Building a Better Workplace, Part I: The Evolution of Office Design

As we analyze the client’s space objectives and design standards, our visioning process continues to look to the future, considering how emerging trends of today might shape what comes in another five or ten years. We work with the client to support new modes that they may seek to embrace, recognizing that the success of implementing flexible and alternative environments relies on communication, and sometimes depends on organizational reconfiguration, along with well-integrated and effective technology. Our work for every project represents a unique response that embodies an internal consistency of detail, materiality, sustainability, and technological integration.

This is decidedly not how it has always been.

Early enthusiasm for efficiency

The modern concept of the office began to emerge in 18th‑century England, when managing long‑distance trade and state administration in far-flung places around the globe generated unprecedented volumes of records and correspondence, requiring permanent staff, standardized procedures, and specialized spaces. Purpose‑built administrative buildings like London’s Old Admiralty Office (1726) and East India House (1729) centralized large clerical staffs, creating a template for the office as a dedicated place, with attendant function and bureaucracy.

Through the late 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and an expanding empire multiplied clerical needs, spreading the office model across Britain and later the United States, culminating in large, “scientifically managed” office floors by the late 1800s and into the early 1900’s. Scientific management theory drove regimented, factory-like office layouts with strict supervisory oversight. Electric lighting enabled deeper floor plates and denser office planning, consolidating even larger numbers of office workers into centralized spaces – while opening the door to longer workdays.

In the 1910s and 1920s, the scientific method’s application to office management was viewed as a path toward modernization and rationality. Office managers, inspired by this “Efficiency Movement,” began to further standardize clerical tasks, setting output quotas, and timing workflows much like the factory processes they meant to emulate. Advocates promoted it as a way to eliminate “waste motion,” improve productivity, and bring the predictability of industrial science into white-collar work. Large corporations and government departments, including railroads, insurance firms, and public utilities, adopted systems of time studies, filing benchmarks, and typing quotas to make clerical production “scientifically” efficient.

Worker and cultural resistance

Despite managerial enthusiasm, however, the office workforce reacted negatively. Many clerical employees – especially typists and file clerks – felt alienated by the loss of autonomy and the monotony of routinized, timed tasks. Critics argued that scientific management dehumanized employees, turning office workers into “automatons” and stripping away skill, individuality, and creativity. Labor groups and progressive reformers protested that the method essentially treated people as extensions of machines. This backlash paralleled industrial resistance led by trade unions.

The influence of scientific management extended to office design. Early 20th-century offices adopted open layouts. These were not the humanistic spaces we’ve come to know today. In fact they more resembled factory floors, to allow supervisors to oversee workers easily and measure performance. Workers were arranged in rows upon rows of desks, under watchful management, while executives occupied enclosed private offices. Silence and uniform work routines were enforced to maintain discipline and output.

Decline and transition

However, by the 1930s and 1940s, scientific management in offices began losing favor as the human-relations movement took hold. Psychologists and sociologists, reacting to the alienation produced by the methods in place, instead emphasized morale, teamwork, and motivation. Popular culture, film, and literature – like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times – satirized mechanistic excesses. The Great Depression and wartime mobilization shifted attention further toward social welfare and cooperation rather than a hypothetical “pure” efficiency.

Ultimately, while the early 20th-century office initially embraced the scientific method as a hallmark of progress and modernization, clerical workers and reformers reacted against its mechanical rigidity. The result was a cultural and managerial pivot by mid-century away from the factory-like office toward more human-centered management philosophies.

From Workplace 1.0 to Workplace 2.0

Gradually, professionalized office design concepts evolved toward the “Office Landscape” concept, grouping desks to promote communication, and using plants and acoustic screens to provide a sense of semi-privacy. The 1960s also saw early open-plan prototypes adopted to promote collaboration and flatten hierarchies fostered by closed offices. In the 1970s and 1980s, cubicles and systems furniture spread, to balance privacy with standardization, and to accommodate emerging IT infrastructure, reshaping office floors into modular, individualized workstations.

The 2000s and 2010s saw a strong return to open-plan environments, to boost interaction and space efficiency, though research and worker feedback exposed drawbacks in noise and focus. Designers increasingly combined open areas with enclosed focus rooms and phone booths, reflecting a hybrid of collaboration and privacy needs.

The 2020s brought dramatic change to the workplace – and right away. March of 2020 ushered in a full-blown Covid-19 pandemic. By the middle of that month, schools were shutting down, stores were drastically limiting occupancy, and businesses were left to figure out what to do next.

What followed proved to be a watershed moment in how business is conducted, kicking off a fundamental transformation of what the workplace is, and how to best use it.

Accelerating Acceleration

Shifts in workplace design were certainly beginning to emerge before 2020, but change was greatly accelerated by the realities of the pandemic. Suddenly, a full, densely packed office was taboo. Face-to-face meetings were greatly restricted, if not banned altogether. Traffic patterns between desks and in hallways were subject to microscopic scrutiny.

And business adapted, pivoting to technology solutions, replacing closed-room meetings with what were at the time largely untested applications like Zoom and Teams. And, despite some early hiccups around security and privacy, the applications served the purpose well. Business found that those same technologies could help reduce in-office requirements (to zero days per week, in many cases). Creating flexible scheduling to accommodate both those who worked remotely and those who needed to be on-site, many organizations managed to conduct something very close to “business as usual” across a period of time that was anything but business as usual.

There were takeaways from that long year or so, when people worked from kitchen tables and spare bedrooms, or sitting in their cars outside the public library to use the Wi-Fi signal. Business learned that the lines that tethered us to the office could be lengthened – almost infinitely – and that by using tools that were readily available, it was also possible to work from almost anywhere. Business also learned that – as appealing as remote work can be – the office, with its array of conference rooms, and huddle spaces, and the camaraderie of workmates, is in fact a critical aspect of getting the job done.

With the sophistication of technology improving the ease with which employees can work remotely, coupled with the need to be in the office among coworkers at least some of the time to maintain a human connection, and with the increased emphasis on employee health and well-being, a changed work environment was inevitable.

As designers face the future, this inevitability has speeded the rise of the hybrid office – a dynamic workplace model designed to accommodate and accentuate both remote and in-person work. Recent trends in commercial interior design show significant shifts in the workplace, meant to meet employee expectations and work patterns.

But what the future truly brings is yet to be seen.

Coming next… The Future   

Written by
Michael Boyer, IIDA, LEED AP
Studio Director – Interior Design