Humans are funny. Not in the Robin Williams sort of way, but in the “why do we do the things we do?” sort of way. For instance, I travel a lot on business, and I use the tedious hours waiting at my gate for the mechanic to fix the plane as productively as I can. But the noise, the crowds, and the constant overhead announcements reminding me how late I will be to my next meeting, makes productivity tough sledding.
Then I discovered The Admiral’s Club, a warm, caring shelter in an otherwise chaotic business-travel storm. There’s comfortable seating, power outlets, Wi-Fi, glossy magazines, food service, and workstations where I can plug in my laptop, make phone calls, and print documents. As I’ve become a frequent visitor at certain Admiral’s Clubs, I find myself seeking out and sitting in the same cubicle each time. It has gotten to the point where I get a little irritated if someone is sitting in “my cubicle.” And that got me wondering: why do humans do that?
I think it must have started when we were cave-dwelling critters, mostly concerned about making it through the night. And if you will allow me a little literary license (you might look the other way on my history, too), let’s travel back in time and you’ll see what I mean.
We are now in a gloomy, frigid, dank, bat-infested cave somewhere in Laurentia, a pre-continental drift landmass that would one day become Africa (of course, we really have no notion of where we are because no one has a map and Google is still a million years away). Two days ago, the smartest guy in our tribe, Ogg The Very Hairyman, learned how to make fire and everybody decided that was swell. We could now say goodbye to raw pterodactyl buffalo wings, and at night, when the temperature dropped to the point where our mastodon-fur jammies couldn’t keep us warm, we could huddle close to said fire.
But soon, an unforeseen problem surfaced: there was only so much room around that fire. This is where the phrase “the inner circle” comes from, because only those with enough status (think the jocks and Tri-Delts of the caveman epoch) got to sit close enough to keep warm, while those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, sat in the outer circle. Where we sat was a matter of life and death. So, we became highly protective of “our space.”
To illustrate my point, fast-forward a few million years to your high school days. Each semester, you walked into your new class, found a seat, tried to stay awake, and when the bell rang, you shuffled to your next class and repeated the process. The following day, when you wandered back into class, you sat in exactly the same seat as the day before. Why? Because if you didn’t, some other kid would order you out of his or her seat, right?
We see this same behavior wherever humans are found. For instance, my parents are now living in an assisted-living facility. My wife and I spent weeks visiting a dozen or more places to make sure they were in the one that was best for them. And what happened? During the first dinner service at their loving, nurturing, compassionate new home, one of the other residents threatened to douse my father with sweet tea if he didn’t get out of her seat! And what about at church? Have a favorite pew? Got a favorite chair in your conference room? A favorite table at a restaurant? In the lunchroom at work?
Knowing all this, for the last hundred years or so, sign companies have made a fine living printing up name tags to attach to furniture, cubicles, and offices so people would know where “their” seat was.
And behold, it was good.
But then some office manager somewhere looked around and saw a bunch of empty seats with names on them but no butts in them. And that same manager came to a stark realization: office space is perishable. In fact, organic, fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt left out on the counter overnight has a longer shelf-life.
Soon, these observations became commonplace, and here came the $400 an hour consultants to perform utilization studies showing how much space was really being used at any given point in time. This led to hoteling, which led to unhappy employees, which led to high turnover, which led to those office managers being fired. So that concept was scrapped for a decade or so but has reappeared recently in new wrappers called Hot-Desking, Agile Work Environments, Alternative Workplace Solutions, Mobile-Workforce Techniques, Admiral’s Clubs, etc. All these well-intentioned concepts attempt to get people comfortable doing what instinct says they should not. And some are now taking this to the extreme. Want an app to find just-in-time seating in someone else’s office space? Check out Liquid Space for one example (https://liquidspace.com/).
Instincts cannot be changed. They are hard-wired into us. But if made aware of them, they can be managed. For humans to work in ways that run counter to one of our deepest instincts, it is instructive to recall the work of Maslow. His Hierarchy of Needs demonstrated the first need that must be addressed is physiological. In summary, Maslow proved we are not motivated by higher-level needs until those base needs are met. So all the money spent on specialty lighting, tricked-up coffee machines, employee perks programs, and company store discounts, doesn’t matter, unless our most basic needs are met first. And for many of us, the most basic physiological need is knowing how close to the fire we get to sit.
Randy Thompson is senior managing director and head of U.S. corporate project management for Cushman & Wakefield. Contact him at [email protected].
