History of Improve Your Office Day
The office has come to signify any place where we get our job done, and that can be in an office building, a coworking space, Starbucks, the library, or even a corner in our house. While we may accept the way we work now and the concept of an office may seem timeless, the office does have a history, and it wasn’t always as it is now.
The medieval monks created the first workplace in the 15th century. The “scriptorium” was a cubicle-style desk made for copying manuscripts and used by lay scribes and illuminators. How the office evolved after that, we do not know. But before the advent of purpose-built office buildings, business owners did their office work — mostly clerical activities — in their homes above their shops. That includes the likes of the Rothschilds and the Barings.
The way people worked changed when the first purpose-built offices, the Old Admiralty Buildings, were opened in 1726. The East India Company made that a trend when it opened its headquarters on Leadenhall Street in the middle of the 18th century, which prompted other corporations to follow suit.
The 20th century ushered in an era that revolutionized the office into how we know it today. The workplace went through several iterations, from open plan office, Bürolandschaft (office landscape), and Action Office, to the much-hated cubicle farm offices, business centers, coworking spaces, and finally, remote work. The commercialization of the light bulb in the early 20th century and the invention of mobile phones and PCs allowed for extended work hours and blurred the lines between personal life and work.
Improve Your Office Day has been marked for years now on October 4 by employers and employees alike to make their workplace more productive for them.