Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  When I visited Interpolis, I spoke to Lhoest over lunch at the company’s Tivoli Plaza, a communal space added in the second stage of making the company more flexible. What might have otherwise been an empty atrium (something like what they have at the Pixar office), connecting the various buildings that make up the Interpolis complex, had been subdivided and given over to various artists and architects to design. Each of the seven “clubhouse” areas was connected by “streets” (the old urban metaphor again), and each was created by someone different. In one section, Aeron chairs surrounded a large yellow conference table in the shape of a palette, near a bar lined with stools; it was all overhung with lamps in the vague shape of bowling pins and carpeted with a light-yellow-and-green pattern reminiscent of a medieval tapestry. Elsewhere in the vicinity were giant huts and chairs in the shape of artist models. Lhoest showed me to an “ear chair,” a high-backed couch with wings extending outward to guard the sitter’s head. Superficially, it seems to have the texture and color of concrete but turns out to be quite plush and comfortable—and amazingly, it blocks out most sound. You can face two “ear chairs” together and have something resembling a private conversation. All the clubhouses had varieties of spaces like this, designed for meetings, conferences, or private work. It was pleasingly extravagant for a workforce that was only at the office three to four days a week.

  Interpolis was ingenious, but something troubled me about the imposition of the concept. Lhoest kept insisting to me that instituting “activity-based working” meant getting a commitment from the top management levels. Executives had to agree, and to believe, before anything could be done. But what about the bottom? Didn’t they have to agree too? It never came up, even though “trust,” Lhoest told me, was the central idea behind activity-based working—trust, that is, between employees and managers, since constant supervision was out of the question. What Lhoest called “trust” I suspect might be better termed, from the staff perspective, “consent”—a willingness to go along with changes made by the executives. In other companies, the consent had frayed. While studies of Interpolis suggest that satisfaction with the space and work had increased since the change to flexible work, other workplaces in the Netherlands that had adopted similar environments had suffered enormous drops in satisfaction. At the Dynamischkantoor in Haarlem, a building housing parts of the Dutch Ministry for Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment, the proportion of workers who believed the activity-based environment contributed to productivity dropped from 60 percent to 25 percent after the new arrangements were introduced. The complaints were legion: lack of proper space for concentration and privacy; constant noise and interruptions; and too much time wasted planning for work.13 This was despite the fact that all the necessary components were in place: cellular offices for concentrated work; informal spaces for collaboration; and closed-door conference rooms for formal meetings.

  The Tivoli Plaza at Interpolis (1998). Photograph by Kim Zwart, courtesy of Veldhoen + Company

  It turns out that imposition of a concept by fiat can easily result in a workplace that looks “creative” but works terribly. Drawing on a utopian concept, rather than the actual experience of actual workers, the plans fail not for lack of trying but for lack of listening. For example, following the MIT professor Thomas Allen, who famously discovered that interactions decrease exponentially the farther people work from each other, designers have tended to cram people together—something that not so incidentally decreases costs exponentially—while making nominal gestures toward private space. The result is noise and distraction. Or, following the “cave and commons” approach, a designer might place a central space in the midst of an area between private offices, thinking that this would be a great spot for those sacred serendipitous encounters. The result might be no interactions at all, or at least not meaningful ones. In one study, a shared space at a media agency was passed through constantly, but there was no combustion of innovation flames, as the collaboration ideologists always hope. There was too much traffic in general, and the agency’s director was often in the space having coffee, which made more junior workers fearful of being overheard.14

  Erik Veldhoen, who eventually sold the company he started (for obscure reasons, he appears to have left when there were differences between partners over the design of Microsoft’s Amsterdam headquarters), is someone who insists grandly on the autonomy of workers to decide their environments. One of the more famous and oddly charismatic personages in the dense, creative world of Dutch design, he has become a freelance consultant, working on books and expounding his theories at conferences. I met him at his usual table in Dauphine in Amsterdam—the sort of buzzy, Parisian-style café that proponents of his method often cite as one of the new working environments for modern-day “knowledge workers.” When I asked him about autonomy, he got right to the point. “Hierarchy models,” he told me, “are based on control … People are owners of their own activities.” He began to hold forth on the future of the digital revolution, something he believes (and many others believe along with him) is as enormous a change as the Industrial Revolution—something that is already changing the way people experience time and place. Explaining his understanding of the Industrial Revolution as two hundred years of error, which cruelly required people to work every day at a specific place, he suggested that the new era would return us to a preindustrial time. “We are at the end of labor,” he said. “We [will] go back to craftsmanship.” Information technology had made work more time and place independent. People could organize time as they liked. “When you see people working, for example, 40 hours a week—a week is 168 hours. Let’s say that from the 40 hours, 20 hours are labeled ‘time with others.’ Cooperation. And 20 hours are just for you to do your work alone … to organize … in the time frame you want. That’s a possibility. It has a lot of influence on how you organize your life and your life-work balance. That will change dramatically.”15

