page_title: Office
section_title: Office structure
hierarchical_section_title: Office / Office structure
caption_attribution_description: English: TradeMe offices, above NZX. Wellington, New Zealand.
context_page_description: An office is generally a room or other area where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific duties attached to it; the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one's duty. When used as an adjective, the term "office" may refer to business-related tasks. In law, a company or organization has offices in any place where it has an official presence, even if that presence consists of a storage silo rather than an establishment with desk-and-chair. An office is also an architectural and design phenomenon: ranging from a small office such as a bench in the corner of a small business of extremely small size, through entire floors of buildings, up to and including massive buildings dedicated entirely to one company. In modern terms an office is usually the location where white-collar workers carry out their functions. As per James Stephenson, "Office is that part of business enterprise which is devoted to the direction and co-ordination of its various activities."
context_section_description: There are many different ways of arranging the space in an office and whilst these vary according to function, managerial fashions, and the culture of specific companies can be even more important.  Choices include, how many people will work within the same room.  At one extreme, each individual worker will have their own room; at the other extreme a large open plan office can be made up of one main room with tens or hundreds of people working in the same space.  Open plan offices put multiple workers together in the same space, and some studies have shown that they can improve short term productivity, i.e. within a single software project.  At the same time, the loss of privacy and security can increase the incidence of theft and loss of company secrets.  A type of compromise between open plan and individual rooms is provided by the cubicle desk, possibly made most famous by the Dilbert cartoon series, which solves visual privacy to some extent, but often fails on acoustic separation and security.  Most cubicles also require the occupant to sit with their back towards anyone who might be approaching; workers in walled offices almost always try to position their normal work seats and desks so that they can see someone entering, and in some instances, install tiny mirrors on things such as computer monitors.
caption: Open plan TradeMe offices, above NZX, Wellington, New Zealand
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