The People Puzzle

Published on Fri 16 Dec 2011

The news that the official human population of the Earth exceeded 7 billion for the first time in October provoked the expected bout of soul searching and anxiety. Many of the concerns expressed were nakedly Malthusian in their pessimism. Although people might have assumed we’d left behind this kind of flawed thinking, there is obviously something appealing about the idea that exponential population growth is unsustainable when resources increase only in arithmetical terms. What we should have learned in the two centuries since Thomas Malthus first popularised the idea is that there are complex and interrelated factors that can influence the resources we need to survive, not least in terms of greater efficiency in the way we produce them.

A similar debate is also apparent in the way in which the commercial property market is able to offer the right sort of buildings for modern organisations. ‘It’s always been a complex equation at the best of times,’ says Ann Clarke, Group Design Director of Claremont Group Interiors. ‘But the accelerating pace of change in technology and working practices is making things ever more challenging. The major complicating factor here is how to square off a relatively fixed resource like a building with the demands of its occupants which can change from day to day. Add in the need to keep costs down and you are left with a heady mix that can only ultimately drive organisations to sweat more out of their assets. But within limits.’  

The most immediate manifestation of this is the ongoing pressure on space allocations for employees. In its 2009 Guide to Specification, the British Council for Offices (BCO) reported that the average occupational density of a British office had increased by around 40 per cent since 1997. As a result the BCO increased its density standard from the previous advisory 12-17 sq m to 8-13 sq m per person. However, the actual new average benchmark for the office environment has been set at 10 sq m. Just two years on, even this is now generally seen as high especially in sectors such as financial services. The BCO launched a fresh research project in September of this year to bring its guidance up to date and it is expected to find another significant leap. 

‘Even this figure hides another layer of complexity because it is not based solely on the number of people who work nine to five in a fixed place in an office,  but on a new idea of the office as a base to work from for an increasingly mobile workforce,’ explains Clarke. 

‘The idea that this would come to pass has been with us for some time,’ explains Paul Statham of Condeco Software. ‘I recall there was great deal of talk about hot desking and flexible working nearly twenty years ago with many predicting the death of the office. Personally I think we are only human and the majority of people will always need or want to go out to work, but there’s no doubt that things are changing beyond recognition. It used to be the case that space planners applied a fairly simple mathematical model based on the usable internal space of the building divided by the number of the people that had to fit into it multiplied by a factor for each person’s status. Nowadays, the workplace is no longer about space allocation, but space utilisation and that will require a different mindset from developers, occupants, facilities managers, staff, designers and architects. Everybody in fact.’

‘The past few years have seen structural changes in the way firms design and manage their workplaces,’ says Clarke. ‘Mobile technology and new working practices have meant that time is no longer the fixed element that determines the way we use space. It has become a variable and that has changed everything. As always, it is technology that has been the catalyst for this change. The mobile workforce is a consequence of the mobile technology it uses. Even for office based employees,  flat screens have been  a powerful force for change by flattening workstation footprints by around a fifth and allowing more people to work in the same space. The most obvious manifestation of this change in recent years has been the dominance of the bench desk as the core element of an office furniture installation.’

‘The bench is absolutely a product of the times,’ explains Grant Morrison of Methis Furniture. ‘There are very good reasons why with all the space planning and product options now available to us that a product like a bench should have taken off in quite the way it has. It has significant advantages and simply represents the best response to contemporary needs in terms of its simplicity, flexibility, space efficiency, price and ability to create environments for teamworking and desk sharing. 

But increasing the occupational density of a building is not just an interior design issue. ‘One of the major implications of change is the impact it has on a building’s infrastructure,’ says Clarke. ’ When you increase the number of people in a given space it inevitably has a major effect on the specification of the building. Toilets have to be specified accordingly, environmental systems, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical systems, escape routes, all must be dealt with intelligently. One of the biggest challenges comes when dealing with these issues in buildings that have been designed for the past, a place where things are being done very differently. I think that is one of the reasons why the fit-out and refurbishment of existing buildings is now such a focus of the work we do.’

As well as the time lag in the property sector, health and safety legislation is also playing catch-up. For example, when it comes to providing a productive working environment in terms of air quality, most of the existing regulations are related to now dated models of space allocation. So most guidance is based on the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and the Display Screen Equipment (DSE) regulations of the same year. 

‘Both sets of regulations are clearly outmoded,’ says Tabish Aiman of DAS Business Furniture. ‘The basic  idea from the former is that you should allocate around 11 cubic metres of space within the building per person,  which we know is not always likely nowadays, is based on old technology and is also determined by ceiling heights. The DSE regulations are based on people using cathode ray tube monitors and desk based working with a single fixed PC which we also know is no longer the case for the majority of people. While there is also a general duty of care under the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974 which covers pretty much everything without going into specifics there is still a problem with the Workplace Regulations in that they ask for things like ‘a sufficient quantity of fresh or purified air’. Well, define ‘fresh’ and ‘sufficient’. The regulations also fail to take fully into account other factors such as humidity, airborne particles and chemicals, heat, air conditioning, planting, smells and so on. In many cases it is up to facilities managers to set their own parameters.’

One other aspect of working culture that is likely to act as a brake on the relentless increase in occupational densities is that of personal space. Already we are seeing signs that we may be at the limit of  people’s tolerance for the presence, smell, sight and sound of other people. Hence the growth of interest in the subject of proxemics.

Fortunately we can put exact figures on the point at which the proximity of our fellow humans becomes an issue. The father of proxemics in the modern sense is cultural researcher Edward T Hall, who claimed that people typically have up to three zones of comfort. These are dependent on the level of intimacy with the other person, and are classified as ‘intimate’, ‘personal’, ‘social’ and ‘public’. The one generally employed at work is social and is actually measurable at between 1.2m and 3.5m.
‘The impact of invasion of personal space in any situation is a real one,’ says Clarke. ‘It has potentially very negative consequences, not least of which is an increase in stress and anxiety levels among workers. Think how it feels when someone is stood over your shoulder watching you work, or if someone sits too close on public transport. It’s not something that anyone would want to form part of their daily working routine, even if they could draw comfort from the fact that their employer was saving a lot of money by forcing them shoulder to shoulder with colleagues.’

‘The human element also acts as a limit on occupational densities in other ways,’ says Paul Statham. ‘Nobody could deny that technology has evolved to allow us to make almost limitless changes in the way we use workspaces. Yet people are still essentially the same creatures that were hunting and gathering over 50,000 years ago and we must work with that knowledge when designing and managing offices. This means addressing a range of issues including how the individual can be offered some autonomy and control. This embraces not only key issues such as working practices and ergonomics, but also empowering people to make decisions about where and how they work and with whom. Technology may have driven the underlying changes in the first place but it is a great enabler of a new kind of approach. In any system with people involved there is a natural brake on going too far but there are plenty of opportunities to strike the right balance.’

*This article was published in FM World, December 2011

**Picture by suphakit73