I was watching the first season of Madmen the other night and realized that back in the early 60’s offices didn’t have any cubicles. Workers, usually women doing administrative work, had their desks in an open area while men, or at least managers, had walled offices with doors.
By the time I started working in an office in the late 70’s I vaguely remember some rather crude cubes that most people worked in, with senior managers still having walled offices. I have always worked in high tech, so perhaps there are other industries where cubicles weren’t used as much as I have seen.
So what event triggered the wide spread adoption of cubicles, at least in high tech offices? More efficient use of limited office space? A drive to reduce the isolation of having everyone in walled offices? There must have been a good reason or everybody wouldn’t have started using them.
Cost was probably a big factor. Some places use what they call hoteling - you get a new cube every day when you show up for work. Sometimes that is just for people who mostly work outside the office.
Cubicles certainly seem inefficient compared to those work areas.
Open area desks require absolute neatness. Otherwise I see little need for a cubicle except storage. Even with cubicles neatness is sometimes required. I worked under a manager for 2 years with a clean desk rule. No one left the office with any work materials on their desk. He was a neat freak and took that rule seriously.
I recall my first programming job each programmer/analyst had a cubicle. There was also a large common work with long tables. All the programmers had their terminals on the tables. No one actually worked in their cubicle. People preferred working together at the tables. We could help each other and consult on projects. The boss didn’t mind because we were more productive.
It appears that cubicles started appearing in the 1960’s:
It’s my impression that they didn’t become common until the 1980’s though. I think of them as being one more idea that management consultants came up with. They’re fond of convincing business managers to try ideas that supposedly save money, but most employees don’t much care for.
And sweatshops are probably efficient too. The worse you treat your workers, the better they function!
Each job is different, so no one solution works best for every office. However - and this is a gigantic however - some jobs require more thinking, more space, more quietness, more storage, and more privacy than others.
Those giant steno pools were allowed because a) they were only women; and b) they were not supposed to think but merely transcribe other peoples’ thoughts onto paper.
The move to cubicles came because of cost. Walls are expensive to put up and even more expensive to move. Cubicles were cheap and configurable. (Later, you got “executive” cubicles that were far more expensive. Hey, people who start off stupid are the easiest to rip off.) The cost of cubicles was noise and all that implied. It was harder to do most jobs when you had to listen to everybody else in the office do theirs. I had both offices and cubicles in the 80s and the difference was stupendous.
The 80s and 90s saw endless discussions about why American productivity wasn’t increasing. I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to support this, but I am firmly convinced that cubicles destroyed productivity. Hoteling was worse. I think that’s been pretty much abandoned. You can’t completely dehumanize employees and then convince them they are valuable.
Your anecdotal experience disagrees with mine. All I can say to that is that I spent years working with programmers. They started out dehumanized - and proudly so - and so had nowhere to fall. Or, to put it more kindly, programming is not an office job, even if it takes place in what looks like an office.
Cubicles are cheaper than private offices, but create an illusion of privacy. But it’s cheaper yet to have banks of desks with no cubicle walls.
I worked at Ford as a programmer 1979-83. One department I worked in had a large room with a bunch of desks and no walls. It wasn’t as large or as cramped as the typing pool photos. This arrangement has several advantages over cubicles.
In such a space you are acutely aware of your proximity to other people and it tends to be quiet. You can immediately see who is there and who is missing, and can establish a conversation instantly.
I have also had a gutful of working in cubicles. Those environments are generally noisier, while also screening out any useful communication.
You might be interested in one of the episodes of a show called “The Secret Life of Machines.” The second-to-last episode is called “The Office” and in it, Tim Hunkin describes the history and evolution of the office from its origins in the 19th century to the modern day. You can download it (legally) here.
My understanding is that cubicles are considered furniture and therefore can be depreciated more quickly than office walls (which are considered part of the building or building or tenant improvements).
Every office worker dreams of escaping a cubicle for a real walled office. A window office is even better. I’ve been in a walled office for ten years. No window but it sure beats a cubicle.
I’m not sure what the newest cubicles are called. They are used at telemarketers. They are nothing more than a desk with walls on each side. I’d find that extremely claustrophobic. I never worked in a cubicle smaller than 6x6.
I wonder at the fact that typewriters are so much louder than computer keyboards. When I went in for my interview at the newspaper where I used to work, there was a typewriter on every desk and carpet on the walls to absorb some of the walls. That was a Friday afternoon. After I got home that day, I got a phone call asking if I could start on Monday. When I walked in the office on Monday morning, there was a computer terminal on every desk (and dozens of apoplectic staffers ready to plotz). But the carpet stayed for decades. You’d think they’d have had the cubicles to start with, especially if the operator was using the phone and needed the walls to deflect some of the noise of other typewriters. But cubicles didn’t really come in till after computers, did they?
Noise. Two people sitting side by side talking on the phone can cause problems. And cubes come with power. In the old days manual type writers and no computers. Now computers, phones, and other wired things.
First time I ever encountered cubicles, they instantly reminded me of my kids playing Whack-A-Mole. When you walk down the aisle, heads keep poppong up.
Only you don’t get to whack the office moles.
It pisses off head mole.
My ex-wife sold these, I think it was, when they were new. They were sold as a word processor and had a vertical (portrait) monitor iirc. It was in the mid 80s.
Anyway, cubicles were just beginning to show up and the relative quiet of the machine was one of it’s selling points.
Look at Steve. Ain’t he cute, with his rosy cheeks and all?
Peace,
mangeorge
Whether those open desk areas were efficient kind of depends on the job. My first few jobs had me sitting in those sort of areas. The ones with five or ten desks in an area weren’t bad, but the one that actually looked like those pictures was horrible. There were about 100 desks and 50 phones in a big room. It was noisy as hell, and unlike typists, we actually spent a lot of time thinking and on the phone. One of my current work locations still has clerical staff in an open area- still noisy, and now everyone has their own computer so there are wires over the place (and since they are old desks, no keyboard shelves). They’d love cubicles.
At my company cubicles replaced offices, not the big open rooms with lots of desks. Some of the offices did have two desks though. The emptied offices are now “huddle” and “lactation” rooms and such. I’m not kidding.
I’m so glad I’ve never had to work in that kind of environment.
I’ve only ever known cubicles. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have my own organization confined to only offices. We’d need 10 times the space. Or where else do you put 180 engineers?
