Bürolandschaft
Location, cost, and amenities are just some of the important elements when thinking about appropriate arrangements for your office. Whether you’re at a startup with a few deskspaces or a larger corporation with plenty of flexibility, the organizing principles stay roughly the same. Enter “Bürolandschaft”, the German word for “office landscaping” and the social movement behind it. Here’s a closer look at how these ideologies impacted the modern office.
What Is Bürolandschaft?
Bürolandschaft was established following the general European mentality towards innovative forms of office design after WWI and WWII. In 1958, brothers Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle of the Quickborner consulting group developed an interest in office spaces and pushed for a system where the focus relied on the individual and the natural.
They rejected the scientific management theories behind the familiar rows of desks with open plan offices and applied the egalitarian principles of the postwar world to create something entirely new: a more interactive workspace with groups of desks that were informally separated with plants and curved screens. This mentality would be further known as “Bürolandschaft”.
Initially becoming a hot trend in Europe, by the time the concept moved overseas in the 1970s to the US, companies, unfortunately, began to warp Quickborner’s approach and shift towards the familiar “cubicle farms”. The Bürolandschaft movement had been pushed aside as companies looked for ways to increase privacy in the open office. This trend had continued on until the 80’s and 90’s era of American office environments.
By the late 90’s and early 2000s, the intentions behind Bürolandschaft came back alongside the growth of the Internet economy, and slowly became the foundation for the agile workplace. With the office landscape changing in response to the backlash of the cubicle farm, companies now are reverting to the principles behind Bürolandschaft to promote the workforce’s need for privacy, flexibility, and comfortability in the workplace.
How To Embody Bürolandschaft
Bürolandschaft highlights the concepts of freedom and autonomy, allowing employees to choose how and where to do their best work, such as activity-based working environments. Employees can choose the type of space that suits their needs and boosts their productivity. Other physical arrangements might vary by function, such as side-by-side workstations for general clerks or pinwheel stations for designers.
Bürolandschaft is also about fostering an environment for stronger employee collaboration. Members of the workforce should have access to tools that allow them to connect with their colleagues: ranging from messaging tools like Slack, video conferencing software, or project management tools. Bürolandschaft pushes for better transparency in the workplace, ensuring employees can more easily share information. Business leaders should focus on workplaces where data becomes easily accessible for their employees at all times, utilizing tech such as company CRM software and workplace management systems to better connect employees.
Since the creation the Bürolandschaft, many modern offices are returning to the organic ways workplaces can be better for the individual employee. The popularity behind the agile workplace, developed from the very core of Bürolandschaft, reflects the changing needs of the workforce to be more collaborative and flexible.