Just How Creative Is Creative Office Space?

It has become a cliché, really.  Any old industrial building with the ceiling removed, a roll up door, and a 2:1,000 parking ratio is now labeled “creative office”.   I even saw a recent blast email from a broker who will remain unnamed referring to such a space in North Hollywood as “trendy.”  Ugh.

A word to the wise: beware brokers touting the coolness of creative office space. 

There is no doubt that we are witnessing a tectonic shift in how workers relate to the physical workspace; not only what they do there and how, but how often they need to show up at the office at all.  Flexible, open layouts, more generous space for amenities like lounges, libraries, and “chill” areas reflects the needs and wants of a new generation of workers.  But there are limits.  A recent article in The Wall Street Journal revealed an issue overlooked by companies knocking down offices and eliminating even cubicle walls in favor of collaborative work surfaces: “pesky, productivity-saping interruptions” as the article puts it. 

Look at this jarring timeline:

• ·         A worker spends an average of 12 minutes and 40 seconds on a task before being interrupted

•       An interruption might take as little as 15 seconds

• ·         It takes that worker 15 minutes on average to get back into the same level of concentration       they were at before the interruption

“Research published earlier this year links frequent interruptions to higher rates of exhaustion, stress-induced ailments and a doubling of error rates,” the article goes on to say.

What is really at stake here is productivity vs. creativity.  A tenant advocate broker must take the time to ask probing questions about what the company does and listen closely to the answers.  The solution is not always a wide open creative office layout, even for technology and media tenants.  At the end of the day, “creative is as creative does” (to paraphrase a lesson from my mom); in other words, it is the company’s culture, talent base, and operating processes that that are the source of creativity, not their office space. 

Aaron Weiner, CCIM, CPM, LEED AP

aaron@bailesre.com