Private Offices

Private offices are usually thought of as traditional work spaces that force some difficult tradeoffs: workers get more privacy but less interaction with others, plenty of quiet concentration but no collaboration, and great image and status but limited function and flexibility.

Many private offices today fail miserably at supporting these new ways of working. They provide no separation between the private, contemplative area of the space, and the public, collaborative area, making it hard for workers to easily engage others. They also lack easy access to tools and visual displays for communicating ideas and information, a key to switching from individual work to collaborative work.

Since private offices usually house a company’s highest paid workers, how effectively those workers are supported in private offices is an important business issue. Steelcase research shows that new strategies for planning private offices, leveraging technology, and supporting the diverse ways people work today, can make the private office more effective, not only for the people who work in these offices but for the organization overall.