Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!boxbro.dec.com!hersh
From: hersh@boxbro.dec.com (Harry Hersh)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: re: Cubicles vs. offices
Message-ID: <8802091831.AA26071@decwrl.dec.com>
Date: 9 Feb 88 18:31:17 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 31


 
About 5 years ago Steelcase, the office desk and cubicle manufacturer
commissioned a Gallup pole on attitudes toward office layouts. Although
I no longer have a copy of the report (it recently was purged in an
annual file cleaning), the results were clear and rather striking:
 
        o By a large and highly significant margin, office workers
          preferred offices with floor to ceiling walls. Next came
          cubicles, and last came bull-pens.
 
        o People responsible for the offices preferred bull-pens, then 
          cubicles, then full offices.
 
        o People responsible for the offices had very little insight
          into the attitudes of the workers in their offices.
          Moreover, they really were not concerned with the workers'
          attitudes.
 
The bottom line of the Gallup pole was that choice of office layout was
first and foremost an economic issue for management, with workers'
preferences accounting for next to nothing.
 
It is a little like the situation in the NFL with astro-turf. There is
clear evidence that football players experience more frequent and more
serious injuries playing on artifical grass than on natural grass. But
the artificial grass is more inexpensive to maintain. Love that profit
motive.
 
				Harry Hersh
				hersh@3D.dec.com