I used to work in an open office. I didn’t love it, but it was okay. I now have decent cubicles, but we “hotel”, and are supposed to remove all our stuff every day.
I hate it.
In practice, I sit in the same desk every day. But there’s just this low level of stress all the time. The first thing I do every day is book space three weeks out. Even when I’m not working I often log in just to book space. If I have trouble with the buggy system, I’m not going to do any actual work until I’ve booked space. People who don’t book space three weeks out end up squabbling with each other over cubes.
Such a waste of energy. And it sucks for collaboration because you don’t know where to find anyone. (Well, except those of us who are anal about booking space.) And it’s not worth learning anyone’s name because they won’t be there next week.
Meanwhile, the president made the news for how much of the company’s money he spent on his plush office.
Uh,me I guess. I mean, I’m not totally a fan of being in the middle of a huge space with empty air behind my back, but if I can manage to grab a corner desk or at least something where ‘in front of me’ is a bigger space than ‘behind me’ then I’ll live. I don’t work in the sort of jobs where everyone is on the phone all the time, and I found some (even quite a lot of) background noise more soothing than distracting.
My personal pref is 6 to 8 person rooms - team size, basically. I go a bit crazy in single-person spaces, and with 2 or 3 person rooms you’ve really got to be sure you like your office-mates.
Ideally a company would have a range of different size spaces, and they could be allocated on the basis of work preferences rather than status.
Athena’s workplace sounds awesome. I’d work there!
There’s ONE person who’s on the phone ALL day. That ONE person makes sure that the rest of the office is disturbed.
Even if he’s not at his desk, the people call and call, so we get to listen to the ringing.
But if it wasn’t him, then it’s the older gentleman with hearing aids who talks loud. Or the younger lady who also talks loud, to be heard over the other people.
And the other person on the other side of the room who’s talking with someone on the phone.
Nope. Hate it. Up to 6 people in a shared room? Fine. More than that? Too many.
We have a wonderful sound masking system, but nobody knows how to operate it worth a shit.
Sound masking systems (pink noise) are for masking small background sounds. Keyboard tapping, murmuring conversations, chair rustling, sneezes, farts, what have you.
Our facilities people thought that if you turned up the system loud enough, you could drown out HEY BRODIE HOW ABOUT THOSE PANTHERS REALLY HAD A GOOD RUNNING GAME BAM RIGHT IN THE 4th. It doesn’t work, it just sounds like a sports bar inside a waterfall.
We went from cubicles (desk, side table, small storage cabinet) to open office (one small desk big enough for laptop, keyboard, and a pad of paper). Everyone detests it. No privacy, extra noise, no room to spread out your paperwork. Most people, including people who normally would have been coming into the office, work at home as much as possible.
If you’d had the same amount of desktop, but just lost the cubical walls, would you still hate it?
I recently went from low cubical walls to high cubical walls, in the same footprint. There were tradeoffs. I didn’t hate either. I did prefer the higher walls, but I can see the other side (so to speak.)
Then we went to hotelling. Still in the same footprint, but no one has a place of their own, you have to book a spot every day. And that feels dehumanizing and I despise it. It saves some money, since we don’t need as many total spaces (someone is always out for some reason. It’s a large company.) But my team is frequently all present, so my team doesn’t actually save money, not without pushing people to work on another floor if they didn’t book a cube on time. Work of the devil, I say.
It may not be true now but in the past the CEO of Intel had a large cube among other people in cubes. Of course I am sure he had a place to go for private talks/phone calls.
truth be told, everyone at my company has access to conference rooms and smaller private rooms for private talks and phone calls. I assume that’s the norm in open set-ups.
When my company first went to open concept decades ago, there were never enough conference rooms/space available. It was awful. Nothing worse than people just shoving a bunch of chairs into one cubicle and holding a meeting near you. My productivity plummeted.
It totally depends on the kind of work I am doing. Generally, I’m happy with low walled cube situation, but not just a row of computers on a table, because I use documents. Not everything I do is online, even if the end result is online. Bonuses are that I can speak to others on my project, answer or get questions answered in a timely manner and usually wear headphones when I need to block out other sounds. In my last position, speakerphone was used only in conference rooms or small rooms (Can fit 2 or 3), not to be used at desks and personal phone calls were expected to be taken elsewhere too. Unfortunately, elsewhere was often the restroom for some.
According to Askamanager, virtually no one working in an open office - who is actually subjected to it and managers often aren’t - likes it.
I worked for years in a place with an open office layout with rooms for training and offices for project managers in the rear, and it was usually okay. The fact that we hot-desked too was worse than the open floor to be honest. However, no one in the open floor had a job that ever required them taking or making calls. That probably would have made the situation a lot worse.
Open plan offices are on my list of Worst Ideas Humanity Ever Came Up With. They can tell you it’s cost-cutting all they want, it’s really about power. It’s the original surveillance capitalism, a form of the Panopticon. Make your employees paranoid that someone is watching and they will behave and be productive. The productivity part doesn’t really happen though because too much noise and too many distractions. Pretty much everyone who works in the office at my workplace keeps their headphones on all day to block out the distractions as much as possible.
