"cave and court design...targets productivity at different levels of interaction and accommodates varying types of work."

Business owners and managers have not only the choice, but perhaps even an obligation, to develop high-quality work settings that allow people to control contacts and to have a choice about when and how much they interact with others. Fritz Steele, in Making and Managing High Quality Workplaces: An Organizational Ecology, suggests a cave and court design that includes small, private withdrawal spots (caves) for work that requires concentration or confidentiality, and a variety of public workspaces (courts) such as conference rooms, sitting rooms, and open common areas for meetings and group projects.

The more private, and smaller, work areas provide appropriate settings for confidential conversations and high-concentration, detail oriented tasks. The larger, public workspaces are designed to stimulate group thinking and activity among workers. This combined office setup actually targets productivity at different levels of interaction and accommodates varying types of work. The result is that the overall work process is enhanced.

An office design that allows for multiple activity settings will resolve the disparity between opposing and diverse privacy needs. A combination of activity settings might include private offices with doors to serve as home bases, bullpen areas with rearrangeable tables for shared work, and quiet spaces or library areas where people can reserve tables to spread out on, lounge chairs for reading, or a secluded corner for concentrated thinking. In this office scenario, the caves -- or home bases -- may be limited to very small areas with just enough space to write, make phone calls, and store personal files, thereby creating more room for activities within the shared areas.

To create the full range of settings requires various combinations of permanent and movable walls and freestanding and systems furniture arranged to form private offices, open-plan environments, and bullpens.