Where Did The Need For Office Pods Come From?
To understand why office pods are such a necessary investment, we have to go back 20 years.
For the best part of two decades, office-based employees have been used to working in large, open plan rooms. They are so common, you’d be hard pressed to find an office that still uses cubicles, or indeed an employee under the age of 30 who has ever seen a cubicle outside of Hollywood films.
Open plan offices were introduced as a result of employees feeling isolated and disconnected from their peers. Many people felt like tall cubicle walls were hindering their ability to work collaboratively, and so employers started adopting a very different approach.
Things went from one extreme to another. Where there once stood a sea of desk dividers, there was now nothing. Employers were so keen to maximise on social interaction between employees that they failed to consider what has been described by many experts as the most disruptive distraction of all: noise.
According to Zenbooth, over half of office workers say their office is too distracting, and when you consider that it can take almost 25 minutes to refocus, it’s easy to see how much of the workday is lost to noise pollution.
You might think the solution is to bring back cubicles, but that’s not a viable option for most businesses. For all their flaws, open plan offices have been proven to increase creativity. Not only this, the lack of dividers means more people can fit into one room. As a result, employers have hired more people, and so installing dividers would mean fewer people could fit in the office. This leaves two options: reduce staff numbers or move into a new premises. One of these leaves businesses understaffed, and the other one leaves them out of pocket.
This brings us to glass office pods. These acoustic, freestanding structures provide a happy medium to this 21st century stalemate. They offer a room within a room which is noise reducing, but they don’t take up a huge amount of space. This enables those in the office to work openly for the most part, but when they feel like their productivity has dipped, they can take themselves to the pod.