Although these days around 80% of my office works from home at least one day a week so on most days around half the office is empty anyway. However, the lessened distractions from less people doesn’t change the relentless stress and anxiety caused by being watched constantly. Everything we do is tracked, our phone calls are monitored (not a call center but we do have occasion to make or take calls sometimes), our keystrokes are logged, what’s on our monitors is recorded, everything gets logged for productivity stats and other such Tayloristic bullshit. This is the Orwellian nightmare of the modern office. I only stay because at least it’s not a call center. There you have to account for every single second of your day, including your toilet breaks!
Sure, I could work from home but I don’t as I would rather not taint the sanctuary of my home with work if I can help it, especially as I just live in a studio apartment so I can’t exactly shut away an office in another room somewhere to separate it. Plus, my electricity bills would go through the roof in the summer from having the air conditioning running more often than if I go to the office most of the week. I just live a few blocks from the office so the commute is not an issue.
We also have hot-desking/hoteling and have to stash our stuff in a locker at the end of the day.
The best office environment I’ve been in was a large open space, enough for a dozen cubicles, that had had all the walls taken down and reassembled into one big wall around the outside with open-backed cubicles extending in from all four sides. So you were facing a wall and had walls to both your sides, but could turn around and look directly at most of the others in the room. (And at the little round table sitting isolated in the middle which on occasion would sprout donuts.) Nobody was too loud, and you could work as if you were isolated in a cubicle, but if you want to talk to somebody you just had to spin your chair and maybe lean a bit. You didn’t have much screen privacy, but otherwise it was basically ideal.
And then our manager’s manager happened to notice us all sitting silently with our backs to each other, and decided that 1) we weren’t being collaborative, and 2) that it was the layout’s fault. So he rearranged things again so now there are four freestanding desks in the middle, in pairs facing each other, with people on the walls behind each of the pairs of desks. I ended up in one of the desks. This means that I 1) have way less desk space, 2) have no walls to post things on, and 3) thanks to the wall of monitors on the desks I can no longer see half of my co-workers without standing up or moving my chair. And, suffice to say, the level of communication and collaboration is unchanged.
So I really liked an open office layout, just not this open office layout.
I’m not so sure about this, or at least it’s not universal. I abhor our open office (see previous post), but there’s no surveillance; all of supervisors are grouped together. Our managers are grouped together, and the general salary folks are in a much larger group, all together. The office is much, much too large to see details across the screen.
Land Division told us the idea was to get us to work more closely together, in a new, modern, and more collaborative way. The problem with this is the people I need to collaborate with are in different builds across town, and mostly the same for others of my leadership level. That causes the issue whereby we’re all on the phone in some capacity for much of the day.
My wife’s office went that way and, from her accounts, it’s lowered productivity. Everyone finds any opportunity to scatter to various conference rooms, phone rooms, hallway couches or anywhere that’s not the table. Which means that, when you want to “collaborate”, you’ve gone from poking your head into their cubical to hunting for them across the building to see which niche they’ve hidden themselves in. Or just electronically messaging them which you could have done before. Plus just lower overall morale from having less privacy, less personal space, feeling like things were taken from you, etc.
Long answer: Over my working life starting in the early 90s, I have gone thru a number of office environments: high-wall cubicle, office with door, high-wall cubicle, tiny and dehumanizing high-wall cubicle, decent low cube/desk with a window, high-wall U-shape two-person desk/cube, private high cubicle, office with window and door, office/closet with door and no window, regular high cube, low cube/open work area, and now open desk/work area.
Of my experiences, the low-cubed/open work space desks are by far the worst: noisy, lack privacy, and require me to suppress my natural “leave me the f*ck alone” look.
My current desk is again one where two people sit in a U-shape and are mainly back-to back. My desk mate is loud and annoying, and frequently turns away from his own desk to face me and mine, while speaking annoyingly loud and reading what is on my screen. Since we are all program and project managers working on separate initiatives, we do not really work together and there is nothing to collaborate on. The desk has one advantage in that it is next to a window, so I can clip the blinds aside to be able to see outside, but since it faces the sun that can only happen on cloudy days.
Fortunately, my company has a liberal telecommute policy so many people do that and only come into the office a couple days a week. Many of the desks around mine are hotel spaces occasionally occupied.
I’ve been through a lot of setups. First 10 years of career (78-88) was in open office with 9 others. It was okay, we could exchange banter and shoot rubber bands at each other as we worked. As far as work goes, it was handy if you’re checking someone’s work to just holler a question to them rather than get up and go to them. Of course, that was before we all had our own computers and phones. From that point on it was cubicles, which I think are fine as long as your back isn’t to the door and people can’t sneak behind you. I did have myself an office with closed walls and a door for a few years which was awesome. After retiring, I now work from home which is better yet- I can listen to my own music and have use of a full kitchen for lunch and can take television breaks.
