Managers: Here's a Primer for Creating the Perfect, Productive Office

The field of workplace design can feel absurdly like political debate. You've got experts on one side barnstorming for freewheeling open-office plans and experts on the other side espousing the 9-to-5 equivalent of a sensory-deprivation chamber, with each concept held up as an affirmation of some all-important corporate value. (Creativity! Privacy!) The whole thing's terribly reductive, and it glides over the fact that different organizations benefit from different office arrangements. Not only that, the same organization often requires a variety of layouts.

Planning Office Spaces: A Practical Guide for Managers and Designers, by Juriaan van Meel, Yuri Martens, and Hermen Jan van Ree, is the rare bipartisan primer. First written in Dutch and now available in English, it presents the pros and cons of a raft of workplace features, from team spaces and locker rooms to cubicles and private offices. The point is less about proving the superiority of one plan over another than helping managers, employees, and others decide on the design best suited to their company. That, in turn, can vastly improve worker productivity and even reduce the cost of doing business. "I get a little tired of this formulaic thinking," says van Meel, who, like his co-authors, has spent his career analyzing and researdhing workplace design. "If you look at the existing literature, people are saying oh, 'Everybody needs a hot desk.' But companies should make up their own mind. What works for a creative start-up won't necessarily work for a well-established law firm."  

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