Workplace Culture vs Office Design: The Cheers Effect.
Updated: Oct 13
Picture a group of mates building a start up in their grandma's cramped garage, working off a couple of trestle tables with the car parked out on the driveway to make room for everyone. On paper it's about as far from a great place to work as you can get.
And yet ask anyone who has been part of something like that, and they'll tell you those were some of the best working days of their life. So, what's going on? If the quality of the space dictated the quality of the experience, that garage should be low down on the list of great places to work.
Now, I'm a firm believer that a new fit out and a new home can dramatically help an organisation adopt a new way of working. But I've delivered enough of them to know that the most important thing in any workplace never appears in the design. It's the culture, the bit you feel but cannot see, and it sits right at the heart of the workplace culture vs office design debate.
I call it the Cheers effect, after the old sitcom bar where everybody knows your name, and I'll come back to why shortly.
Key Takeaways: Workplace Culture vs Office Design
The Cheers effect is real. People can have a brilliant workplace experience in a pretty ordinary space when they feel connected and part of something worth belonging to.
Office design affects culture, but it doesn't create it. A great fit out can lift a good culture and will expose a poor one, but it can't manufacture belonging on its own.
Belonging comes from the people. Visionary leadership, comradeship, a desire to be part of something and a sense of control over your own destiny do the heavy lifting.
Desk sharing only damages culture when it's done badly. Activity Based Working done properly protects connection, while hot desking potentially erodes it.
Every workplace transformation is a culture project. The job is to protect and enhance a good culture, resurrect one that has lost its way or launch a new one.
Does office design affect culture?
Yes it does, just not in the way most people assume.
I've written before that a new workplace should be a physical representation of a company's culture, vision and ethos. Good design can get people bumping into each other, give teams somewhere to genuinely settle in together and send a loud signal that the organisation cares. Neglect the workplace and the opposite happens; employees read a tired, forgotten office as a lack of care and respect for them, and the seed of disenfranchisement is sown. I covered that in the top 5 trigger events for a workplace transformation.
Put a healthy culture into a great space and it'll fly. Drop a broken culture into that same space and you've spent a small fortune papering over the cracks without addressing the terminal issue for the health of the organisation. A new shiny office is not a silver bullet for fixing chronic cultural issues. Employees will put up with a substandard workplace far more readily than a substandard manager.
What is the Cheers effect?
The Cheers effect is that feeling of being known, valued and part of something positive, even when the environment around you is nothing to write home about. The building is a supporting actor; it's what happens between the people inside it that plays the lead role.
The term comes from Cheers, the sitcom set in a basement bar in Boston that launched Woody Harrelson and gave us Dr Frasier Crane, and nobody went there for the fit out. They went because it was the place where everybody knows your name, a line that has never left me. People don’t just want a place to sit. They want somewhere they feel valued, recognised, connected and part of something, where walking through the door feels like your presence matters and people care about you as a person.
Once you start looking for it, it turns up everywhere, from the mates building a start up in grandma's garage to soldiers in the trenches, forging bonds with their comrades that last the rest of their lives.
MIT Building 20: the Magical Incubator
A great example is MIT's Building 20 at 18 Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was quickly built in 1943 to house wartime radar research, a sprawling three storey timber structure of around 250,000 square feet, designed in a single day and framed in cheap wood to get around the wartime steel shortage. It was only ever meant to last for the duration of the war plus six months, and it stood for 55 years.
It was notorious for its lack of soundproofing, people routinely called it a fire trap and Noam Chomsky, who spent decades there, said it looked like it was going to fall apart. Despite the shabby aesthetic, Chomsky fiercely loved the space, praising it as a "marvel of excitement and interaction" where random encounters with physicists, tech hackers and acoustic engineers regularly sparked creative thought. Out of that building came the single antenna radar, Chomsky's revolution in modern linguistics, Amar Bose's loudspeaker research that became the Bose Corporation and the Tech Model Railroad Club, widely credited as the birthplace of hacker culture.
The people who worked there nicknamed it the Magical Incubator. Some say it was the sheer number of new ideas it housed, others the building's power to bring out the best in the people inside it. They had the autonomy to reconfigure the space as they needed it, and if a wall was in the way you could pretty much stick your elbow through it, so they felt real ownership and pride in a space they co-created with everyone else who shared it.
When it came down in 1998 to make way for Frank Gehry's “Stata Center”, MIT set out to carry that spirit into the new building, with Gehry talking about a place where people would feel comfortable banging the walls out and putting stuff up. It's a striking building, but plenty of critics reckon the special sauce didn't quite make it into the new building. As they likely found, it’s hard to artificially create culture through built form and design alone.
What makes the Cheers effect work?
Strip away the misty eyed nostalgia and it works because of a few very human things.
It starts with authentic visionary leadership. The type of magnetic leader you'd go into battle for, because you believe in where they're taking you and you know they'd be right there in the trench with you.
Then comes comradeship. You trust your team mates, you don't want to let them down and you know they've got your back because you've got theirs.
And underneath it all is the pull of belonging. You look at what that group stands for and represents, and you want to be part of it, because feeling valued and connected is an innate human need. Our working life comes second only to our home life in the hours and headspace we give it, and for some people their work family is the only family they've got.
And then there's control, which as a feeling often gets overlooked, and it's no coincidence that it’s also a fundamental reason so many change projects fail. Strip away a sense of control and you don’t feel like you belong in this space anymore with these people. Can you feel these are your people if the same group also make you feel out of control?
