Reinventing What Privacy Means


PRIVACY IN PHYSICAL SETTINGS

According to Steelcase research, people instinctively evaluate four, often-overlapping mechanisms that determine if a space can provide the type of privacy experience they seek:

• Acoustical privacy: Undisturbed by noise and/or able to create noise of your own without disturbing others.
• Visual privacy: Not being seen by others and/or freeing yourself from sight-induced distractions.
• Territorial privacy: Claiming a space and controlling it as your own (olfactory privacy is a subset).
• Informational privacy: Keeping content (analog and/or digital) and/or a conversation confidential.

Most people think about privacy in terms of other people bothering us, but it’s really about control, say Steelcase researchers.

“When Steelcase started looking into privacy in the early 1980s, our researchers were primarily exploring spatial properties, especially the analytics of sound management. By the early ‘90s, they had synthesized a solid understanding of four mechanisms that regulate privacy in the physical setting: acoustical, visual, territorial and informational. In other words, privacy in any setting is determined by what you hear, what you see, how you define your boundaries and/or what kind of information is revealed and concealed.

“But now we live in an online world as well as a physical one. At the same time that it’s brought us closer, technology has invaded people’s privacy, exacerbating concerns and sensitivities. We wanted to know more about current human needs for privacy and the types of privacy experiences that are important to workers today. We realized we needed to look deeper and apply a new lens,” explains Melanie Redman, a member of the Steelcase WorkSpace Futures team that recently researched privacy by surveying, interviewing and observing workers in North America, Europe and Asia.

As a result of their work, the Steelcase researchers framed the basic psychological context for individual privacy into two spheres: information control—what others can know about us—and stimulation control—managing distractions. They found patterns that were consistent globally: Today’s workers repeatedly shift between revealing and concealing themselves, and between seeking stimulation and blocking it out.

“The most surprising thing to us was how universal the need for privacy is in today’s world. We expected that in countries like China, which has a very collectivist culture, privacy might be less of a need than in countries like the United States, where individualism is prized. But what we discovered is that people all over the world want privacy at times. In different cultures, they may seek it primarily for different reasons and in ways that are permitted in their culture, but the need for privacy sometimes—at work as well as in public—is as important to people as is the need to be with others,” says Wenli Wang, who conducted Steelcase’s privacy research in China.

“As someone who grew up in the U.S.’s deep south and now living in Shanghai, I’m fascinated by how much people are different and how much they are alike. Before we did this research I assumed that Chinese people didn’t place much value on privacy since it’s such a collectivist culture. But the surveys manifested otherwise. Though Chinese people think about privacy differently than those in the U.S., it’s a universal need.”

WENLI WAN

People in Western countries seek privacy at work most often in order to manage distractions, whereas in China the primary motivation is to keep information and one’s self outside of others’ sight, explains Wang. “In China, people don’t think about individual privacy in the same way that Westerners do. In the Western world, it’s more often about stimulation control. Being distracted isn’t as much of a talking point here in China. It’s more about information control, keeping personal information from others and getting away from other people watching you. That’s challenging at work because workstation density is fairly extreme and there typically aren’t options inside the workplace for taking a personal call or having a personal conversation.”

How people use space as an extension of culture has been studied in-depth since the early 1960s. An American cultural anthropologist, Edward T. Hall, coined the term proxemics (the study of human spatial requirements and its effect on communication, behavior and interactions) and established it as a subcategory of nonverbal communication. Hall investigated spatial zones based on the amount of distance between others and ourselves: intimate space, personal space, social space and public space. Each is considered appropriate for different situations, and personal space is where people feel comfortable working with others. While the specific distances vary some, each national culture has spatial norms for each of the four zones. In North America, for example, intimate space extends 18 inches from the body, while personal space extends out to 4 feet, social space to 12 feet, and the public zone is beyond that.

Some of the stresses of today’s work environments can no doubt be traced to the fact that people’s personal space is being compromised. Many are working in environments that routinely bring coworkers close to or even within intimate range, says Taylor. This invasion is not only occurring in physical space. It’s also happening digitally when people make video calls on their mobile devices, which puts the other person less than an arm’s length away. In contrast, a videoconferencing configuration that situates distributed team members “across a shared table” makes for a much more natural and comfortable exchange among peers.

