Spatial office designing getting more and more efficient

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.