It's bad enough many hard working Americans are forced to slave away in the fabric-lined cells management euphemistically calls "cubicles", but with office space shrinking, many say they are working in spaces smaller than their home bathrooms.

Forget being able to bring a little bit of home to the office and deck out your cube to reflect your personality. You're lucky if you can squeeze a monitor and a fax machine in there at the same time.

According to a recent national survey sponsored by office supply company Fellowes Inc., almost 50% of full and part-time working men and women that work in a cubicle say that their home bathroom is actually larger than the space they have to work in eight hours a day. And nearly a quarter of them say their closet or kitchen pantry is bigger. (I think veal are raised in larger spaces.) One in five respondents (20% for you math whizzes out there), say a small office space makes them feel less organized, with 59% saying that the small space is to blame for their cubicle being messy (1). (Are they sure it's not all the Snickers wrappers and the NBA bobblehead collection that makes it messy?)

According to one study (2) the average desk worker has 36 hours of work piled on their desk and spends three hours per week sorting piles trying to find the project to work on next. (And another 2 creating covers for their TPS reports.) Leaving little room for anything else. Which is why more than 50% said they would have to sacrifice personal items like books, family photos and Jenna Jameson DVDs (I made that one up), to save room for work items.

Here's my take: yes I know it's a WORK space and it should be for work related items, but most of us spend more time in the office than we do at home. You should at least have enough space to hold all your work stuff and let you throw in a few personal items. Even prisoners get to put pictures on the walls.


For those of you that love the specifics: The survey interviewed 265 random full and part-time working adults ages 18 and older living in the United States and currently working in an office cubicle. The survey was conducted during a 10-day period starting June 8, 2007 by KRC Research. The margin of error is +/-6 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.

1. International Facility Management Association "Space and Project
Management Benchmarks, Research Report #28," 2006
2. "The Overload Syndrome," Richard A. Swenson, 1998