberg was correct is that employees find fulfilment and pleasure in making progress towards meaningful goals. |
