When Erica Davis reported for her first day of work as chief marketing officer of Meetup a few months ago, she wasn’t ushered into one of those fancy offices to which corporate executives are often treated. Nor was she placed with the marketing group she had signed on to lead.
Instead, Davis found herself stationed at a very long, oblong table along with other company executives, computer monitors in front of them and ample personal space for family photographs and other personal items at each side.
“It was to help me build rapport with the other executives,” says the Jersey City resident.
Davis later moved to an open work area with her team of marketers, and when Meetup moves from Soho to Nomad later this year, Davis and her executive-level counterparts will each have two workspaces, one with the management team and the other with the group that they lead. The idea is to make collaboration easy and to create opportunities to learn from informal office chatter and such.
“I’m very deliberate about how and where people sit,” says Meetup’s CEO, David Siegel. And though not everyone at the company gets two workstations, there are plenty of physical spaces — picnic tables, table-tennis areas and more — where employees can extend or privatize their reach beyond their functional areas (such as marketing, IT, product design) and work together in product squads, project teams and such.
The company also wants employees who wouldn’t normally cross paths to meet, so it hosts company-wide “Eatup” and “TreatUp” events on Tuesday afternoons, where everyone gathers to share lunch or sweets.
Siegel is not the only CEO paying attention to spatial workplace arrangements.
Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat made headlines a few years ago when he told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that he had moved out of his office and into a cubicle. On Cramer’s “Mad Money” show, Corbat said that in the company’s open environment “information flows, there’s no doors, we come and go from each other’s spaces, we hold meetings together . . . There’s a trust factor there in terms of communication, and I think it’s resonating in the rest of the firm.”
Companies are redesigning and rethinking their workspaces to include elements like “hot desks,” which employees can claim for a few hours — desk users must clean them with an anti-bacterial wipe each day — or “neighborhood seating,” where staffers station themselves based upon their function or activity in progress, even temporarily seating high performers next to workers who need motivation or might benefit from observing another’s success. At some companies there are even options to work from the courtyard, kitchen or facsimiles of old-fashioned phone booths.
“There are definitely significant benefits to a more organic manner in how work space is used,” says Michael Bonomo, a workplace design expert at global architecture and design firm CannonDesign.
That’s something that the employees of digital mortgage company Better Mortgage learned the hard way. Before they moved from Soho to One World Trade Center, the company seated departments on different floors. It was a mistake.
“Teams felt they were really out of sync and wasting precious time from going up and down the elevator to ask each other questions,” says Graham Storey, the executive creative director at the firm.
In their new location, the office area is open and workers sit parallel to the team they interface with most often. “That way people can simply turn and ask their counterpart, ‘Hey, I need help on this,’ rather than walk around to a different part of the office,” Storey says.
At Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan, enclosed spaces are in the interior core of the building, allowing floor-to-ceiling glass windows to cast natural light on all spaces. Seating is defined by activity based working (ABW) practices. “We want to provide a variety of spaces to match the variety of activities our teams work on across the firm,” says Leslie Shribman, vice president of media relations for the company. Individual departments or teams decide between assigned and flexible seating.
Role-based seating is the ticket at people-management software maker Hibob in Tribeca, where workers who do the same thing sit in the same open area. “They can pick up tricks and tips by observing each other,” says the company’s head of sales, Bill Leys.
But aren’t workers who make cold calls humiliated when they blow it in front of a bunch of people? No, says Leys, explaining that the group helps workers shake off those kinds of situations.
“We all make mistakes and put our foot in our mouth now and then, but here it’s not about the individual. It’s about the team. Making calls in front of your co-workers is a good thing,” he says. At Hibob, workers who struggle are sometimes asked by their managers to swap workstations so that they can sit side by side with a high performer. It’s something that’s easy to do because their phones aren’t hard-wired and their file cabinets are on wheels.
Erik Dochtermann, CEO of MODCo Media, located near Madison Square Park, says that his company is about a year away (from a technological perspective) from inviting its staff to play musical chairs, where whoever gets to work first gets the preferred seat. At present, most of the company’s offices have been converted to break-out rooms, the most popular one featuring a standing-desk tabletop that can accommodate six people with their laptops.
“It is in rooms like this where one can see true team-building as well as opportunities for social bonding,” says Dochtermann.
When new employees are brought in, they sit alongside a variety of employees from whom they can learn.
“Putting recent college grads together does not increase their skills,” says Dochtermann. “They really need experienced mentorship for maximum gain.”
This shift has motivated employees of all levels to get up and go to another team member’s desk in a different part of the office, rather than e-mailing or messaging them.
“It creates a more cohesive environment across teams,” he says.
Teamwork — as well as opportunities to collaborate, learn from one another and make decisions together — are the primary reasons to come to the office in a world where many jobs can be done from anywhere, say experts.
As yet, the jury is out as to which seating arrangements win out. One thing that is certain is that companies all over the city, whether large or small, are experimenting with what the future of the workspace should look like.