How Cubicles, Telecommuting, Personal Computers, and Email Shifted the Way We Work

Harvard Business Review · Oct 25, 2026 · 9m

How Cubicles, Telecommuting, Personal Computers, and Email Changed the Way We Work

5 Aug 2020

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Can a brief history of the modern office help us understand changes happening today? Offices, and the ways we use them, are continually evolving. We identified four key moments in the history of modern offices, then asked HBR readers to share their memories of those disruptive transitions and tell us how the changes affected the ways they work. --------------------------------------------------------------------- At Harvard Business Review, we believe in management. If the world’s organizations…