KM & Law Office Design: Danish Style
I have long been fascinated with "proxemics" -- man's appreciation and use of physical space (see this previous blog). A number of law firms have rethought their physical spaces to achieve more innovative and flexible knowledge sharing environments.
Here is the relevant part of Bjerrum and Aalokke's work:
The law firm had a traditional office environment where all the employees had private or shared offices except for the personal assistants (PA) who where placed in an open office environment. The law firm had a strategy for increased knowledge sharing and increased openness and as a part of this strategy the firm decided to use glass instead of walls in the offices and meeting rooms. This may seem a very small change in the office design, but it was recognised as a big step and visiting other Danish law firms.
In this law firm we interviewed 40 employees: partners, lawyers, trainees and PA’s.
We saw a workplace where everybody walked very fast. A workplace, where most of the offices had open doors and where some were always closed. We saw a lot of short meetings in and out of offices and a lot of laughing and talking in the open space. Whenever there was a meeting in one of the partner’s offices the door was always closed.
The general opinion in this law firm was that legal work only could be carried out in a traditional office environment. The various groups all agreed that PA’s share an open office environment partly because of the design of the building, partly to strengthen the professional and social network.
The groups also agreed that partners and lawyers need to have their own office, because they have a very noisy behaviour. They speak a lot on the telephone and they dictate. At the same time they need to concentrate a lot on their legal work. The trainees on the other hand have been placed in offices in pairs, because they are new in the company and in a learning process. And everybody agreed that the trainees would benefit a lot from sharing.
In our interview with the employees we found that their conception of work was that law work primarily equals individual work. When asked to describe their work the lawyers describe long or short cases and the organisational relations like for instance “I’m working for . . .” or “I refer to . . ." but never “I work with . . .” Nobody describe[s] their work as collaboration with others. On the contrary they underline the individuality of their work.
Informal meetings with your colleagues are considered either a luxury or interrupting and disturbing. Either way it is not considered real work. So if you have talked to somebody during your workday it is like you have been playing hooky from work:
“I talked to different people – nearly half an hour with my boss. Then you have to work late” “It is cosy to be sitting together but it’s not increasing the efficiency.”
“The work needs a lot of concentration. The most efficient way to work is to turn off the phone.”
How did the conception of work correspond with the office design? It did correspond very well. The offices underline that the work going on in the law firm is individual work where it is necessary that you can close a door. The combination of the different methods broadened the picture of the work going on in the law firm:
In our observations we saw that all the employees had a lot of informal meetings during the day. In the registrations of their work no one included those meetings and they did not include the major part of their working from home either. In the interviews we found that they didn’t include the informal meetings because they didn’t consider them real work and they didn’t include the working late or some of working from home because it wasn’t work that you could be billing.
