The environment where we work in offices and spend the majority of our days has been top of mind lately. My company is busting at the seams and we are looking for new office space. With that, we’ve been touring space around Boston, looking for a new home, and looking to be inspired.
The space to us represents not just a place to show up and crank out work. It’s a place to gather and collaborate. It’s a place to call your second home. It’s a place to make magic happen.
I’m a pretty conceptual thinker. I’m decent at being able to walk into a space and envision what it might look like with an open mind. But lately, walking into these populated spaces, I’ve spent more time noticing what’s in the current spaces than imaging what we might do with the space if it became ours.
It started a few weeks ago, when we were exploring space in the Financial District. We walked into one space, and found row after row of cubes. The people occupying them reminded me of baby cows in pens, awaiting their transition to become veal. The next space we saw was filled with palpable silence. Plenty of people occupied the space, but there was not one conversation taking place. Today, we walked into a space that was taupe on taupe. They tried to jazz it up with a stripe of color along the top of the ceiling. And yet, again, no conversations, no smiling faces. And a dead ficus tree in the corner. I described it to my colleagues as soul sucking. I found my mood sad by the end of the morning.
How can a company thrive if the place where you work lacks so much inspiration? Granted, not everyone is going for the coolest, most modern space. But I can’t get my head around any company that wouldn’t aim to design a space to optimize people working together, and aiming to get the most out of those people. Doesn’t it make logical sense that if people are motivated to be in their work environment, they will produce better results?
Perhaps I’m naive. I’ve always worked in high energy, relatively “fun” places to work. Most people enter into our spaces and say “wow.” And we don’t have the coolest space. We hope to take our new space and make it more uniquely ours. But what we do have is an emphasis on our people. We’re designed to work together, and think together. White boards everywhere. Common areas to gather. Places nearby to eat and drink together. These things matter. We work hard together, and building these relationships enable us to work better together.
I walked away from these site visits wanting to hand my business card out to these people sitting in these dismal cubes and say, “Call me. We’re hiring.” But maybe they are happy. Maybe some people are comfortable with “comfortable.” I’m just not one of them.
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