The mates in the garage feel in control of their own destinies. They want to be there, it’s where they’re meant to be and nobody made them choose it. That's a world away from the feeling modern corporate life can sometimes thrust you into, where micro management, toxic cultures and under resourced projects with unrealistic timeframes can leave you shell shocked. It's also why lowering someone's job control is a listed psychosocial hazard and why the Building 20 crowd felt such ownership of a building they were free to reshape. Give people a say and a sense of control and they'll eagerly co-create the space and by association the culture as well.
Will desk sharing destroy our culture?
It's one of the most common early concerns on the Activity Based Working projects I deliver, and it's rarely the senior people raising it. Most of them aren't that fussed. It's the more junior, long tenured staff who worry about it most, the ones who have sat at the same desk for years. "If we can’t sit with our team mates, we'll lose our culture."
It's a fair worry, and the honest answer is that it depends whether you make a hash of it. Hot desking will absolutely chip away at the culture. You get a daily bun fight for a desk, nowhere for a team to settle together and people scattered across the floor. Everyone works out pretty quickly that the whole exercise was about the rent saving rather than about them, and once people feel like a line item on a spreadsheet the culture can go downhill fast.
ABW done properly is a different beast. Team neighbourhoods give people a home base, so they still know where to find their teammates. A proper range of settings gives them places to collaborate, catch up and actually talk to each other. Good change management means they help shape the new way of working rather than having it done to them. And because people move around, cross paths and bump into colleagues they'd never have met parked at the same desk for ten years, it can genuinely strengthen connection. If you want the full comparison, I've written about hot desking vs activity based working.
Protect it, resurrect it or start a new one
Every workplace transformation is a culture project, whether anyone admits it or not. Stay and refurbish or pack up and move, the cultural stuff comes with you either way, and the project will either strengthen it or damage it. Broadly, organisations find themselves in one of three places.
Protect and enhance. Some organisations already have the Cheers effect. People like each other, they believe in where the organisation is heading and the place has a pulse. The job here is to do no harm first, then turn it up a notch. Work out what makes it tick, the rituals, the in jokes, the Friday drinks, the battered trophy on the shelf, and make sure the new space gives those things room to breathe.
Resurrect the glory days. Some cultures have lost their way. The long timers will tell you about the golden age, before the restructures, the leadership churn and the slow decline of an office nobody loved. Pockets of it remain, though, and a workplace transformation can be the moment to dust it off and bring it back, because a new space gives everyone a fresh start.
The dawn of a new culture. Sometimes there's a new leader in the chair who wants to leave their own mark and legacy. The old culture isn't the one they want to carry forward, so the workplace transformation becomes the catalyst for something new. This is where the workplace really earns its keep, as a visible, tangible signal that things have changed.
Whichever camp you're in, start thinking about it at the very beginning of the project. That's a job for your workplace strategy and your workplace change management, and it's why I consistently promote engaging people early so change is done with them, not to them. It also pays to bring people along step by step rather than in one big reveal, which is the whole point of my Harajuku girls post on effective change management.
Pro Tip: Don't go in asking people to define their culture, because you'll most likely get the values poster read back to you. Spend time with them instead. Observe it, experience it for yourself and listen, in the workshops and meetings but also in the kitchen and the corridors, then play back what you believe works and what doesn't. People tend to recognise their culture far more readily when they hear it described back to them than when they're asked to describe it themselves, and that playback becomes part of the brief the new workplace has to protect, amplify or fix.
Frequently asked questions
Does office design affect workplace culture?
Yes, but it can't create a culture on its own. Good design makes connection and collaboration easier and signals that the organisation cares about its people, while a great fit out laid over a poor culture rarely fixes it.
What is the Cheers effect?
The Cheers effect is the experience of feeling known, valued and part of something positive at work, even when the space itself is far from ideal. Named after the sitcom bar where everybody knows your name, it shows that leadership, comradeship and a sense of belonging carry more weight than the quality of the space.
Will desk sharing damage our culture?
It depends how it's done. Hot desking introduced purely to cut property costs tends to erode connection. Activity Based Working done properly, with team neighbourhoods, a genuine range of settings and real employee engagement, protects culture and can strengthen it. The worry is usually strongest among long tenured staff, so they deserve the most attention in the change program.
Should we move office to fix our culture?
Not on its own. A move or refurbishment can be the catalyst to resurrect a culture or launch a new one, but only when leadership and change management are doing the real work. Moving a broken culture into a better building just gives it a nicer view.
Workplace culture vs office design
So, workplace culture vs office design, which one wins? Culture, every time, although that doesn't mean the space doesn't matter. Give a great culture a great space and you'll get something special, but the garage, the trenches and Building 20 all tell the same story, that it's the people who make a place and not the other way round.
If you're a leader about to sign off on a new fit out, ask yourself one question before you look at a single render. Would your people still turn up for each other if you put them all in the Cheers basement bar? If the answer is yes, protect that with everything you've got and build a workplace that does it justice. If the answer is no, the flashiest office in the CBD won't save you, so use the project to fix the culture as well, and let the new workplace be the catalyst for that change.
Build the palace by all means, just make sure it's a place where everybody knows your name.
This blog was written by Work Future, a workplace strategy and workplace transformation consultancy based in Perth, WA. Whether your culture needs protecting, resurrecting or starting afresh, we make sure your workplace transformation carries the bit you feel but cannot see. Contact the team at hello@workfuture.com.au or +61 0435 824 305.
