Back in the 1980’s I was working for one of the new American software companies that were taking over the world. In a few years, about half a dozen of these companies established sizeable offices in every country in Europe, and I visited most of them. They were all the same style and it was hard to tell what country you were in.

An Open Plan Office

They all had a strict corporate identity code which meant that the office furniture was exactly the same, no matter where you were. They would take over one or more floors of an office block and build glass-walled offices for managers, supervisors and meeting rooms all around the external walls – the only part of the office which had natural light. The glass walls were designed to allow natural light into the centre of the office, where most people worked, but they rather foolishly had double-glazed walls with blinds between the panes. This meant that most managers, most of the time, kept their blinds shut and cut off any natural light from the central area. At that time the only office lighting available was rather poor fluorescent strip lighting, which worked well for the first few days, but soon degenerated into a disco-like flashing and blinking which was very disturbing. Back at that time we didn’t have wide-screen, full-colour LCD monitors, we were working with small-screen monochrome CRT monitors which usually displayed light green flickering characters on a dark green background, rather like a second world war radar screen. The effect on people’s eyesight must have been devastating.

At that time, fashionable corporate colours were rather dark and sombre washed-out blues, mauves, greens and burgundy reds. It was fashionable at the time to have walls, carpets and even office furniture in these corporate colours, so the overall effect was dark and intimidating, not at all conducive to a bright and cheery office environment. The style of the open plan office was to have clusters of cubicles. These cubicles were constructed of rectangular blocks of fabric-covered screens on which were hung desktops and overhead storage bins. If you were lucky you might have a cubicle with a small round meeting table as well, but there were never any meeting chairs to put round it – they usually ended up in the manager’s office. The style and colours of these cubicles meant that they could not be provided by local business  furniture manufacturers, so the required  furniture was usually flown in – at great expense – from the large US furniture suppliers. Typically American, they were usually much larger and less stylish that the European equivalents and the overall effect was rather intimidating, with long straight lines of identical, sombre cubicles with poor light, where the workers had to spend large parts of their working life.

How it used to be

Open plan offices were a new phenomenon in Europe, where such places were reserved for typing pools and other lesser mortals and were hardly ever visited. The British, Irish, Dutch and Scandinavians seemed to adjust quite well to it, but others less so. The Germans hated it; they were fiercely hierarchical and the size and style of their office denoted their rank - rather like the company car used to in the UK - and they were initially disorientated by having no visible signs of how important they were. In Latin countries such as France, Italy and Spain they simply did not work. The shouting, slamming down of telephones, and general noise levels made it impossible to work, in the end the large offices were partitioned into individual workgroups.