Spatial office designing getting more and more efficient

Rikza Abdullah, Contributor, Jakarta

Planning for an office is of high concern for companies as not only does it function as a place for work and business, but it also is a status symbol.

Some of them, therefore, have large open offices in high-rises to assure their prestige, while others opt for smaller open offices to economize on expenditures.

But developments in technology and the higher concerns of efficiency and productivity have induced companies to operate smaller offices with an effective spatial design, layout and management.

"A new trend is that offices are getting smaller and people don't want to spend a lot of money on them. So the sizes of offices are shrinking and becoming much more efficient," Thomas B. Elliott, the director of design for the architectural and designing company, PT Paramita Adirama Istasatya, said in Jakarta on Wednesday.

He said offices should not necessarily be very large as employees go outside offices a lot. The number of desks in offices, therefore, don't need to be the same as the number of employees. Two or three people can use the same desk.

While colleagues are doing a marketing job outside, one employee might just come in and sit at someone's desk and use the computer at it for a few hours and then somebody else could use it later, he said.

"Or perhaps, some people come to the office only one day or two days out of the week, so the desks can be used flexibly," he said.

The office of PT IBM Indonesia at the Landmark building on Jl. J. Sudirman in South Jakarta is a good example of the flexible use of desks.

Ariantini Yatim, the communications specialist for IBM Indonesia, said on Thursday that her company, under its flexible policy on working, allowed its employees in charge of sales, marketing and services to carry out their jobs anywhere -- inside or outside the office.

Her company, she said, provided some 30 desks that could be used by about 150 employees in charge of sales, marketing and service, who took turns and worked in shifts. In total, the company employs 270 people in Jakarta.

"The aim of the flexible policy on working is to support the mobility of the employees and to help improve their productivity," Ariantini told The Jakarta Post. "The fact that we can reduce the space that we rent for our office from four floors to merely two and a half is just a natural consequence of the policy."

To support the "tele-working" of employees, IBM Indonesia has facilitated them each with a computer notebook that can be hooked up to the company's database in Jakarta and a special telephone line at their homes. If any of them needs to do some work at the office, he or she makes a reservation at a determined computer desk top, which would recognize his or her table and pass messages on to his or her computer, she said.

Elliott said the concept for offices' need for meeting rooms has also changed.

"Because a large number of staff members spend most of their time outside the office, the need to bring everybody to a large space is changing and the number of meeting rooms, therefore, is going down," he told the Post.

He said even though some staff members worked inside the office while others worked outside, communication could be made through cellular phones, which, besides being used for making calls, now also functions as an e-mail center. Discussions with more than two people could be done through teleconferencing and face-to-face interaction through videophones.

Having eye-to-eye contact would be good when people wanted to make a final deal, he said. Ariantini said meeting rooms at her office were generally small and were used just for the discussion of confidential matters.

Discussions on nonconfidential matters were usually made at work places and that was practically easy because everybody, including managers and directors, sat in the same open space, which was divided only by a low cubical partition.

On lighting, companies also have a tendency to obtain as much natural light as possible to reduce costs.

"Lighting has a new dimension now. With a lot of the natural light coming into the room, electric light, which increases heat, is becoming unnecessary and the power needed for air-conditioners can be reduced," Elliott said.

He said developers used low transmission glass as the "skin" for office buildings, to allow more light into the rooms. Some developers, particularly those in Europe, put "eyebrows" on the glass wall to reduce the impact of direct sunlight. The eyebrows could reflect sunlight to the ceiling of the office, thereby softening its impact on the eyes, he said.

Also related to lighting is the typical arrangement of floor planning with managers' offices positioned against the glass wall, while the staff members' have open work places inside.

This arrangement can be seen at most offices in Jakarta. The floors of the Ministry of Industry and Trade's building on Jl. Gatot Subroto, for example, generally have managers' offices on the far side. IBM Indonesia's president director's office is also located against the window, even though its walls are made of solid material, which natural light cannot penetrate.

"What people are talking about now is the reverse," Elliott said. "The open offices with a low partition for the staff are near the windows, while managers' closed offices with walls made out of glass are near the core of the building."

Because natural light can go into the room, including the managers' offices, everybody's spirit is much better and productivity is high, he added.

In rooms where natural light cannot filter in, ambient light was preferable when people work with computers, he said.

He said the office layout arrangement at shop-houses was more difficult than those in high-rise buildings because their rooms were generally long with a window at one end.

If that was the case, high partitions should be avoided as much as possible, so that natural light could reach the other end of the rooms, he said.

On the arrangement of the floor, Elliott advised that offices should use carpet tiles. Carpet tiles offered many advantages, including reducing an echo and the easy job of cleaning any part that gets dirty.