The Reason the Office Isn’t Fun Anymore
RIP eavesdropping. Employees are now hiding out in privacy booths or empty conference rooms, turning workplaces into quiet zones. ‘It’s weird.’
RIP eavesdropping. Employees are now hiding out in privacy booths or empty conference rooms, turning workplaces into quiet zones. ‘It’s weird.’
When David Witting prepared digital-marketing agency Dept@’s Boston-area offices for employees’ return in 2022, he ordered trendy couches, chairs and high tables, envisioning lively collaboration and banter.
Yet when his co-workers arrived, many skipped the furniture and gravitated toward the private booths scattered in the office. Since then he’s jettisoned some of the furniture, and added more booths.
“People are coming in to do occasional big meetings, but really the rest of the time, they want a quiet private spot to get on a Zoom call,” said Witting, a partner at the company. “It’s weird.”
As Covid-19’s remote-work surge fades, some workplaces are quieter and odder than ever. Employees have returned only to park themselves in deserted conference rooms or sound-muffling chambers. Colleagues grumble about booth-hogging co-workers, and some companies have started enforcing time limits on them.
The pods, some resembling old-school telephone booths, have emerged as one of the hottest segments in the $24 billion North American office-furniture industry. Manufacturers such as Room, Nook and Framery say business has been brisk. But some workers and managers say more booths means less eavesdropping, less gossiping, less camaraderie and less fun.
“It’s strange,” said William Blaze, a technology recruiter and consultant, referring to colleagues who end up occupying booths for much of their workdays. Blaze, who lives in Atlantic Highlands, N.J., observed the phenomenon while working at tech companies from 2021 to 2023, as well as at a client’s Manhattan co-working office where he now works two days a week.
“It seems that the goal of returning to office has been to create a rowdy buzz,” said Blaze. “We’re not seeing that.”
Janet Pogue McLaurin, global director of workplace research at architecture and design firm Gensler, said workplace privacy has never been more important. Many of the firm’s clients, which include big companies such as Amazon, have more than doubled their booths and other private or semiprivate areas since the pandemic.
“This is a huge trend,” she said.
Demand for privacy has office architects and landlords scrambling to rearrange layouts. Open-plan offices, often dreaded by employees, are now being peppered with pods and booths that scream “do not disturb.”
Jamie Hodari, chief executive of global co-working company Industrious, said some workers are monopolising private areas in office spaces that were designed for professionals to connect with other professionals. “We see a lot more people linger for two hours post-phone call or a Zoom call because they like having a little space to themselves.”
Booth-inclined office workers say their needs have changed post-Covid, and they have a harder time concentrating among noise and distractions.
At CrowdComms, a U.K.-based maker of event technology, managing director Matthew Allen got used to working in near-silence at the office during the pandemic. When colleagues returned, their phone calls—even at normal volume—annoyed him so much he bought a sound-dampening booth.
Though it was ostensibly for the entire office, he soon moved in.
“It’s quite selfish,” said Allen, who has added a trio of plants. “I think it has very much become my home.”
On social-media sites such as X, Reddit and TikTok, employees generally celebrate the booths. Even Chatty Cathys are seeking them out. One X user tweeted that she locks herself in an office phone booth most days because she talks too much.
Others vent about booths’ poor ventilation and small size, or their aesthetics. Kirsten Auclair, a biomedical researcher in San Francisco, shudders at the harsh lighting in the booths she uses to take Zoom calls at work.
“It casts like the worst shadows, you look just kind of, like, on the brink of death,” she said. Still, Auclair considers the oasis from colleagues’ noise an office lifesaver.
Booth manufacturers insist their products can coexist with collegiality. SnapCab founder and CEO Glenn Bostock said the glass walls of his company’s pods allow for a sense of connection with co-workers.
“They can see you,” he said. “You can wave at them. You can still interact with people visually but you get that audio privacy.”
Other products seek a different balance between isolation and community. Furniture maker Steelcase offers a desk-encircling tent meant to ensure “territorial privacy” instead of silence. Nook, headquartered in the U.K., makes hut-shaped hideaways intended to provide a sense of psychological safety without being completely enclosed.
Nook founder David O’Coimin said an office filled with phone booths “is like you have a jail instead of having a workplace.”
Furniture distributor Thinkspace sells booths that Sid Meadows, principal and vice president, said are designed to allow a low level of outside sound. Humans are wired to crave some background noise, he said, pointing to popular YouTube videos of ambient office chatter.
That matches the findings of a study co-authored by Dr. Esther Sternberg, director of the University of Arizona Institute on Place, Wellbeing and Performance. She and colleagues discovered people became stressed when their surroundings were too quiet as well as too loud. The typical volume of birdsong, at 45 decibels, appears to be just right.
Nick Fine, a user-experience researcher in London, describes himself as an “old school, pre pandemic office worker” who enjoys the hubbub of a busy workplace. But the now-hybrid worker still spends considerable time in an enclosed pod to work without overhearing his colleagues’ chatter on days he’s in the office.
“I have ADHD and working in a pod engages my hyper focus,” he said, adding he likes having the booth option when the din is too much.
Farmer’s Fridge, which sells fresh salads out of vending machines, has eight pods made by Zenbooth and a plethora of conference rooms in its Chicago office. It offers about 40 hideaways for the 85 people who work there, yet that bounty of isolation isn’t always enough, even for the CEO.
“I actually live three minutes from here,” said Luke Saunders, also the company’s founder. “If I really have to get work done, I do it at home.”
