looks like my company has decided to get rid of cubicles and move towards a more open floorplan, with different areas set aside if you need to make a private phone call or you want to work in a “quiet room.” for some jobs (let’s say, project teams) i can see how this may be useful. for most jobs, i think it’s absolutely asinine. of course it doesn’t help that i’m also anti-social, but i don’t want to have to hear everyone else’s business throughout the day.
someone, please tell me that this isn’t the end of the world. i am seriously considering the future of my employment with this company.
The last place I worked had an open plan office - about 150 staff, motly male and some days it was like trying to work in the middle of a fucking gannet colony.
The worst would be when two or more people arrived at the desk of a third, and had a sort of (not SCRUM) standing-up-meeting, not realising that standing up naturally makes you talk louder, and your voice carries further.
Two such impromtu meetings in close proximity would quickly escalate to actual shouting.
I’ve worked in a couple of open floor plan offices, and have mixed reviews. At one place, there were plenty of small conference rooms for phone calls or ad-hoc conversations (they were well equipped with white boards). The open floor plan here worked great - it was easy to talk to people you needed to, the conversations I overheard were actually good things for me to overhear, and sometimes participate in.
However, at a different place, there were not sufficient conference rooms, you tended to have to reserve them in advance, and so everyone took all manners of phone calls or conversations at their desks. I found this unnecessarily distracting.
So in my experience, the devil was in the details. But - if you’re much more easily distracted than most, you may find any open floor plan to be negative. In which case, I’m truly sorry. I don’t know really know what you can do about it.
This is my fear… I am very easily distracted (not to the point of impacting my work, but definitely to the point of impacting my level of annoyance) with repetitive noises, outside conversations, etc. As it is already, with cubicles, I can very clearly hear the conversations of every other person in a 10 foot radius and sometimes it is tough to focus.
I am asking if I can be allowed to work from home for part of the week, as I don’t see how I can manage any other way. If they don’t want to allow that, I will have to seek employment elsewhere.
It’s the end of the world. It sucks. It rapes rotting roadkill and then eats it.
Managers love it because they always keep their offices, so they get to save money at the expense of everybody else. Their attitude is, if your work was important enough to require privacy, you would have been promoted.
It won’t do any good, unless your industry has lots of small employers. Any company of any size is going the same way. Managers love anything that increases the visible status distinction between them and the peons.
I just moved to an open office plan. I’m in day 6 of my experience with it. It has gotten worse just about every day. Our company does have the managers in the same situation, so the offices are gone for them.
I’m in a statistics group, which is traditionally a bunch of introverts, and we overwhelmingly hate it. There are other groups that are more collaborative that probably are more comfortable with it. A big problem is that our group is not in a separate area, so the talky, collaborative people can be sitting next to introverts. Not a good recipe for optimal working conditions.
On the plus side, my commute went from 30-40 minutes each way to 10 minutes each way. As far as I can tell, that is the only plus.
Our company has gone to cubicles for everyone, including the muckety-mucks, although their cubes are bigger and more private, with higher walls.
I’m the sole introvert in our group, and I find myself completely spent and wiped out constantly. It takes me all weekend to recharge, but I still go in on Mondays feeling like I just CAN’T. I have one coworker in particular who’s in seventh heaven because she processes everything out loud. That means there is never, ever a break from jabbering. I’m not at a level where I can ask to work from home (it’s ridiculously hierarchical here) but the current situation isn’t sustainable, so I’m just not sure what I’m going to do.
That probably doesn’t help you in the slightest; I’m sorry. Good luck.
I had to do it for a year as part of a special project and it sucked. Luckily I got along wonderfully with my team mates, and I knew it was short term only. I can’t ever imagine working like that full time.
Currently I’m in an office with 2 other people, but we have partitions. A fourth person is about to join us. I book a small conference room for myself occasionally, when I just need privacy or peace and quiet.
We have cubicles that I can see over while sitting down, so I’d say that counts as “open”. Yeah, it sucks. If they can’t give us offices, can they at least give us a cube taller than a small pony? I don’t understand the point of these things. I guess it’s just something to hang a white board from. Otherwise it might as well just be a line on the floor.
A couple of weeks ago I was at an extended family gathering of adults ranging from low 20s to 60-ish, mostly engineers/lawyers/accountants/computer-related. One of the younger guys (an engineer) commented that he was being moved to an open workspace. I asked folk what their experiences/reactions were, expecting everyone to agree with me that they were horrible. To my surprise, no one hated them, most seemed pretty ambivalent, and the oldest guy (computer programmer) thought it was advantageous in terms of collaborative work.
It has been over 25 years since I had anything other than a private office. (Back then, not only did we have desks in one big room, but smoking was permitted! A different age!) If I were placed in an open workspace, the clock would be ticking as to whether I killed myself or a cow-orker first.
To be clearer about what I have described as open office. There are banks of desks arranged in groups of 6 to 8. There are two rows that face each other, but because of a monitor, you are not actually staring at the person across from you. The distance between people sitting at desks is about 5 feet with no partition between people.
