Described as the first formal sociological examination of the American workspace, "Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace" by Nikil Saval (Doubleday) documents changes in the physical office environment–from the "countinghouses" of the 1850s to the cube farms of the '80s and '90s, through today's "collaborative workspaces" and co-working arrangements.
Saval examines the technology, architecture, social mores and pop culture surrounding the changes in the physical workplace. In the Civil War era, clerks and bosses sat cheek by jowl at high desks, the clerks hand-copying documents. The typewriter and the telegraph revolutionized the office; as women emerged into the workplace as stenographers and typists, the steno pool was born and managers retreated into their own offices.
From there, the morphing of the American workspace followed technology and the popular thinking of the day—from Frederick Taylor's time and motion efficiency studies that broke each office worker's tasks down to a codified, measurable unit, to the wacky workplace-as-playground feel of the dot.com era.
As a business driven by clear-cut processes and the need for very specific, wordy documents, insurance has always been known as the realm of the proverbial paper-pusher. In popular culture such as Billy Wilder's 1960 satire "The Apartment," hapless protagonist C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) sits at Desk No. 861 at imaginary Consolidated Life Insurance, one of the "home office's 31,259 employees." Scenes show Baxter and hundreds of other employees seated in uniform rows of identical desks.
Because "the basic features of insurance work were factory-like" and "ensuring an even flow of paperwork was an important concern," as Saval observes, such arrangements were typical at insurance businesses since the introduction of the typewriter. But as technology advanced, architects and space designers began to rethink what the insurance workplace should look like.
Here are three examples from Saval's research when an insurance company set precedent in rethinking and redesigning the workplace.
The 1920s: Met Life's Jazz Age work/life balance
In the 1920s, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, was one of the largest and most iconic of the day. Lauded by historian Olivier Zunz as being "a model of domestic cleanliness," Met Life's headquarters in midtown Manhattan were a far cry from the sooty, cramped offices of the 19th century: smoking was forbidden, as were the cuspidors of the traditional all-male offices of old.
With the introduction of the first commercial produced typewriter in 1867, more young, single women flooded into the workforce as typists and stenographers. By 1926, 88% of secretarial positions were held by women, who comprised nearly 100% of typists, stenographers, file clerks and switchboard operators.
To ensure that its female workforce would be unharassed by male coworkers, Met Life segregated rest areas, entrances, hallways, elevators and stairs by sex. In keeping with the Taylorist vision of time and motion management, supervisors walked the floors to keep workers quiet during the working day.
But Met Life also introduced recreational programs for its thousands of clerical employees, including jazz dance lessons, which were also segregated by sex: "Though Met Life's women—advertised in their brochures as the 'Metropolitan Belles'—were permitted to learn only among themselves, groups of males and female often gathered on the roof of the building to practice dancing."
The 1950s: Connecticut General goes suburban
Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. led the post-World War II charge from the city to the suburbs in 1957 with a low-slung, three-story office building on a 300-acre "campus" in Bloomfield, Conn. The project was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architects that also designed the Lever House (1952), which helped usher in the age of the glass skyscraper. Interior design was by Florence Schust Knoll, who studied with Mies van der Rohe among others.
The Connecticut General building's open-floor design was an early example of modular office space and recombinable partitions, desks and cabinets, designed to facilitate the flow of paperwork.
"Ensuring an even flow of paperwork was an important concern of SOM and Knoll's design; as a result of their meticulous planning the entire building hummed with the smoothness of an assembly line," Savil writes. "Even the fact that escalators rather than elevators conveyed people through the various floors enhanced this impression."
To entice staffers from New York to relocate to the new space, the campus offered amenities like swimming pools, a library, and classes in languages, singing and automobile repair.
The 1990s: Dutch insurer Interpolis introduces "activity-based" workspace
In 1994, consultant and author ("The Demise of the Office") Erik Veldhoen was commissioned by Netherlands insurance giant Interpolis to redesign the company's workspace after a large layoff. The result was an ingenious plan based on "activity-based working."
Teams were assigned to floors, where there was a variety of work settings—private offices, semi-open spaces and totally open spaces. Private desks were abolished; workers instead had lockers, a "home zone," an internal mobile phone, and the ability to work at home as much as they needed (today, about 2,500 employees work from home several days a week, according to the OpenBuildings website).
Although the rank-and-file employees readily adopted the new approach, managers were initially concerned that workers would shirk their duties. Instead, studies found that workers seemed to seek each other out more, and internal communication increased–although they did tend to seek out the same spot to work.
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