Cube Farms

By Prabhat K. Mukherjee

After working for a chaebol company in Korea for nine years, I immigrated to Canada and started working for an oil and gas engineering firm in Calgary. There is a mushroom of engineering companies in Calgary which all work for Alberta’s Oil Sands Projects.

All such engineering companies rent office spaces in downtown Calgary and they all look alike in form and shape. Our engineering office in Ulsan, Korea, had that old-styled bullpen layout with separate freestanding desks spread out in a large hall, with ample space between two desks.

But the Canadian layout was different. A large number of cubicles accommodate a much larger populace within the same office space giving it an altogether different look. In the office you can see plenty of stereotypical middle managers with coffee mug in hand, wearing white-collared shirts, suspenders and a belt.

They would occasionally peep into a cubicle, raise some queries with juniors and then leave briskly. What a difference from the Korean office scene where people worked with their heads tucked into their files or eyes glued to the computer screen wearing headphones to block out noise.

The moment I found myself in such an office of cubicles, I was reminded of my office in India, which in the late 1980s was undergoing a sea change in interior design and office furniture layout.

A new CEO who had just joined us wanted all the archaic furniture to go to make room for the new state of the art layout. The old fashioned people, who murmured in protest at the new ``ugly” look of the office, had to face some victimization at a later date.

They were not happy with sharing a cubicle with four colleagues each of them sharing a quadrant of the desk and facing a wall or partition.

The cubicle office was nothing but a partially enclosed workspace, separated from the neighboring workspace by partitions. People dubbed these offices ``Cube Farms.’’

These cube farms which originated from the dot-com booms in the United States, percolated down through other service sectors in America and around the globe. The strong argument in favor of these new offices was that it had magic ingredients that could make noise levels and other distractions fall to zero.

The protagonists of old styled offices argued that the new office had in fact produced negative effects in the reduced amount of person-to-person communications among office workers.

In India that time, it was so common to see office workers discussing among themselves, early in the morning, the previous day’s football or cricket match played between popular rival teams.

The new, enclosed, bird-like habitats snatched away such earthly pleasures in the name of neo-layout concepts. People were holed up in cubicles and the communication suffered. Robert Propst who was credited with being the father of the cube farms lamented his invention later in life.

After years of research and studying how people work, and with an eye on improving on the ``open-layout office’’ that dominated much of the previous decades, Propst designed a system he thought would increase productivity of the workers and which he named as Action Office.

He thought of insulating noise from CPU fans that were marginally less powerful than a jet engine, from the printers and the photocopy machines that were slamming the paper about, from people having speakerphone conversations and from people stopping in the walkway next to a working desk and starting conversations, or from a joyful announcement over the PA by a colleague who giggled occasionally when amused by a telephonic conversation with her friends.

The open office had fewer cabins and mostly, these were reserved for senior managers, the people that made their living talking on phones sitting opposite the working level people that concentrated for a living.

Around the time when the Action Office was born, a growing number of white-collar workers were working in the Silicon Valley and banking and insurance sectors. Also, real estate prices were rising, as was the cost of furnishing office buildings.

Cubicles offered attractive financial propositions with reduced costs. That was when Propst's original idea began to slip. Builders kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle and a place to pack workers in, like in a sardine can. Now you see cube farms all over the world _ from Manhattan to Shanghai.

Sometimes we are amused to see photographs of sweatshops in China on the Internet. More numbers of workers packed in an office space than you could imagine. You wonder how they work! Despite all odds, cubicles rule our present lives.

We use it as our home. We display posters all around, keep photos of family members, keep coffee mugs with photos of our children embossed on them and fix post-it notes all around the enclosure.

The number of tasks on these post-it notes might take a lifetime to complete. In the lyrics of Dilbert we sing _ ``I am the king of cubicle and these are my subjects; the mouse, the monitor, the keyboards and the box.’’

p.mukherjee@gmail.com

Prabhat K. Mukherjee resides in Calgary, Canada, working for an oil and gas company.