The office is shrinking as tech creates workplace everywhere

 

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At online retailing giant Zappos, two of the top managers have no titles, and no one — except for two in-house lawyers — has an office. Not even the CEO.

The Nevada-based company's 1,300 workers (average age, 36), from the founders to programmers, mill about rooms without walls. Small cubicles serve as stations to park personal items, but work can be done anywhere — on couches, at shared tables or at the coffee shop down the street. Ear buds, not partitions, act as sound barriers.

"They're more concerned about being around other people who do cool things than how big their desks are," says Zach Ware, a no-title Zappos executive. "Our workspace has become our laptops."

The office of The Office is fading and shrinking in the process.

Technology, the urge to go green, telecommuting and a generation of workers who grew up with smartphones in their hands and computers in their laps are revamping the work culture. Companies are knocking down walls, even dismantling cubicles to create a free-flowing layout that many believe gets the creative juices flowing and encourages collaboration.

Younger workers welcome the change, says Patricia Lancaster, head of The Lancaster Group real estate consulting company who teaches at New York University's Schack Institute of Real Estate. "They don't aspire to the big corner office," she says. "They don't even want it."

And they don't need an assigned work station to call their own. Their cherished family photos adorn not their cubicles but their computers' wallpapers. They're kept on smartphones and posted on Facebook, not pinned to a bulletin board at desks.

At the same time, office equipment from printers and copiers to computers are shrinking. The paper trail is also waning, making big file cabinets obsolete in many work areas.

There's an added bonus for employers: Open floor plans accommodate more workers in less space, a welcome savings for companies scrambling to cut costs in a rough economy. Efficiency is also at a premium at a time when environmental concerns are on the rise.

A survey this year by CoreNet Global, an association of corporate real estate and workplace professionals, found that for many companies, the average allocation of office space per person will fall to 100 square feet or less within five years.

Only 24% of the 465 companies surveyed said they had already hit this low, but 40% said they would by 2017. Square footage per worker has already slipped from 225 square feet in 2010 to 176 today, according to CoreNet.

The main drivers: More companies stressing "collaborative and team-oriented space" and "smaller but smarter" offices in a bad economy, says Richard Kadzis, CoreNet's vice president of strategic communications.

The trend is expected to accelerate as 10-year and 15-year leases signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s expire.

"That is going to encourage companies, when they do go to market in this new environment, to try to make upgrades to a 21st century office space," says Dan Fasulo, managing director of Real Capital Analytics. "It absolutely makes sense. Your more forward-looking firms have already made the transition."