The Future is Here, and It's...Different

he offices of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government were depressing, cluttered and congested, says Bob Stone, who calls himself NPR's "energizer in chief," and who's also known as principal deputy director. "People were sitting on top of each other. It was dysfunctional because there was little opportunity for people to work together without bothering others. And it was limiting-only the people who could find desks could actually work here."

So the group set out to redesign their space in a way that supported their vision of the way they wanted to work. They set their sights on a workspace that would:

• support a team-based approach;
• accommodate more workers in the same 7,400-square-foot space;
• encourage interaction; and
• serve workers at home or at other agencies as well as if they were in the office.

The General Services Administration delivered the furniture, phone system, information technology and space as one turnkey package. NPR pays one set amount annually for the contract's three years.

Stone says the package costs NPR about 30 percent a year more than the old stuff, but he points out that they would have incurred much of that cost anyway had they upgraded their antiquated phone and computer systems and furnishings. "We had furniture that was the pick of the GSA junk warehouse," says Stone. "Now we have a workplace people can be proud of."

Mixed Reviews

Stone says staffers were worried about privacy, but the private workspaces (personal harbors) are rarely occupied. And "lack of quiet is a non-problem," he adds.

The real issues surface when you try to put the people of the present to work in the office of the future. "Today's person needs turf," says Stone, "a place to put pictures of kids and leave a coffee cup."

Culture change, not furniture, is the issue, says team leader Susan Valaskovic. "A lot more personal accountability and responsibility is required," she says. And when you need to communicate with a co-worker, Valaskovic says, "you can't just plan on going down the hall and grabbing someone," because chances are they won't be there.

Stone concurs: "We're learning to schedule ourselves to come together on a regular basis. [The new offices] limit the amount that can be done on ad hoc basis, which has a cost to it."

Representatives of more than 50 federal agencies have toured the NPR offices, and reviews are mixed.

Rosslyn Kleeman, who heads up the Coalition for Effective Change, a group of 30 federal executive, managerial and professional associations that meets monthly with NPR, isn't sure how practical the workspace is for full-time workers. "It's a fascinating experiment, but I'm not sure I want to work there," Kleeman says.

One federal management analyst was less than impressed. "There's something odd, if not wrong," he says, "about an office configuration where when it comes time to do some thinking and hard work you have to get up and go to a specially designed booth the size of a bathroom stall."

Think Ahead

If you're thinking about turning your federal workspace into the office of the future, the NPR folks have a few words of wisdom:

• Involve all those affected. "Give them a say in the layout, let them know what to expect," says Stone.
• Engage in a group process to figure out how you work and how you want to work.
• Keep in mind that change is the only constant. No office system is perfect. Your office, just like NPR's, has to be an experiment that contributes to its own evolution.