Workers, Decorate!

My first job in New York was on the ninth floor of an office building on Fifth Avenue, where, in keeping with the insignificance of my position, my desk was situated not inside an office or a cubicle, where most of my co-workers were seated, but in the middle of a windowless hallway. I did not enjoy the transparency of such an “open office” design—with passersby stopping to say hello or glance at the game of solitaire left open on my computer screen—but I appreciated the fact that, if I lifted my gaze over the top of my monitor, I found myself looking at a large Mark Rothko print hanging on the opposite wall. Whenever my eyes began to throb with strain or boredom, I would relax by glancing up at the orange-red print for a few seconds, feeling as though I were meditating inside a miniature Rothko Room designed just for me.

That was the idea, anyway. But it didn’t last long: I got sick of looking at the same Rothko abstract “multiform” month after month, and I eventually decided that the painting was dull and smugly self-satisfied, even though it had formerly lulled me into pleasant, contemplative moods. This change in attitude may have contributed to my over-all dissatisfaction with the job itself, or it may have been that I was simply projecting my unhappiness at work onto the nearest available object. (The hallway situation didn’t help matters.) Either way, it struck me as cosmically appropriate when, one day, shortly after I gave two weeks notice, the company’s president unceremoniously removed the Rothko print and hung in its place an original oil painting by an artist friend of his, which depicted a beguiling woman dancing the tango while wearing a dress in a familiar orange-red. The exchange struck me as significant, although I couldn’t say exactly why.

How should a modern workplace be furnished, decorated, and designed? The question is more than a century old. At the end of the nineteenth century, how-to guides for industrialists suggested that, just as the assembly line had revolutionized the manufacturing plant, a workplace’s aesthetic could be optimized to make employees more efficient. An engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor, best known for exalting standardization (of scheduling, wages, equipment, and so on) for the sake of productivity, advocated that managers arrange their workers into cell-like spaces tailored to the simple, unskilled labor that each would perform. His ideas—known as scientific management or, simply, Taylorism—helped to inspire not only the modern factory but also the rigidly planned mid-century office, and they remain widespread in the business world. A 2002 industry report titled “The State of the Office” characterized the standard managerial viewpoint as follows: “Space management is about control, autocracy, and enforcement.”

An alternative to Taylor’s minimalism also emerged in the late nineteenth century. According to this philosophy, workers in an aesthetically pleasant space work more productively. In 1891, an article in the magazine Engineering observed, “The engines in Jewell’s Mills, Brooklyn, are painted with coach black, and striped with real gold leaf. Seems reckless extravagance, don’t it? Well, it isn’t. The engineer feels that he has charge of two noble machines, and gets their best out of them.” Some writers even argued that painting rooms in particular colors, such as red, could have an enthusing or “dynamogenic” influence on factory workers. By the nineteen-fifties, theories about color and the worker experience had infiltrated offices as well as factory floors. “The occupant of an orange office, for instance, will become ill at ease after a short time and will leave it at every opportunity,” one 1968 book on interior colors claimed. Such arguments did not typically survive scientific scrutiny. Most studies have found that, even though workers might prefer some color schemes, this preference does not affect their performance.

“Color is very prone to pop psychology,” Craig Knight, a research psychologist at the University of Exeter, told me. “Take red. Red can mean aggression. It can mean sex. It can mean concentration. So to say, ‘I’m going to put red in this room to help people work harder’—that’s absolute nonsense.” Knight studies how office-design choices affect performance and morale, but he doubts that folksy beliefs about room color are accurate. When it comes to the nature of office enrichment, he said, generalizations are always dangerous: “Blue might help you relax, but it’ll depress the hell out of me.”

Then again, recent research shows the shortcomings of Taylor’s spartan workplaces, too. In the past decade, several studies have suggested that workers in an “enriched” office—one decorated with posters, prints, office plants, and the like—are more satisfied and productive than those who work in stripped-down, “lean” offices that are designed to minimize disruptions and expense. (These are described in the scientific literature, with Orwellian flair, as “low autonomy environments.”) In 2010, Knight’s research group found that, when they allowed students and workers to collaborate on decorating their offices, the subjects reported higher workplace satisfaction and well-being, on average, than those who were forced to abide by their employer’s tastes, whether lean or enhanced. These subjects also performed tasks more quickly, without making more mistakes. In other words, if you let employees determine their own surroundings, they will choose what works for them. In the process, they’ll be more productive, and they’ll feel more empowered, too.

For decades, some psychologists have argued that employees should be allowed to add personal touches to their workspaces in order to feel a greater sense of permanence and control. Knight’s work is part of a growing body of research that supports this stance, and that questions the assumption that managers should be the ones controlling the office environment. (In addition to his research, Knight is also a private consultant to businesses on design decisions.) Still, top-down design remains the standard arrangement in many offices, especially open-plan offices, where low-status workers may be discouraged from decorating their spaces or participating in design decisions. And the classic office remains highly standardized in its choice of furniture, layout, and décor, so that workers can be moved around quickly and anonymously as needed.

That this standard survived the twentieth century intact may have something to do with one influential, if questionable, study. In the twenties, around the time that Taylorism was reaching its peak influence, an industrialist named Elton Mayo conducted a series of tests known today as the Hawthorne Experiments. These tests found that changes to the workplace environment—including, for example, making a room’s lighting more or less intense—generally didn’t affect how workers at a Chicago-area Western Electric Company plant performed. The exception was a short-lived boost in productivity that depended not on the nature of the change but on the simple fact of any change, which conveyed to the workers that they were being observed by management. The psychologist Henry A. Landsberge later called this the Hawthorne Effect, named for the plant where the experiments took place. Employers, it seemed, could inspire a rise in productivity by observing workers and making small adjustments to workplace life, even if these were simply reversions of previous changes.

Recent attempts to re-create the Hawthorne experiment have produced mixed results, and today some critics argue that it is little more than a “glorified anecdote.” In 2011, the economist Steven Levitt, of “Freakonomics” fame, and his colleague John List reëxamined the data from the Hawthorne Experiments, which had long been thought to be lost. They found that much, though not all, of the rise in productivity could be explained by factors other than the Hawthorne Effect—for instance, whether the experiments took place on a Monday, when the workers were most rested. More than anything else, Levitt and List concluded, the Hawthorne Experiments demonstrate “the power of a good story.” For decades, managers and researchers alike treated as gospel the notion that workers are easily motivated by dictatorial attention and decision-making. A vestige of this belief persists today: office design generally remains the provenance of managers and consultants rather than the workers themselves.

Knight, the University of Exeter professor, is now studying other effects of letting workers make their own design decisions: can the practice be associated with improvements in memory, for instance, or attention span? In the current issue of the British Journal of Psychology, he published the results of an experiment that he conducted among the elderly residents of an assisted-living facility. The study found that, when residents could choose the facility’s decorations, they later did better on several cognitive tests.

As an art lover, I asked Knight whether any of his studies suggested that works of art are especially successful at increasing workers’ well-being. Maybe, I ventured, interesting or challenging works of art could encourage creativity, especially if the employees themselves, and not the company president, chose the pieces. I remembered my old office job and wondered whether a favorite Kandinsky, in place of the Rothko, might have changed my feelings of dissatisfaction. Knight said that I might not like his answer. Giving workers a choice was the crucial factor in his studies, he said, meaning that, in my case, a Kandinsky might have done the trick. But in general, he said, “how you enrich doesn’t really matter. Pictures are not much different than plants.”

Photograph: Amy Eckert/UpperCut Images/Getty