Completely dotty about work

When staff at the booming British e-business Another.com fancy a break from their screens at the firm which creates personalised e-mail addresses, they can stretch out on the company’s lawn – right in the middle of the office.

Alternatively, they can just step into reception and take the stress away with a ride on one of four galvanised steel swings.

It is hard to imagine Another.com’s older and more traditional British business colleagues entertaining such frivolity. But there is nothing frivolous behind the dotcom company’s reasons for adding such a light-hearted touch to its working environment. Well, almost nothing. It’s about fun, but fun for a serious reason.

In the past 18 months the e-business revolution has turned internet-friendly staff into a highly sought after commodity. Where once ‘exploration of cyberspace’ might be something found buried under ‘hobbies’ on the CV, the sheer number of internet start-ups has pushed such skills to the front of the queue. Even the recent troubles over the dotcom gold rush have failed to halt the tidal wave of vacancies for those who know their ‘hortals’ from their ‘vortals’, and dotcom businesses are falling over each other to sign them up. Their success depends on it.

That is just one reason why so many of the dotcom players have put a premium on creating the kinds of working environments that they hope will spell happy, motivated staff. Money isn’t, by itself, always enough.

Graham Goodkind, managing director and co-founder of Another.com, says: ‘The idea behind the grass and swings was for our working environment to be fun and interesting enough to attract potential staff.’ He adds: ‘We can compete with other companies on the sort of packages they offer, but we wanted to give them a great working environment as well, with a great atmosphere that keeps them motivated.’

Phillip Foster, pre-construction manager at Churchfield, which recently handled the fit-out for the UK arrival of US on-line financial news service TheStreet.com, concurs: ‘We are in a supply and demand economy for experienced internet staff, so you have to create an environment to attract the right people.’

TheStreet.com, Another.com, and on-line recruitment service StepStone, are all examples of dotcom companies that have commissioned new offices that in different ways reflect this desire. All three have their own innovations but also have features in common.

We can compete on packages, but we wanted to give a great working environment that keeps them motivated

Graham Goodking, Another.com

The first is the desire for flexibility in design, allowing the office to change as the business grows or shrinks. The ideals that are driving this change are also triggering a need for specialist facilities that suit the environment.

Andrew Wakeling of architecture, interiors and design firm Wakeling and Williamson, designed the offices for both TheStreet.com and StepStone.

TheStreet.com, which arrived in the UK earlier this year, taking 1,560m² at Cardinal Tower in London’s Farringdon Road, opted for an open-plan design giving it plenty of flexibility, with clusters of workstations and café style breakout areas.

Wakeling says: ‘At TheStreet.com they have room to expand if they want because they have options on other parts of the building. They can also shrink the space if they need to. This is the flexibility of having an open-plan area.’

The inner core of the open-plan space at TheStreet.com contains the usual static features, such as meeting rooms. The idea is that staff will adapt to the area if there is limited variation in the workspace: ‘The flexibility is in how you use the personnel not how you use the space,’ he says.

Given the computer-intensive work inherent in dotcom businesses, breakout areas feature heavily to compensate: ‘Break-out areas are very prevalent in e-commerce environments because the staff have to switch off from their work regularly to prevent eye-strain,’ says Wakeling.

With the addition of coffee-bar style services, the provision of break-put areas has the added advantage of keeping people in the office: ‘If you provide services that rival those of high street coffee shops, then maybe staff will stay in, have a sandwich and then go back to work more quickly.’

Breakout areas and open-plan working areas are also part of creating the kind of environment to support non-hierarchical staff structures that tend to be a feature of many dotcom businesses: ‘We have fitted the space with the same modularised desks which are non-hierarchical, in that the managers and the managing director sit at the same desks as everyone else,’ Wakeling says.

Water cooler areas provide staff with an escape area: ‘Work does not always happen when you are sitting down at a workstation

Designer Andrew Wakeling

He says that many e-businesses have a ‘shopfloor’ style of management that suits an open-plan environment – one reason they usually reject cellular offices. TheStreet.com’s office manager Kate Laurent says: ‘We did not want people hidden away, we wanted to know what was going on across the whole of the departments.’

Managing what are often younger workforces than are the norm – for many dotcoms a number of staff will be in their first job since university – also plays a part in office design. While young people will respond to an environment that is familiar to them, close contact with managers is also essential for staff motivation. ‘The environment encourages social control. Often in these sorts of offices it is about keeping people motivated as they are very time-orientated and time efficient.’

More generally, creating an environment that maximises communication is also key. At TheStreet.com, for example, Wakeling says he and his client strived to create an office that could handle a significant amount, and different types of, person-to-person contact.

Wakeling explains: ‘You can have all manor of informal meetings. If a reporter has people coming in to see him or her, they could go to one of the café-style tables and talk over a coffee.’ If laptops are needed they can be plugged into dedicated sockets. ‘Breakout areas are the new reception areas,’ says Wakeling, ‘You come into the building, say “howdy” and then immediately adjacent to you is the break-out area.’

Designated water cooler areas provide staff with somewhere they can escape for 10 minutes: ‘Work does not always happen when you are sitting down at a workstation,’ points out Wakeling.

The 24-hour working environment is also part and parcel of dotcom culture and needs to be carefully considered in design. At StepStone, this meant incorporating facilities that would cater for a skeleton staff in the most efficient way. Clusters of desks were installed that could be lit and air-conditioned individually, eliminating the need to light the whole building. ‘We developed the desk canopy lighting idea to save on lighting costs. If you come in at the weekend you only light up your own cluster,’ says Trevor Williamson.

The clusters are operated by a combination of local controls, switches and sensors.

The heavy IT requirements of the dotcom companies are also an issue that needs negotiating. For example, at Another.com, interior designer Nowika Stern had to develop a multi-layered workstation specifically for the company’s use, to separate the sheer mass of cabling they use. Each layer of the workstation contains a different set of cables. Design director Oded Stern-Moiraz explains: ‘Each individual can plug themselves into the desk and surf at any time.’

Ergonomic issues also come into play particularly with IT intensive work. ‘You can make efficient people inefficient through the wrong use and implementation of workstation design, so you should be looking to optimise it,’ says Wakeling’s partner, Trevor Williamson. He adds that furniture in breakout areas should be designed to be comfortable.