When you strip an office of its closed doors and cubicle walls, the thinking goes, you make room for increased dialogue and creativity between co-workers, facilitating more insightful conversation and an open exchange of ideas rather than long spells of silence amid a sea of diligent head-down email-sending.
That's all well and good, but you might also be sending a green light to potential thieves.
"It's probably worth considering what's in plain, snatchable sight late at night."
Burglaries are up in some neighborhoods in San Francisco, reports Fast Company Design, a trend attributed to tech companies' affinity for open office spaces and the relative ease of stealing a ton of stuff in a short period of time that appears to lend itself to would-be thieves.
Of course, open offices have garnered their fair share of negative press as of late, said to promote everything from a more prevalent transmission of germs to a decrease in employee happiness.
Still, the trend seems to be holding fast, especially in tech-related startups where the hipness of your office is held in just as high a regard as the effectiveness of your product.
In a nutshell, here's the rub: Offices void of lockable doors and instead lined with clean, wide-open work surfaces mean far fewer gadgets are put under lock and key when the lights go off and everyone leaves for the night. Add to that the culture of mobile work spaces – workers carrying laptops from area to area all throughout the day – and you've got fewer locks in general.
So instead of having to break in and go from locked door to locked door, finding the keys to the so-called kingdom means simply finding your way in and making off with as much as you can carry.
And such efforts have gotten rather extreme. Consider this account from an L.A.-based architect:
I was once in an extraordinary "ram raid" in London in a client’s ground floor office. At 6 p.m. on a weekday, when half of the 200-person staff was still in the office, a truck rammed their back doors, headlights streaming in, and men in balaclavas smashed through and grabbed laptops and other hardware, while the staff ran away screaming. It was all over in about two minutes as the truck reversed, the men jumped on and drove off.
I write you this from BostInno's remarkably open-concept office in Faneuil Hall, where the majority of staffers sit in a wide-open room among gadgets galore. For all our writers, sales people, developers, marketers and business folk to sit behind closed doors would be unfathomable; ours is a business predicated on lots of shouting and expecting quick, accurate results.
We're good little worker bees, typically taking our goodies home with us at night or finding a drawer with a lock.
But in general, for everyone, it's probably worth considering what's in plain, snatchable sight late at night or during the weekends. Perhaps consider a simple laptop lock. Or one of those signs littering the 'burbs assuring passersby yours is an office protected by ADT. A strategically placed security camera (working or not) might go a long way, too.
Or maybe, finally, you've found your rationale for a live-in office guard puppy. #ComeAtMeBro
Image via Shutterstock/luchunyu
