New Zealand Commercial Design Trends Series NZ Commercial Design Trends Vol. 33/04C | Page 63

Below:Havas, Chicago by Gary
Lee Partners – the modern office
is a mix of formal workspaces
and informal communal areas.
Kruger at New York University have shown how we
consistently overrate our ability to communicate
over email, and fill in the gaps in communication
with faulty guesses. Meanwhile, Robert E Kraut at
Carnegie Mellon University has demonstrated how
digital technology has failed to create environments
where collaboration succeeds as well as it does in
the office. Shared physical spaces and proximity
to each other are crucial to effective understanding
between employees.
Flexible working hasn’t always improved the lives
of workers either: for many, a reliance on digital
communication has ended up blurring the boundary
between work and home. As Monash University’s
Anne Bardoel points out, technology “has increased
our ability to work from home and outside of regular
hours, but at the same time it has increased the
expectation that we will do so”.
In this way, remote working further complicates
the difficult work-life balancing act that employees
already face. Other researchers have identified what
they call “flexibility stigma”, where remote work-
ers in high-level roles feel they need to put in long
hours at evenings and weekends to demonstrate
their passion for the job, fearing that otherwise they
will be overlooked for advancement.
“You have to prove yourself worthy of your job
by making it the central focus of your life – the
uncontested central focus of your life,” says Joan C
Williams, director of the Centre for WorkLife Law at
the University of California Hastings College of the
Law. “Technology now sets no work boundaries.
So we have to set these work boundaries through
social norms.”
Employees have also noticed the impact on the
way they work. Akshat Rathi, a writer for the online
business publication Quartz, mourns the loss of
those water-cooler moments of spontaneous brain-
storming between his colleagues who work virtually
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