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An office is a room or other area in which people work, but may also denote a position within an organisation with specific duties attached to it (see officer, office-holder, official); 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 legal writing, a company or organization has offices in any place that it has an official presence, even if that presence consists of, for example, a storage silo rather than an office. An office is an architectural and design phenomenon and a social phenomenon, whether it is a tiny office such as a bench in the corner of a "Mom and Pop shop" of extremely small size (see Small Office, Home Office, Xerox Office) through entire floors of buildings up to and including massive buildings dedicated entirely to one company. In modern terms an office usually refers to the location where white-collar workers are employed during the day. An office allows an environment for office politics.
History of offices Space arrangement in offices 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 which put multiple workers together in the same space and some studies in particular areas have shown that they give short term productivity, for example 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, possibly made most famous by the Dilbert cartoon series, which solves visual privacy to some extent, but often fails on acoustic separation and security. Office buildings While offices can be built in almost any location in almost any building, some modern requirements for offices make this more difficult. These requirements can be both legal (light levels must be sufficient, for example) or technical (requirements for networking). Along side such other requirements such as security and flexibility of layout, this has led to the creation of special buildings which are dedicated only or primarily for use as offices. An office building (also called an office block) is a form of commercial building which contains spaces mainly designed to be used for offices. The primary purpose of an office building is to provide a workplace and working environment primarily for administrative and managerial workers. These workers usually occupy set areas within the office building, and usually are provided with desks, PC's and other equipment they may need within these areas. An office building will be divided into sections for different companies or may be dedicated to one company. In either case, each company will typically have a reception area, one or several meeting rooms, singular or open-plan offices, as well as toilets. Many office buildings also have kitchen facilities and a staff room, where workers can have lunch or take a short break. Standard facilities in modern office buildings Smoking in office buildings Smoking is becoming restricted within large offices and other work spaces in most countries. When smoking is allowed, it is often confined to a smoking room. This arrangement can lead to a large interconnected area where smoking is disallowed, forcing smokers to either forego smoking during the day or, more commonly, to leave the buildings for short periods of time. Depending on the climate, this may be inconvenient. In some cases smokers may have some form of shelter outside the building. See also | ||||||||
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