When Brian Lang was appointed president of MasterCard Canada this past March, he inherited a workspace in downtown Toronto that was divided between two floors, linked only by public elevators and emergency stairwells.
The office at the corner of Bloor and Yonge streets features work stations organized by department. Short walls divide each desk – the kind you can see over when standing but not when sitting – all surrounded by executive offices, including the "huge corner office," as Mr. Lang describes it, which was designated for the president.
"I inherited that office and then turned it into a sitting and meeting room," he said.
In November, MasterCard Canada will move a few of buildings over and across the road into a new space just a few floors above the Shaw Media television studio. The new workspace will feature interdisciplinary desk clusters of four to eight employees from various departments, this time without dividers between them.
The desk clusters will line the sunlit perimeter of the two-storey workspace – which will be connected by interior stairs – encircling a series of private meeting rooms and quiet work spaces. There will be a room with a gaming console, a cafeteria where all employees can eat lunch together and desks for temporary work or just a change of scenery.
"The offices of the management team will no longer exist," Mr. Lang said. "All of my management team, including myself, will all be sitting in an open space."
Nigel Scott-Williams, regional manager for office-furniture supplier VS America of Charlotte, N.C., has researched and designed office layouts for more than 25 years, working with a companies such as Microsoft, Apple and BMW. He likens ideal work space to something between a mall and a library; a place where you can stop in to different departments as needed, move around between benches, tables and couches or have a casual chat with a colleague at a café.
"That collection of multispace types in a close enough proximity where you have smaller neighbourhoods in the larger open plan, and everything you need is close by, so you can transfer from one work mode to the other and it accommodates the different learning and work styles of different people, because they're not all the same," he said.
Since organizations begin experimenting with open office concepts in the 1960s, researchers, architects, managers and employees have described such work spaces as everything from a way to increase interoffice collaboration, promote dialogue and foster innovation to an inexpensive surveillance technique intended to decrease costs-per-desk while increasing employee oversight.
Many believe that's because open office spaces were conceived with the best of intentions, but quickly became subject to corporate pressures that focused more on cost savings.
"It becomes a cramming exercise of tables in an open plan, and they killed the whole concept [of collaborative work]," said Mr. Scott-Williams. "If you ask the CEO 'How is this working for you?' the first response is about the cost savings on real estate, how much cheaper the furniture was because it's simpler than expensive cubicles, it's all about what they saved on product and real estate, which tells me they don't get what they just did."
According to a study by Steelcase, an office supply manufacturer, more than 70 per cent of American employees work in an open office environment, and their work stations have shrunk from an average of 225 square feet per worker in 2010 to just 190 in 2013. Furthermore, Ethan Bernstein, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, will soon release a study that suggests that face-to-face communication actually decreases in most open office environments.
"Participants in the new, completely open office space spent more than 50 per cent less time interacting face-to-face, and sent and received more than 30 per cent more e-mail," he said. "We're now in a world where privacy is more expensive than transparency in every location, including office space. If that's the case, we should be thinking not about how we invest in more transparency but how we invest in more privacy."
Dr. Bernstein and Mr. Scott-Williams believe that in order to achieve the intended results of collaboration and creativity, open office plans must provide a variety of work station types and accommodate a variety of working styles. While that key point was often lost on employers, the growing trend of providing flexible work options has seeped its way into office design.
"Once you move to a very flexible work environment – where people can work from home if that serves them best, they can work in here, they can hot desk if they want, they can move around – so there's a fair bit of flexibility built into our overall operating model around people and working, and now we build that same kind of flexibility into the open space," Mr. Lang said of MasterCard Canada's new office space.
Dr. Bernstein and Mr. Scott-Williams also believe that certain protocols and details, such as educating employees on how to best use the space, providing flexibility to accommodate various working styles and even the proximity of quiet rooms where impromptu conversations can continue, are key to fostering innovation and collaboration.
"A variety of spaces where you can choose to be so comfortable that you'd rather go there than be at home, because it's nicer than your house, that's the vision," Mr. Scott-Williams said. "Nobody can quantify it. You can't sell it and monetize it."
An earlier digital version of this story incorrectly attributed a 2014 study to Ethan Bernstein, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. In fact, he was citing a earlier survey done by office supply manufacturer Steelcase. This digital version has been corrected.