The Walls are Coming Down
Practically every business day, we hear from clients who want to lower their cubicle walls and open up their office space, but don’t want to blow their budget on all new furniture.
We’ve known for a long time tech savy millenials do not dig the Dilbert cube. Young office workers want to collaborate easily and often with their office mates without having to stand up and walk around a five foot griege panel. They also liked to mix in the occasional game of ping pong or pool. Robert Propst and his team at Herman Miller definitely didn’t have these guys in mind back in the late ‘60’s when they invented the cube.
It’s 2014 and if you look around you’ll see some of the biggest and best organizations in the country are lowering the walls and encouraging collaboration among the troops. And don’t think for a minute these guys didn’t do their homework before they decided to open things up a bit. Organizations like Google and McDonald’s spend a lot of money and time researching any decision and you can bet they wouldn’t do it this unless they knew it made bottom line sense and (cents).
Here’s the deal. We all know a happy worker is a more productive worker. Besides, smaller cubes with lower walls are cheaper and take up less real estate anyway. The new and improved cube is emerging from surgery better, cheaper and much cooler looking than ever before.
Not to worry if your open office doesn’t look like this yet. Very few offices do – yet. This (re)evolution of the cube will take time and in the meantime, Team Office can provide you with options. We’ve taken the pain out of this migration for many clients by doing everything from cutting down their panels, recovering them with bright new fabric and rearranging their existing cubes to buying their old cubes from them and allowing them to start over.
So – if you’d like to foster more collaboration and communication in your office, but don’t want to blow your budget on all new furniture – call Team Office today and talk to one of our workplace consultants about how you can bring those walls down.