  I asked him what would happen to the system of hierarchy as a result. “In the future we don’t need managers anymore,” he said. He took off his glasses and self-consciously widened his large blue eyes. He knew he had made a grandiose statement, and he took care to emphasize it. “The labor contract will change dramatically. It’s not ‘You work for me, I’m the boss, and you do what I say.’ It’s ‘We have a target in our company, and what can you deliver to reach that target?’ And then we make a deal, but you have to deliver that. You’re organizing your own way to get that result, you’re responsible for that, not the company.” I was confused momentarily, since it seemed to me that he was eliminating managers from his system but not executives or the old forms of ownership that had made the Industrial Revolution possible—before it turned out he had another semi-scandalous statement in store. “You know Karl Marx?” he asked, eyes again expanding. “He has to live now. Because his dream comes now. Power to labor, to the people.”

  Veldhoen’s supposedly Marxist claims for the increasing autonomy of workers, and the return to a preindustrial world of labor organization, mirrored the sorts of arguments I heard from another writer on contemporary work arrangements, Richard Greenwald. I met him in a café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which was full of the laptop-affixed workers he’s spent the last several years studying: namely, freelancers. A professor of labor history and sociology at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, where he is also the dean, Greenwald did his early work on more traditional subjects, like the rise of the garment workers’ union. But in his work as a labor activist and journalist, he began to realize that the world he saw around him made little reference to the unionized precincts of the urban industrial workforce he had studied; indeed, it was far different from the corporate world of flush benefits and high pay that had characterized corporate life for generations. Nor did it seem to consist of knowledge workers “controlling the means of production” in a “post-capitalist society,” as the late Peter Drucker had come to prophesy in the last decades of his life. Rather, he saw people moving
from gig to gig, in an ever more jagged and precarious path of nearly permanent underemployment.

  “Freelancing is the fastest-growing sector of our economy,” he told me. It’s difficult to come up with an accurate count of how many freelancers there actually are—filing a self-employment tax form doesn’t mean you don’t also have a permanent job, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t done an estimate since 2005—but reasonable estimates put the number anywhere between 25 and 30 percent of the American workforce; their numbers are growing in European countries as well, leading some writers to speak of a precarious office proletariat, or “precariat.” Some of these precarious workers choose to leave the permanent workforce; most others are pushed out. Most don’t have health insurance; many are in constant and “desperate need of money.” And they suffer from “the illusion that not many of them are being exploited.”16 These are the same people who, according to Veldhoen, were harbingers of the end of capitalism.

  Of course, as Greenwald went on to explain, the picture is complicated. Drawing on his many conversations with freelancers and people who hire them, he discovered that contract work does offer a kind of freedom. He found in their attitudes “a sense of pride and identity with work” that—if we’re to believe Office Space anyway—has gone missing from the larger economy. The people in the creative industries, like graphic design, spoke of the satisfaction they took in their work. Freelancers who do well have substantial control over their hours and the work that they produce; like anyone else, they sell their labor for a price, but the best can set the terms of what they offer.

  At the same time, along with the satisfaction, comes “a lot of worry.” When the freelancers are exploited—when they have to do a lot of work for not much money, and there’s nothing else coming their way, and bills are due—they feel “helpless to prevent that exploitation.” Much of the pleasure of being a freelancer also seems to entail many of the problems. Freelancers usually work alone and many refer to themselves as “entrepreneurs,” which often means that they see themselves as unique. It also means that when they fail, they put the failure entirely on themselves rather than ascribe it to some kind of system. Greenwald, in a rather uncompromising phrase, called it “a persistence of the white-collar delusion.” He blamed a whole host of freelance self-help books for promoting a boosterish attitude toward contract work—one that rarely informs a freelancer of the difficulties he or she is likely to face.

  What did the rise of contract work mean for the future of work more generally? Here Greenwald too saw the return of older styles of independent entrepreneurs pursuing their craft. With, of course, a key difference: the large, transnational companies weren’t disappearing but in fact were growing, taking on larger shares of the workforce. The change was that the workforce was increasingly taking on a precarious aspect. Greenwald thought the only way to make freelancing work was to increase a frayed safety net—to allow for flexibility while making sure failure didn’t mean catastrophe. He suggested that something along the lines of the old nineteenth-century guilds could operate as greater protection against the headwinds of economic change or crisis. In a cheerier vein, Veldhoen had voiced the same idea: but neither the optimistic nor the pessimistic view seemed to reflect the coming of a socialist utopia.