Though there are culturally based differences regarding privacy and acceptable ways to achieve it, Steelcase’s work with global companies has shown that organizational protocols usually trump nation-based norms fairly quickly, says Redman. “If a company places a high value on collaboration and designs an open, collaborative environment in a location where the local culture doesn’t support those behaviors, it may wonder why those local employees don’t like their new office,” she explains.

Within any given culture, the researchers emphasize, privacy is always ultimately contextual to the individual. This means that the privacy that each person seeks depends on personality, state of mind at the moment and the task at hand. “While a particular environment may provide the stimulation necessary for creative work on one day, that same environment may provide only distraction the next day,” says Redman. Moreover, says Wang, Steelcase’s research underscored that mental privacy and physical privacy, though often related, aren’t necessarily synonymous. “People talked about having their own ‘space’—i.e., their own headspace, with the freedom and safety to do and think whatever they want without judgment.”

“There really is no one-size-fits-everybody-all-the-time solution. Privacy encompasses many different needs and behaviors.”

MELANIE REDMAN

PRIVACY: A TIMELESS ISSUE

The clamor for privacy at work isn’t new. In fact, office design concepts have been oscillating around it for decades. Open-plan systems furniture, developed in the late 1960s to accommodate a burgeoning office workforce, was envisioned as a way to provide more privacy than the rows of desks in large rooms where non-management people had typically worked in the past. Of course, it optimized real estate and reduced costs, too. Over time, the approach continued to evolve. In North America many organizations intentionally migrated to cubicles as a way to flatten hierarchies, break down functional silos, improve collaboration and create a more team-driven organization.

To better understand changing needs and expectations for workplace environments, in 1978 Steelcase commissioned the opinion research firm of Louis Harris and Associates, Inc. to conduct a pioneering study of the attitudes of office workers, corporate office planners and professional office designers toward their offices. The results showed that privacy-related considerations were very important to office workers and were, in general, the least satisfactory aspects of their work environments. Though privacy remained an issue, another study in 1991 revealed that changes were underway: Office workers were spending more than half of their time working alone, but organizations were beginning to respond to the growing need for faster, better and more efficient work outputs, and getting to those goals required more collaboration. More workers in 1991 reported there were areas where they could get together to meet and talk informally than two years previous (51 percent vs. 46 percent in 1989), while 57 percent said specific project areas were available.

Throughout the ‘90s collaboration got stronger and the pendulum began swinging away from privacy. Based on an another survey that Steelcase conducted in 2000, nearly half of workers (48.9 percent) wanted more access to others in their work environment, compared to just 27 percent that said there was too little privacy. What’s more, one in every 10 respondents (9.6 percent) said their organization’s work environment had too much privacy.

The value of collaboration has become so recognized since the early ‘90s that, especially in the tech sector, creative industries and countries with egalitarian cultures such as The Netherlands, even executives have chosen to leave their private offices in favor of open plan settings that offer the reward of sharing information more easily for better, speedier decisions.

Today an estimated 70 percent of office spaces in the United States have some form of open plan, according to the International Management Facility Association. Over time, these workstations have become more open and considerably smaller. In North America, the amount of space allotted per worker has decreased from an average of 46 m2 per person in the 1970s to 21 m2 in 2010 to 16 m2 in 2012, says CoreNet Global, and it’s predicted to drop as low as 9 m2 by 2017. At the same time, panel heights have gone down from a standard of 180 cm to 160 or less. And in many offices today, panels have disappeared altogether in favor of open “bullpens” or benching work environments, often used on a shared “hot desking” basis versus individually assigned.

Although technology has made work more mobile, the majority of workers worldwide are still doing most, if not all, of their work in workplaces with still-shrinking personal space and few, if any, accommodations for privacy. Meanwhile, the work they do has become more complex and faster paced to meet the imperatives of creativity and innovation that rule today’s economy.


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