Hey, corporate warriors: this thread is about having a personal office. What perceptions do people have about those who have one, especially co-workers who they might feel “shouldn’t” have an office but do? Is there a set list of legit business reasons … and what if someone is assigned to an office but doesn’t meet any of the justifications?
(For the purposes of this discussion, having an “office” means your desk is in an on-site room with walls & a door that closes. Other workers on site have desks, but are in cubicles without doors, or an open-floor plan with maybe some partitions.)
For background, my I.T. Guy has been assigned to his own office, and is having some angst over it. He believes the only business justification for having an office is that one needs to have private meetings (like with direct reports or outside vendors) and since neither is part of his current role, he’s concerned about negative perceptions. Currently he’s a business analyst, and since this company is the opposite of data-driven (snark alert) any minor report he creates seems like magic! and he has rather unwillingly become something of a golden boy. Especially to executives.
Hence, the perceptions issue. To him, it smacks of hubris, and the fact that he didn’t ask for one won’t matter to the people who feel otherwise. He told me, “I don’t want people to have a perception that I’m moving up because I’m the teachers pet.”
Do you think he should ask his boss - who assigned the new seating arrangements - to move him out to a cube? What would you do?
Did he get a promotion? Some kind of title change? At my company, if you’re a VP or higher you have an office. If you’re lower than VP, you don’t have an office. Pretty cut and dried.
My general thought is you should take everything upper management sees fit to give you, including an office. Do you think he’s right that people will resent him for having an office? If so, sounds like a not-so-great workplace.
Our IT guys (all three of them) have their own offices. I thought the reason is because they might have sensitive personnel or other confidential data on their screens.
I recommend reading a book called The Ropes To Know and The Ropes To Skip. It explains a lot of the senseless rituals and behavior in corporations. Sometimes the workings of the machine don’t make sense; don’t let them worry you. Much of it is just for show, anyway. Sometimes there are more offices than important people.
I saw a couple of IT guys get a big office where I worked. They didn’t have rank, but they did have a lot of expensive gear that might have “walked away” from a cubicle.
Every creative employee (artists, engineers, scientists, programmers, architects, etc.), as well as many other kinds of workers, should have their own office. An office is just a room with a door that shuts. It blocks out sounds and distractions, allowing you to think, so you can perform your job to the best of your abilities. It could literally be a converted janitorial closet. Anything more than that, like a window or extra space, is a perk to attract and satisfy employees, not a wasteful handout to be justified.
Unless he has one of those swanky top floor offices with a city scape view, plush leather couches and a fully-stocked wet bar, I would never think “this is only acceptable if you entertain clients”.
I hate open floor plans and short-walled cubes. Collaboration should be encouraged in other ways, like open door policies and friendly socialization. If you feel offices are just too isolating, have a lobby or break room with couches for people to work in and collaborate if that’s what they prefer. Just give them an office to keep their stuff in and go back to when they need peace and quiet.
Yes, it will look like he is being looked on especially favorably. No, he should not refuse the office or ask to be assigned to a cube – that would look like he doesn’t have confidence in himself.
I’d tell him to keep the office, leave the door open, and always have a bowl of candies on his desk for visitors. Nobody will think he’s being snooty, unless he is.
I should clarify that his discomfort is purely a matter of his own personal morals, since he feels he hasn’t “earned” it yet. The problem is not snide comments from other co-workers . . it’s that his Jiminy Cricket isn’t comfortable.
As an IT guy, you have sensitive conversations – “What’s your password”, “What’s your account name”, “You need me to suspend which user’s account?”. You need a door at these times.
As cited earlier, if you don’t have a dedicated IT room, you need a place with a door to lock up those five $4,000 laptops so they don’t walk away.
From your OP, maybe the report-requesters would like to ask him to create some private reports - “Could you please analyze if we should keep XYZ as a client, or drop them”, “Could you please produce a report of all the websites Slacky McSlackerson visited in the last week”. “Could you please analyze keeping Bob at his current salary, or hiring Ted and Alice at half his salary and both doing his job”.
An IT guy definitely has times where privacy is needed, if not demanded by legal reasons.
Yikes. A bit late to clarify but “my I.T. Guy” is my cutesy way of referring to my boyfriend. He’s a business analyst. (Now. He was in IT when we met.) He’s a golden boy partially for pulling together the Power B.I. reports that allowed middle management to finally implement any sort of Q.A. and - no, really - some rudimentary PIP plans, which literally did not exist a year ago. For a shared service center that’s been providing customer service & financial preparations for a couple of years now.
Basically, in his mind, he’s being rewarded extravagantly for the corporate equivalent of “I did not poop my pants today.”
Hey, if you’re in an office full of pants-poopers and your underwear is clean, take the freakin’ office. Who cares *why *he’s getting it? Assuming he didn’t do anything morally objectionable.
There are people who will resent a rising “golden boy”, even if he’s pleasant, talented, personally humble, and always willing to help. Fuck those people. Really. They are generally toxic and they have no real influence, because they are stuck at some job because no one wants to listen to–let alone promote–the sort of person who’d rather sit around and bitch about how so and so got an office rather than actually do anything interesting. It sounds like your guy is the sort of person than when/if people bitch about him, they will make themselves look petty and small-minded, not him. So worrying about keeping them happy is a waste of time.
After 15 years in one district, there are two or three people who really resent the fuck out of me. In every case, I worried a great deal–until I realized that in every case, they were the sort of person no one I respected would listen to. I’ve also seen whole departments destroyed by too many of those people: where success or high performance of any kind is just seen as inherently bad, as being uppity–and talented entry-level people pull their punches to match the culture. I don’t know if that happens in the private sector, but it happens in education.