Nobody has an assigned seat. You show up in the morning and find a spot. You can keep a small amount of stuff in a locker about 3x3x3 feet in size. There is also a drawer for files and other stuff. The locker is not very close to the drawer. At the end of the day, you have to put everything away, and leave the desk empty. In my six days, I have sat in six different seats.
There are small quiet rooms and conference rooms to get away for some time, but there is a time limit for how long you can be in them. It is not like you can just camp in one all day.
Today, most of my group of 12 are working from home. This will probably become more and more frequent.
That’s what we had at my last job, and that some segments of my department have now. It sucks. Everyone can see everything you do- there’s no privacy whatsoever, and IMO, some degree of privacy is essential. For me,it’s not noise, but rather the feeling that others are all up in my shit and judging me, even when I’m square with my boss. Or the worry that I’ll pick a booger, or scratch my ass or crotch and everyone will see, when in a more normal cubicle or office, that’s not such a worry.
They company I used to work for had an open floor plan at HQ, but not in my office. From what I saw and heard, it sucks. I can’t imagine why companies still do this. I mean, I can imagine, but it’s never a good idea.
I don’t mind my current open floor plan, but I have a small office. 4 people max, each basically has a corner of a space that’s about 20ft square.
My corner is an office with a door, but that door is open unless I’m meeting with a client or otherwise need to be uninterruptible. I’m actually considering moving my regular work space to one of the corners and making the office a meeting space that anyone can use.
I could see being very annoyed with the large open floor plans where hundreds of people might share a big space.
My daughter recently started working at what impresses me as a pretty “cutting edge” business (Epic Systems). I asked her about what impressed me as pretty luxurious headquarters. No one has more than 2 people per office, and the goal is individual offices for everyone. During our conversations, she said the company line was that private offices were proven to improve productivity and employee retention. I never asked her for cites to those studies.
She’s a coder, and works on a lot of teams. The facility has tons of formal and informal meeting spaces of varying sizes.
Just offering this datapoint to support that private offices is not entirely “old school.”
I’m currently working in a location where everyone has an office except the receptionist. They are building a new facility where most of us will be moving in 2017. There only Senior Directors and above will have offices. Everyone else will be in cubes or…shudder…pods. The pods will be somewhat like you have described - a stand of 8 open workstations that will not be assigned to anyone in particular. If you are assigned to a pod, you will grab the first work station available when you come in. The ‘intent’ of the pods is to provide in-office workspace for remote workers when they need to be in the office, but everyone is fearful that in practice, it will not work that way. Fortunately, as an HR person, I’m immune from the rules due to the legal ramifications of having sensitive employee information available where anyone can view it. I would get what they call a ‘super cube’, which has four walls and a door and the temporary walls reach up to the ceiling. Clearly that will be adequate for paperwork privacy, but any sensitive phone calls I need to make will have to be taken to one of the conference rooms they will make available. As you can imagine, no one is happy about this arrangement.
I think it depends on the company and co-workers. At my last job we had an open office plan, and I thought I would hate it, but it was fine most days. We were all engineers, and would mostly be working quietly at our computers. And when we did need to discuss projects, it did make it easier. There were sometimes people would be chatting and I couldn’t focus and it would drive me crazy. If I was by sales people who had to be on the phone all day, or just around people who liked to chat, I probably would have hated it and quitted very quickly, but as it was it wasn’t too terrible.
The supposed idea behind the open floor plan is that it increases collaboration. I could see this potentially working in somewhat small groups that are highly collaborative, and I imagine that the hands-on micro-managers out there really like being able to see what’s going on, but in most implementations, I think it causes more harm than good.
For example, they had it at my last job where I was working as a developer and system engineer. I did work fairly closely with several other people, but what I found happening was that I was distracted way more often. I was seeing people moving around, people were more likely to engage in idle chatter (myself included) and my productivity dropped. Yes, collaboration is important in that kind of work, but we also need to have time to actually sit down and do the work. The only way I could really get any concentration was by putting on some earphones and listening to music.
That said, I wouldn’t have minded so much if it was just, say, 3 or 4 of us in a small group that worked closely together and were separated from the rest, so the people that need to collaborate closely can do so easily, but there’s not all that other distraction from other people that I don’t need to work with very often. However, even in all of that, I found I got the most work done when I just had a cube all by myself, off in the corner, free of distractions. Then if I needed someone’s input, I could go ask them, and if I wanted to socialize, I could step out, but I wouldn’t just get drawn into random social interactions going around.
Either way, see how it gets implemented. If they’re putting a dozen, or worse, dozens of people in a giant room, it’ll probably be hell. But if they can do it in a small organized way to keep teams together, then it might not be so bad. Either way, it never hurts to polish your resume.
In going to be losing my office in a few months because of new management’s obsession with open plans and “accountability” and “safety”. I’ve had my precious walls and doors for about 18 years now and I’m dreading losing them.
Hot-desking is the devil’s work. The large company I used to work for who tried it abandoned the idea very quickly. It was just such a shit idea for departments made up of project teams.
I liked working in an open-plan environment though, but then I’m nosy and have the attention span of a gnat at the best of times.
Good luck.