  If the increasing contingency of work could be said to have one bright side, it would be the emergence of a workplace characterized less by hierarchy and management control, and the potential of greater control by workers themselves over the labor process. Management theorists have been prophesying the coming of this world for decades, of course; Tom Peters and similar figures have long urged executives to upend hierarchies; and in one of his last books Peter Drucker suggested, in another inversion of Marxism, that knowledge workers would at last come to control the “means of production”—knowledge—and bring about a new, “post-capitalist” society. Other theorists, such as labor scholar Charles Heckscher, have seen a “post-bureaucratic” world emerging, again characterized more by trust than by control. The problem has been that such conjectures rarely describe actual workplaces; rather than in the sector of so-called knowledge workers, job growth is projected mostly to take place in low-wage clerical sectors, while the expansion of heavily monitored call centers puts the lie to the idea that Taylorism is coming to an end.17 One professor of business has suggested, influentially, that employees in the new era need to develop a “mindset flexibility,” or a “self-employed mindset,” in which they treat their employers as “customers” of their services, and ensure that they are satisfied, in order to retain their customers’ “business.”18

  Among a rash of new companies, however, chiefly in the tech sector, one does see significant gestures toward loosening forms of work. These have become known as “bossless” offices—among the most famous are Menlo Innovations and the video game company Valve—in which hierarchies are supposed to be flatter than usual, work is done on a group basis, and leadership emerges and subsides on a project basis, rather than being functionally apportioned by a bureaucratic rationale. GitHub, a San Francisco–based software company that came up with a fantastically popular means of sharing and editing open-source software, is one such workplace. I visited them in September 2013, just after they had moved into a giant new warehouse office, which expressed a newfound sense of security and power after several years of profitability. Spread out over three floors, it resembled some of the dot-com offices of an earlier boom in its many touches of expensive wackiness. The vast reception area had been designed as a replica of the Oval Office; one secret wall opened into a mahogany-paneled library with musty leather furniture, while another led to the internal office “speakeasy.” Breaking up the wide loft floors into mini conference rooms were dismantled shipping containers: a reference to the company’s jargon for “shipping” code. Some workers had assigned desks; many, perhaps most, were mobile or nomadic; private rooms were available for concentrated work. The bottom floor was open for events. It reflected the most intelligent contemporary ideas in office design. Over 70 percent of the workforce worked offsite, or would end up in one of GitHub’s new offices opening around the world; all of the important work-related conversations tended to take place online, or in forums that were otherwise available to people after the fact. Yet Scott Chacon, one of the company’s founders and CIO, kept referring to the importance of employees being able to “serendipitously encounter” each other throughout their workday (in a slightly unserendipitous phrasing). When I asked how people were supposed to have these encounters, given the fact that most of the staff wasn’t actually required to come into the office, he mentioned, sensibly, that he wanted these encounters to be rare, once a month, or once every two months, and to be “deeper interactions.” He suggested that people could run into each other at a company event as well as at the office, and actually have longer, more profound conversations. “That’s way more valuable to me than ‘I saw this person when I was going to the bathroom,’ or ‘I had to wait in line behind them when I was waiting for food’ … that’s not a valuable interaction.”19 It was a rebuke to the lazier ideas of fortuitous encounters that proliferated in office design–speak around the world.

  The permissive attitude toward coming into work had its correlate in the lightly articulated management structure of the company. GitHub has gotten a substantial amount of press for not having managers. Tim Clem—who was described to me by Liz Clinkenbeard, a GitHub press representative, as being on “our, I guess … management team, if you would?”—suggested it was “a little bit of a falsehood that we have no management. The reality is we expect most individuals to perform most of those managerial functions.” The idea was that management wouldn’t be the structure above the coding and more entry-level work that one ascended to after years of service; it was something that was supposed to emerge. Chacon described this as coming out of the open-source model: “A lot of the ways that we worked [when we were starting the company] was the same way we would work on an open-source
project … You have all these projects that you can work on, and people choose the crossover of what they’re good at … leadership can be ephemeral.” Though others were hesitant to recommend the practice as a model, Clinkenbeard mentioned that the way it tended to cut through traditional aspects of the division of labor could be salutary for other companies. For example, rather than a project commencing with a small group of engineers, and enlisting publicity only at the very end, the fluidity of the structure made it possible, even likely, for people from various departments to comment and participate in work from the beginning. “It can be frustrating to get things done,” Chacon commented. “You have to convince people … It’s taken a lot of experimentation, and frustration, but a lot of great stuff has come out of it.”20

  GitHub has begun subtly to affect the practice of governments as well, with municipalities and states releasing data to the public to manipulate through GitHub’s software. What effect this could have on general attitudes toward bureaucracy, and whether places like GitHub represent an emerging “post-bureaucratic” workplace, remain open questions. For now it’s clear that, like other widely admired work environments, the company remains an exception; even internally, its loose management practices leave GitHub’s ownership structure unclear. Still, its approach reflects a wider sense of unease with the systems of managerial control that developed during a century in office environments—something the debate over Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! signified as well. Organizations that insist on hierarchy are becoming harder to defend; the “mindset flexibility” demanded of workers has the potential to transform itself from contingency and precariousness into something that might very well look like autonomy.