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Sky-high pricey artworks may not be flying off the auction block right now, but the art market is actually doing just fine.
That’s a key takeaway from a 190-plus page report written by Art Economics founder Clare McAndrew and published Thursday morning by Art Basel and UBS. The results were based on a survey of more than 3,600 collectors with US$1 million in investable assets located in 14 markets around the world.
That the art market is doing relatively well is backed by several data points from the survey that show collectors are buying plenty of art—just at lower prices—and that they are making more purchases through galleries and art fairs versus auction houses.
It’s also backed by the perception of a “robust art market feeling,” which was evident at Art Basel Paris last week, says Matthew Newton, art advisory specialist with UBS Family Office Solutions in New York.
“It was busy and the galleries were doing well,” Newton says, noting that several dealers offered top-tier works—“the kind of stuff you only bring out to share if you have a decent amount of confidence.”
That optimism is reflected in the survey results, which found 91% of respondents were optimistic about the global art market in the next six months. That’s up from the 77% who expressed optimism at the end of last year.
Moreover, the median expenditure on fine art, decorative art and antiques, and other collectibles in the first half by those surveyed was US$25,555. If that level is maintained for the second half, it would “reflect a stable annual level of spending,” the report said. It would also exceed meet or exceed the median level of spending for the past two years.
The changes in collector behaviour noted in the report—including a decline in average spending, and buying through more diverse channels—“are likely to contribute to the ongoing shift in focus away from the narrow high-end of sales that has dominated in previous years, potentially expanding the market’s base and encouraging growth in more affordable art segments, which could provide greater stability in future,” McAndrew said in a statement.
One reason the art market may appear from the outside to be teetering is the performance of the major auction houses has been pretty dismal since last year. Aggregate sales for the first half of the year at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Bonhams, reached only US$4.7 billion in the first half, down from US$6.3 billion in the first half a year ago and US$7.4 billion in the same period in 2022, the report said.
Meanwhile, the number of “fully published” sales in the first half reached 951 at the four auction houses, up from 896 in the same period last year and 811 in 2022. Considering the lower overall results in sales value, the figures imply an increase in transactions of lower-priced works.
“They’re basically just working harder for less,” Newton says.
One reason the auction houses are having difficulties is many sellers have been unwilling to part with high-value works out of concern they won’t get the kind of prices they would have at the art market’s recent highs coming out of the pandemic in 2021 and 2022. “You really only get one chance to sell it,” he says.
Also, counterintuitively, art collectors who have benefited from strength in the stock market and the greater economy may be “feeling a positive wealth effect right now,” so they don’t need to sell, Newton says. “They can wait until those ‘animal spirits’ pick back up,” referring to human emotions that can drive the market.
That collectors are focusing on art at more modest price points right now is also evident in data from the Association of Professional Art Advisors that was included in the report. According to APAA survey data of its advisors, if sales they facilitated in the first half continue at the same pace, the total number of works sold this year will be 23% more than 2023.
Most of the works purchased so far were bought for less than US$100,000, with the most common price point between US$25,000 and US$50,000.
The advisors surveyed also said that 80% of the US$500 million in transactions they conducted in the first half of this year involved buying art rather than selling it. If this pattern holds, the proportion of art bought vs. sold will be 17% more than last year and the value of those transactions will be 10% more.
“This suggests that these advisors are much more active in building collections than editing or dismantling them,” the report said.
The collectors surveyed spend most of their art dollars with dealers. Although the percentage of their spending through this channel dipped to 49% in the first half from 52% in all of last year, spending at art fairs (made largely through gallery booths) increased to 11% in the first half from 9% last year.
Collectors also bought slightly more art directly from artists (9% in the first half vs. 7% last year), and they bought more art privately (7% vs. 6%). The percentage spent at auction houses declined to 20% from 23%.
The data also showed a shift in buying trends, as 88% of those polled said they bought art from a new gallery in the past two years, and 52% bought works by new and emerging artists in 2023 and this year.
The latter data point is interesting, since works by many of these artists fall into the ultra contemporary category, where art soared to multiples of original purchase prices in a speculative frenzy from 2021-22. That bubble has burst, but the best of those artists are showing staying power, Newton says.
“You’re seeing that kind of diversion between what’s most interesting and will maintain its value over time, versus maybe what’s a little bit less interesting
and might have had speculative buying behind it,” he says.
Collectors appear better prepared to uncover the best artists, as more of those surveyed are doing background research or are seeking advice before they buy. Less than 1% of those surveyed said they buy on impulse, down from 10% a year earlier, the report said.
Not all collectors are alike so the Art Basel-UBS report goes into considerable detail breaking down preferences and actions by individuals according to the regions where they live and their age range, for instance. The lion’s share of spending on art today is by Gen X, for instance—those who are roughly 45-60 years old.
Despite a predominately optimistic view of the market, of those surveyed only 43% plan to buy more art in the next 12 months, down from more than 50% in the previous two years, the report said. Buyers in mainland China were an exception, with 70% saying they plan to buy.
Overall, more than half of all collectors surveyed across age groups and regions plan to sell, a reversal from past years. That data point could foretell a coming buyer’s market, the report said, or it “could be indicative of more hopeful forecasts on pricing or the perception that there could be better opportunities for sales in some segments in the near future than there are at present.”
In the U.S., where 48% of collectors plan to buy, Newton says he’s seeing a lot of interest in art from wealth management clients.
“They’re looking for ideas. They’re looking for names of artists that can be compelling and have staying power,” Newton says. “That’s definitely happening from an optimistic standpoint.”
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Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.