But there's one workplace development likely to bring joy to more than a few: The demise of the dreaded office cubicle.
Yes, all over the country, the world of work is being redesigned, and the dreary Dilbert cube is dropping out of the picture.
At BP's Houston offices, departments are clustered into work "neighborhoods" organized around a central cafe, and cubes have given way to low-panel furniture meant to encourage interaction. Tented, semi-enclosed spaces allow for quiet time.
At Google's renovated Silicon Valley campus, one building has a massive wooden staircase with electrical outlets to accommodate perching workers' laptops. A series of quilted-fabric "yurts" serve as work areas or meeting rooms.
At the financial-services firm Capital One, execs at the corporate offices near Richmond, Va., gave up private spaces to work together around large communal tables.
Many employees there aren't even assigned desks. Instead, thanks to an increasingly wireless, paperless environment, they choose where to labor each day, roaming from shared work stations, to video-conferencing theaters, to informal meeting rooms outfitted with couches and rocking chairs.
"It's not just about putting up a structure and dumping people into it anymore," says Dave Ancell, whose Palo Alto, Calif., company, Emergent Solutions, helped Capital One conceive its new office environment, which is still in a pilot phase.
The new trend in workplace design, Ancell says, focuses on "how people collaborate and get things done."
There's "a sea change in how people are supported at work," says Jim Williamson, a principal at Gensler, an international architecture and design firm whose clients include BP and Hearst Corp.
Gensler's revamp of ad agency McCann-Erickson's Los Angeles office included moving staff from enclosed work stations to open work counters, and shifting managers from perimeter offices to more centrally located spaces with wooden louver walls.
"When I first got into this business," Williamson says, "we were counting bodies and dropping in work stations and cubicles. Then in the late `80s, there was a focus on process. We'd track paper flow and design around that. Then it was about supporting new technology.
"Now, we're asking: `What kind of people do you have? Do you need them to be focused? Creative? Collaborative? Do you need them to work in groups or alone?'"
In many workplaces -- especially those that are part of what's been dubbed the "Idea Economy" -- the answer is, depending on the project, "All of the above."
What that means is a new vision of workplace design that eschews one-size-fits-all formulas and sees workers -- equipped with cell phones, laptops and wireless Web access -- as semi-nomadic.
The definition of "work area" these days is more than just a desk. It encompasses a wide range of shared spaces, including "huddle rooms" for informal meetings and "heads-down" rooms for focused work.
Some offices are even being designed like town centers, with boulevards for strolling and stopping places (lounges, libraries, indoor parks) that encourage chance interactions.
At BP, for example, that cafe was situated so most workers have to walk through it when traveling from one work neighborhood to another.
"Bringing people together in a more open environment helps the work get done better," says Capital One's Lahne Mattas-Curry, adding that 87 percent of employees surveyed preferred the new office design.
"Instead of e-mailing back and forth, you have direct access. You reduce the time it takes to get input from your peers and from your managers. They are more approachable because they are not stuck behind an office wall."
All in all, none of this bodes well for the office cube, whose rapid adoption in the 1960s came courtesy of its one-size-fits-all efficiency and the tax-depreciation credits that systems furniture brought to employers (credits you couldn't get for building an actual office wall).
"The standard cubicle is really the worst of all solutions," says Franklin Becker, who runs the International Workplace Studies Program at Cornell University. "It provides no auditory privacy at the same time it inhibits face-to-face communication.
"And they're not terribly flexible. If you move one wall, you have to move the one next to that, and the one next to that. The only thing the cubicle is good at is delineating territory. It says, 'This is my space, this is my desk.'"
(Interestingly, workplaces that dispense with cubicles and lower the walls are finding that noise levels actually go down. When employees can see each other, it seems, they're more likely to keep their voices down.)
Still, the cube hasn't drawn its last breath quite yet. Office-furniture manufacturer Herman Miller has embarked on a heroic effort to reinvent it with the "My Studio" line, introduced at this summer's NeoCon trade show in Chicago.
"Personal, Comfortable, Controllable" is the slogan the company is using to hawk the high-end systems, which feature translucent doors and sliding-glass window panels.
"People need to be able to concentrate, and they need to be able to interact," says Joel VanWyk, product manager for Herman Miller, who describes My Studio as an effort to provide a work space that will appeal to the kind of skilled knowledge workers he says are in demand.
"With baby boomers retiring, and not as many people entering the workforce, high-performance, creative employees are going to be incredibly difficult to find," VanWyk says.
"When employers are looking at ways to attract the right people -- and keep the ones they have -- then the workplace becomes one of the things they look at."
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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via Newscom. Photo © Elenathewise - FOTOLIA
