Measuring Office Complexity

Abstract

An "office" can be described in terms of at least four different (but related) sets of descriptors:the physical, the social, the organizational, and the work-related. This paper focuses on work-relatedaspects of offices, and presents two measures of complexity in office work. The first measure,operational complexity, gauges the average difficulty, in terms of the cognitive resources required, toperform a "chunk" of office work. Independent of this, sequential complexity measures the potentialnumber of task sequences which could be used to accomplish a given chunk of work. Sequentialcomplexity increases as does the number of "special cases," "special cases of special cases," etc. forwhich the chunk of office work need be performed. In other words, it focuses on the complexity ofinterrelationships between individual office tasks, while operational complexity is concerned with thecomplexity of the individual tasks themselves. We then combine these measures into a an aggregatemeasure of overall complexity, combined complexity. The application of these measures isillustrated, using descriptions of order entry processes, for two hypothetical firms, employing job shopand assembly-line technologies, respectively. While these three measures hardly comprise anexhaustive catalogue of complexity in the "office" (or even in office work), we believe they provide auseful basis for both practical application and further theoretical extension.