The Office Walls.

• Author: WIESNER, PAT
• Position: Brief Article

SOMEHOW, THEY NEED TO BE A WAY TO BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER RATHER THAN KEEP PEOPLE APART.

Along time ago I had just been promoted to my first job in what you might call "upper management." I was really on top of the world, and I was trying to be very cool about it. During my first management meeting, I struggled to be thoughtful and positive. One of the topics of discussion was the move into new offices. The management team would soon have its own floor. My new boss, the CEO, asked me how I felt about office size. Did I have to have one of the bigger offices? He said he would certainly give it to me if it were important. Cool me said something along the lines of, "Hell no, office size wasn't important to me, I was just glad to be here!"

Well, he took me at my word. I ended up with the smallest office on the new executive floor. And I resented it for two years afterward until I got out of it. And I could never say anything about it, because I had been so big hearted and cool in the beginning.

It was a lesson I have never forgotten about office walls. They are important to people. They define political boundaries, status, power and pecking order. They can be used to separate the elite from the not-so-important, or to gather people together as a team, where everyone thinks together, works together and helps one another be successful. It depends a little on how the walls are built and a lot on how the managers make them seem to be built.

There was a time in my career when I spent a lot of time calling on the Hewlett-Packard company. In those days at least, HP had no private offices for anyone. It had offices for people to use when meetings needed to be private, but otherwise, everyone sat out in the open. It was clear that the "office" problem had been carefully thought out and decisions made to take the office out of the pecking order equation. I have always felt that this was one of the reasons for the overall long-time success of the company and the great performance that HP gets from its people.

Some companies (like ours) make the decision to have private offices for just about everyone because of the creative nature of their work (engineering, writing, etc.) We have...