Bob Goldman
What has a blueberry-muffin-blue conference room, a razzle-dazzle-red conference room and a maple-waffle-brown meeting room, all decorated with fake succulents in purple pots and vintage chairs upholstered in yellow pineapple-printed cloth?
No, it isn’t the nightmare you get after drinking too many ayahuasca martinis with the marketing staff. It’s the New York headquarters office of Magic Spoon, an alternative cereal company with core values that include “Be a Froot Loop in a world of Cheerios.”
I think they’ve succeeded, don’t you?
I read about the company’s off-color office decor in a New York Times article by Emma Goldberg and Anna Kode, “The Envy Office: Can Instagrammable Design Lure Young Workers Back?”
According to the authors, the purpose of the color-blinded concept conceived by the design firm Roarke is to “lure workers in with plenty of opportunities to fill their social feeds with photos taken at the workplace.”
(The unstated goal, I suspect, is to chase older workers out onto the streets, but that’s me. Personally, I think the Instagram photo of you standing in front of the water cooler is totally groovy, and so do your three followers.)
Magic Spoon is not the only company where making profits appears to come second to making fans on social media. Case in point — the new headquarters of Marriott, which has a tree growing in the middle of the lobby, planted by the Johnny Appleseeds at Gensler. You could definitely fill your Insta accounts with posts about this fun expression of forest decor, especially since it fits so perfectly with the wilted mushroom that is your career.
If your office has not yet gone Insta, take this moment to make a few design suggestions of your own. Here are three of mine, which you are free to steal. Just don’t invite me over when the transformation is complete. At this point, the only place I can work is a closet.
No. 1: Farm.
The farm-to-table movement is well established in restaurants; it’s time for the farm-to-desk concept to make its debut in office design. Start by replacing the Aeron chairs with hay bales. Take up the carpet and cover the floor in barley. You will need at least one cow in the main conference room, giving a whole new meaning to your description of the pointless discussions that occur during meetings as “chewing the cud.”
There’s no need to bring in pigs — you’ve got them already — but chickens do make a bold design statement. No question, an artistic assortment of poultry will have you and your coworkers filling your Instagram feeds with snaps of multicolored chickens pecking their way through the HR department. It’s not exactly free-range, but the eggs are free — for VPs and above, of course.
No. 2: Hospital.
Every company says its employees work hard. By turning your office into a faux hospital, your company can prove it. A quick coat of white paint is all it takes to turn conference rooms into operating rooms, and while it may be difficult to get an adjustable hospital bed inside your cubicle, it will certainly facilitate your midafternoon naps.
While the staff may be put off by an all-white dress code, the money they’ll save on buying work clothes will soon win over your coworkers, especially managers, who will be permitted to wear green surgical scrubs and run around like they’re really important.
To put everyone in the mood, practice saying, “This meeting has to start, stat!”
No. 3: Haunted House.
If you want images to pin on Pinterest, turn the office into a haunted house. Put cobwebs in C-suite offices. It’s very appropriate since nothing has happened there for years. Conference tables can be replaced with coffins. Bats will be provided by IT, which is, as you know, totally bat-guano crazy.
Replace the jaunty Muzak in the elevators with dirges, and arrange corpses on the communal work tables — members of the accounting team will do nicely, and require no make-up to project that bloodless cadaver look they have when reviewing your expense account.
Admittedly, these office design ideas are not likely to make your company more efficient or productive, but that doesn’t really matter to today’s CEOs. All they care about is how many employees are posting fun photos of their fun office on social media.
You can imagine the quarterly review of the future.
“You were 35 percent more productive and increased profits by 60 percent,” a supervisor will say, “but your Instagram posts are down by 10 percent, so we have to let you go.”
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
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