I would like to know what happened over that fateful coffee.
I hope nothing untoward happened to Maastricht.
Coffee will be next Friday.
Except they don’t. Wikipedia has a topic about open floor plans. The consensus is that they lower productivity by as much as 60 percent, especially for older people who have to focus for long hours. And our company happen to consists largely of older people who have to focus for long hours (most people write policies). I cited this wikipedia article in my post.
I also reminded management that we have already experimented; one department in another building has open seating, and they chimed in to say they hate it. And in our main building we have a extra section since two years with open seats, for temporary project organisations, very chic and modern. (office hotelling, it’s called.) It stands mostly empty. I remarked that I thought both experiments should be evaluated before implementing it in the rest of the building.
Quicksilver, I don’t mind that kind of punshment! As long as it isn’t windowdressing ans the results actually get considered.
Not a fucking chance. 
But I’ve been wrong before…
Well, this should be very pleasant week for you coming up.
I suppose it is enough time to start updating your resume.
(I do hope I am wrong about this.)
Please keep us posted as developments proceed.
Huh. I don’t think I think of posting a message thread as addressing someone personally. At best, it’s addressing someone and an audience of a bunch more people, which is not really the same.
In my company, we don’t have a messageboard exactly, but we have other methods of group discussion by which people can criticize management, etc. In general, management is very much discouraged from participating in these group discussions because a) you don’t want to scare off people from being critical, which they might be if they thought management was going to be heavily involved, and b) the last thing you want to do is to get into a big flamewar with a manager on one side and a worker bee on the other – talk about being bad for morale!
So I think it may actually be wise of the CEO not to participate in the thread.
Besides, I think there are two potential ways this will fall out:
- They’ve already decided they’ll do the open floor plan thing, regardless of your arguments
- They are convinced by your superior arguments and won’t do it after all.
In either case, what earthly use would it do to debate it in the thread?
I am well-aware that there are people whose sole goal in life is to experiment with efficiency schemes in the business-place. This kind of … was going to say meddling but let me be gentle … exploration into social systems has its place. In a sociology lab. Not in the place where people spend the majority of their waking hours. I have been in many business, scholastic and lab environments, and I utterly detest the kind of culture that is inculcated when intelligent people are stuffed into tiny cubicles with little to no privacy. Listening to the person next to you (separated by a tiny partition of fabric and failed dreams) explain over and over to their spouse that he or she misunderstood what he or she saw last night at that party… that is not conducive to concentration on your business goals.
When there is a sudden increase in the ambient noise level, as in someone accidentally dropping a stack of folders, you get the rather amusing phenomenon known as ‘gophering’ or (more recently) ‘meercatting’. If you have ever worked in a cubicle farm, you know quite well of which I speak.
Open plans are even worse. You lack even the fig-leaf of privacy that a cubicle wall affords.
Fortunately, as a senior scientist on my last few projects, I was given an office. With a locking door. It was one of my requirements for being hired. Now, of course, I am given all the privacy a human can handle.
Thank you for reading my rant.
That’s what I get for relying on oft-erroneous common sense instead of assuming. Thanks for the correction =)
Makes you wonder, though, why are open concepts such a buzzword right now? I can’t imagine what the higher-ups are trying to accomplish if they kill both morale AND productivity in one fell swoop. Is it cheaper or something?
Yes, it is a bit cheaper. It is also fashionable. But the real reason, I suspect, is the same reason a new management keeps doing reorganizations even though most professionals in the reorganisation consultant business say 70 percent of reorganisations fail(except, of course, the one they are hired to do) . Management just wants to leave a mark. To DO something. To have a reason to get everyone on their toes and promote and lay off according to their underlaying ideas.
Interesting. As I said, we have an older messageboard, and a new version, Yammer. When Yammer was implemented two years ago, management was very active on them, to lure others to Yammer. Unfortunately, all they posted was posts of the “I had a very stimulating meeting with X this morning, our project Y is firmly on its way!”-variety. While almost everyone got a Yammer account to see what happened there, it struck many people as insincere, and after a short while, Yammer all but died. The three CEO’s still posted and a handful of communication professionals and the odd newbie.
