All Systems Go!

Purchasing the right work systems for an organization—or teams within an organization—isn’t exactly like picking up a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. But with our new structure for understanding their use and application, we’d like it to be.

For decades the tried-and-true methods of selecting a system and applying it across the office landscape proved to be efficient at an organizational level. But as the world changed, that efficiency became deficient at the individual level. When Herman Miller conducted the research that led to Living Office, we found that workstations were unoccupied for 60 percent of the day. So much for efficiency (to mention nothing of attraction and retention, engagement, and happiness!). As Dilbert and Office Space made all too clear, the workstation-at-its worst (the so-called “sea of cubicles”) had become an object of almost unanimous cultural contempt—a physical presentation of the pervasive negative sentiment most of us harbor toward “faceless” organizations.

As Herman Miller worked to help customers realize their own Living Offices, it became clear that a single standardized furniture system would no longer solve all of their problems. Rather, we saw that delivering a purposeful variety of settings required a purposeful variety of furnishings—and a process for their purposeful application. At the risk of being overly deliberate, we realized that purposefulness was the missing link. Even start-up-type offices—with their beanbag chairs and foosball conference tables—while perhaps offering a refreshing alternative to the status quo, presented their own set of design clichés and practical dilemmas. Our research found that these kinds of “highly collaborative” spaces weren’t optimized for the realities of work, couldn’t scale, and, at the end of the day, were no more heavily utilized than their generic counterparts.

Taking all this into account, we reevaluated our furniture offerings using two lenses: that of Living Office, with its settings based on the specific purpose, character, and activities of each organization, group, and individual; and that of our customers, who desire a practical means of understanding what to purchase, in which quantities, for which people, and why it matters. We soon recognized that our systems furnishings fell into two distinct categories: Landscape Systems and Focused Portfolios.