Is modern office killing creativity?

Nafula beamed with pride and joy as she opened an email one Thursday morning on her phone. Much to her surprise, she had landed a new much coveted underwriter position at one of East Africa's largest insurance companies. She eagerly handed in her resignation notice at her current small employer and accepted the new offer.

On the first day she showed up early to her new office. But she could not get in. Every employee walking by her new department did not have the electronic key card and commensurate combination to enter her particular department.

She stood outside the floor in the office high rise before the first worker in her new department arrived and let her in. Then in walking to her new team's area, her escort had to enter two additional key codes and card swipes before getting to the conference room. Nafula was not accustomed to such levels of security. By the end of her first week, she pondered whether she should have taken the new job or not.

Travel around Nairobi, take a business trip to the Coast, or hop over to Kisumu. If you go to a modern office building in Kenya you will often notice big differences between how large companies treat their staff versus smaller employers. Many large companies with over 100 employees have started a trend to implement electronic key cards and access codes at doors.

While such technology has been in wide use in multinational firms since the early 1990s, many firms now go wild with over emphasis on the electronic key card access. Instead of just opening the door like in the 1990s and 2000s, many large company employees must swipe so that the system can track staff movements.

Walking from one room to another, one floor to another, going to the lobby to use the restroom then back to your desk or office, one must swipe or touch their access card to a reader. If opening the door for a friend, then that friend must still swipe their access card even if the door is already open.

Otherwise, the system will bar them from reentering the area. So in walking from perhaps one's ninth floor office down to a meeting on the second floor as an example, a staff might have to swipe or enter a key code up to seven times as they move throughout the floors, lifts, offices and stairs.

But is such movement regulation useful? Corporate security experts argue that not only door access but tracking employee movements are crucial to safety and fraud prevention in large companies.

But what does research say the employees feel? Over-regulation of employee movements builds compliance with company process and staff get used to the added hurdles and physical bureaucracy. But it also lowers their commitment to their organisation.

Humans hold an innate desire to feel trusted, autonomous to make their own decisions, and respond spontaneously to creativity. More recent research has been done on how open plan minimum walled offices actually diminish employee interactions and happiness. Now researchers are beginning to delve into too much electronic office monitoring with key cards.

Hurdles, in research called field constraints, create actual and psychological bureaucracy. Employees who want to spontaneously get up and collaborate with colleagues on a new creative idea will think twice before going through the bother of moving to other areas in the company to talk.

Innovation in such firms decreases as employee proactiveness declines. Staff risk taking on projects also declines, another key component of innovation, because they feel that since the firm will not trust them or take a risk on them, why then should they take risks with new product and service ideas to boost the company. It changes the whole mindset of the organisation's mindset to one of constraints and permissions.

So, while technology was meant to boost security and effectiveness, it actually can end up lowering productivity, efficiency, and growth. Corporate managers must carefully weigh the costs and benefits of new trends, fads, and technology. Humans are not robots and every bad decision can hold numerous undesired bad consequences.