Then me and another girl interested in social media got interviewed for our in-company magazine about Yammer. We said pretty much the same thing you said up there. And we also said that such bragging posts (we didn’t call them that:)) are actually Twitter posts.
And that people go to a messageboard because there they can not only share sucesses, but also ask advice, debate to get clear on something, bitch and moan, point and laugh, be funny, talk about trivia stuff, help, and show off. And that a messageboard should allow people to do all that, because that leads to lively conversation and enough critical mass so it stays lively. Bragging posts don’t do that.
Right after that article appeared, the CEO’s withdrew from Yammer. One with a post referring to the article. Maybe they had already tired from it and saw this as an opportunity to make an graceful exit, or maybe they agreed and really wanted to help Yammer flourish, I don’t know. But Yammer is still all but dead.
Well, I had the half hour talk with my CEO this morning. Pleasant and constructive. She’s good 
I told her how I did not really have a strong opinion about open floor plans either way, but that I WAS interested in keeping the in company forum alive and buzzing with relevant content. And that was the main reason I had started a thread.
And that I did understand that such fora had their place as one of the many possible tools for incompany discussion, and that optimizing the use was still a learning process, but one I intended to keep alive. There, she agreed with me.
She told me about the process and how management had been planning it for over a year now. The short mention at the end of the November speech was just an announcement, part of a process where the mid level management would be more elaborately informed mid january (yesterday, in fact) and mid management would determine together with the work floor how much of an adaptation in floor plan would be necessary.
We agreed that it may have been unfortunately, but also understandable, that the announcement would cause buzz and rumours in the absence of clear information.
I asked her what I might do better next time. I’ve found that phrasing a good way to get constructive and honest critism. She said that a thread would be okay, but phrase it open, dont set a (negative) tone. So she would have preferred me posting “Hey, what do you people think about open floor plans?” rather then “Please don’'t implement open floor plans!” which was my OP.
The other posts can be as negative as they want, but not the Opening Post. I thougth she had a point and agreed to that.
I asked if she had thougth about posting on the forum. She said she had, had even asked the head of the communications department if she should, but thougth that it would not be wise, mainly because it would kill the forum. I agreed wholeheartedly. I asked if she had any ideas on if and how wh should report back on this on the forum. She said wait untill I have done the official announcement on the plan and process. Then you can discuss on the forum if you like. I agreed again and asked her if she would like to see the post before I posted it, because after all the post would be like a report on the meeting we had. She welcomed that.
So, all is well and our CEO was a class act, IMHO.
Good job!
Glad to hear it went so well, sounds like you both got positive things out of it.
So bottome line is - she’d like to control the message.
Fair enough and not at all surprising. After all, it’s her circus.
Very pleased it went well for you.
My government agency got both Yammer and SharePoint in the past year or so. Upper management expressed particular ideas about what they wanted to accomplish with SharePoint, which they all of a sudden stopped talking about last summer, so I guess the ideas must’ve been shelved. I still have no idea what the point of Yammer was supposed to be. I don’t know anyone in the agency who uses either one, right now.
SharePoint, for all it’s irritating quirks, is an excellent collaboration tool. MSFT bought Yammer to integrate with SharePoint in part as a better blogging tool than what currently exists in SharePoint and in part to improve their MySite feature set. I’m not sure how tightly integrated the two are in the 2013 version of SharePoint. My impression is, not very. As for the point of Yammer, well, people have mentioned up-thread that it’s largely a tool to announce successes and project kick-offs and basically be used as an internal cheering section. In other words, propaganda and not a whole lot more than that.
My workplace has implemented Sharepoint. It serves as a viable resource for collocating and sharing files. I can also post things from my desk and access them from on site, various different computers I may borrow. There is a discussion board element that is almost never used.
We tried putting some discussions on one of our company team collaboration Sharepoints. These teams were designed so us line workers could collaborate on our problems and issues and methods and such. A few threads got started, but it all mostly died. The biggest hurdle is there just isn’t a lot of interest from the line workers for the actual collabortation. There’s little participation in the team itself that meets every other week, and almost nobody checks the Sharepoint.
Putting these communication paths and tools in place is all well and good, but won’t go anywhere if the workers don’t engage.
I’m glad the meeting went well and was a positive exchange.