How far can you go with office design, really? Diane from HR has been on about it for four weeks straight now. At every meeting, she’s got some new idea up her sleeve that’s supposedly going innovate the whole sector. We’re a law firm, Diane, not a happening PR company like those kids over the road. We don’t need a slippery dip between floors, nor do any of us especially want one.
See, I have a problem with being pressured to have fun. I don’t come here to have fun or to flip the script on my profession. I come here to make money; that’s the tall and the short of it. Certainly, there are some adjustments that could be made to the office which would support this end – a technology upgrade, for example, and perhaps an updated set of meeting rooms. A different layout wouldn’t necessarily go astray.
Sydney office fitouts have a way of being somewhere between overly trendy and downright boring, and I suppose Diane might be looking for a middle ground between the two. That’s understandable, but there are surely ways of going about it that aren’t simply band-aid solutions. If anything, innovation might be best achieved through more traditional solutions that aren’t as likely to go out of fashion.
Don’t get me wrong – slippery dips are great, and I’m sure they work really well in some offices. I just don’t see what they have to do with the price of fish around here. Maybe I should suggest to Diane that she compile a list of the best office designers Sydney has ever seen, then get their professional views on our situation and present those, and we can go from there.
I could take the whole thing more seriously that way. It’s not that I don’t respect Diane’s taste; I’m just getting sick of her chewing my ear off in the toilets about her idea for a ball pit in the main meeting room.