10月 14 2008
英语阅读 Do open plan offices work?
越来越流行的开放式办公室真的会提高工作效率吗？这篇文章比较简短和清晰。
Do open plan offices work?
Leo Benedictus
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 14 2008
Gordon Brown certainly thinks so. Yesterday it was reported that the prime minister will shortly be moving his team into 12 Downing Street, where there is room to create a large shared space that will reflect his famously relaxed personality and laid-back working style.
The idea of putting staff together in one big room is as old as the office itself. Certainly it seems to be the way that most journalists, for example, have always worked. The concept of providing non-allocated desks, however, is much more modern, with roots in Europe in the 1970s. Also known as “hotdesking”, the practice is now common in Scandinavia.
But could such an open working environment help to improve a flagging government’s performance? “Absolutely, yes,” says Alex Redgrave, head of consulting at HOK, a design firm that has helped the Guardian, among others, to plan its new office. “It’s all to do with trying to persuade people to move around the office, meet colleagues and exchange ideas. You’d have thought No 10 would have done that a long time ago to cut out all the little secret phone calls that must go on.”
Even so, senior staff who have been turfed out of their offices can be slow to adjust to perching on a stool with their laptop. And with this in mind, Brown himself must take the lead. “It is normally important,” says Richard Leyland, head of knowledge at the Cordless Group, a workplace consultancy, “that the guy at the top is also seen to be working in these flexible spaces, because employees are hypersensitive to this idea that they’re losing their status.”
Nevertheless, for more delicate tasks, Brown will need at least one private meeting room he can call on. “You don’t hire and fire in an environment where other people can hear the conversation,” says Leyland bluntly. The next reshuffle should be fun.
