What is the main drawback of traditional office layouts?
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
Computers and electronic communications are allowing many people to use their homes as offices. But offices will never disappear entirely. Instead, the office of the future may become like home.
AMERICAN managers who want to get more out of their white–collar workforce will be in for a shock if they seek advice from Frank Becker, a professor at Cornell University who studies the patterns of office work.
Mr. Becker is one of a group of academics and consultants trying to make companies more productive by linking new office technology to a better understanding of how employees work. The forecast of a decade ago that computers would increase office productivity, reduce white–collar payrolls and help the remaining staff to work better – have proved much too hopeful. Mr. Becker, who unfortunately calls himself an "organizational ecologist", is trying to find out why the huge sums of money spent on office automation have produced such disappointing results. He is leading a two–year study on offices called “Workscape 21”. Sponsored by Cornell, the study is financed by firms in America, Japan, Britain and Holland.
Even before completing the study, Mr. Becker has firm ideas about how the office of the future should look. Technology, better communications, rising inner–city land costs (once today's property bust is over) and the trials of commuting will, he predicts, prompt more workers to split time between a central office, a computer–equipped home office and perhaps a satellite office in a suburban business park.
Even those few workers based at the central office will be more mobile, moving between different work stations as their tasks change, taking their mobile telephones with them. This will cut the amount of wasted office space, says Mr. Becker. It will also improve communications between employees, by pushing them out of the tight and unchanging circle of people who sit nearby.
Mr. Becker predicts that the central office will become mainly a place where workers from satellite and home–based offices meet to discuss ideas and to reaffirm their loyalty to fellow employees and the company. This will require new thoughts about the layout of office buildings. Now, spaces for copying machines, coffee rooms, meetings and reception areas usually come second to the offices in which people spend most of the day working. Mr. Becker sees these common areas gradually becoming the heart of an office. He even believes that many central offices will come to resemble a hotel lobby or somebody's home – a disturbing thought, that, for people who find in the calm of the office a refuge from the rigors of family life.
Managers, says Mr. Becker, will also have to abandon their long–cherished notion that a productive employee is an employee that can be seen. Appearing on time and looking busy will soon become irrelevant. Technology and new patterns of office use will make companies judge people by what they do, not by where they spend their time.
That does not mean the end of the office, just its transformation into a social centre. Thomas Alien, a professor of management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied communication patterns between people, in the admittedly artificial environment of research laboratories. His less–than–startling conclusion is that people talk to each other more when they work in close proximity. Workers on different floors might as well be in different buildings, so rarely do they see one another.
Because buildings are seldom designed with employee–to–employee contact in mind, co–workers may barely know someone a few yards away, even though they have related jobs.
To show how this can be changed, Mr. Alien has helped one pharmaceutical firm to establish an experimental office designed to get chemists and biologists to talk more to each other. A similar bunch of employees, serving as a control group, is occupying a more conventional building. The two groups will be compared for such things as the time they take to complete reports and the rate at which they find new chemical compounds.
New ideas about offices are catching on elsewhere. IBM's British division will soon have all 1,000 of its headquarters’ employees working in "non–territorial" offices – places where they have no desk to call their own. And in California TRW and GTE arc trying to help employees cope with traffic problems and work more efficiently by setting up satellite offices. Digital Equipment Corp's subsidiary in Finland has equipped offices with reclining chairs and scuffed sofas to make them more comfortable and conducive to informal conversations and the swapping of ideas. Companies such as Apple and General Electric are experimenting along similar lines.
Steelcase, a manufacturer of office furniture, is one of the firms keenest to experiment with new office layouts and designs. The company's research center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a $111 m building completed in 1989. It is designed around a series of office "neighborhoods" that put marketing, manufacturing and design people close to each other so that they can find it easier to discuss ideas and solve problems. Employees on different floors can see one another through glass, and easily go from floor to floor via escalators.
Top managers work in a cluster of offices that are wrapped around an atrium in the middle of the building, rather than occupying the usual suite of top–floor offices. They can see, and be seen by, the people they manage. Mr. Allen, who worked as a consultant to Steelcase and argued vigorously for placing the bosses' offices in the middle of the building, believes it will improve managers' chances of bumping into the people they lead. "Who knows," he says, "they might even talk to them."
Enriching as it is to be constantly under the gaze of your superiors, Steelcase employees are also rather keen on 14 "think–tanks" located on the sixth floor of the pyramid. Intended for intense, individual work, these small offices are equipped with a computer, but no telephone. Available on a first–come, first–served basis, these havens are rarely unoccupied. Sometimes even the most communicative employee just wants to be left alone.