Oh yes, tear down all the walls, and let the flowers of collaboration and creativity take root. I guess that’s the idea, but somehow it’s always 1 guy who thinks it’s open mic night surrounded by 9 people wearing noise-canceling headphones the size of dinner plates.
I literally don’t do anything proactive or creative anymore. I just sit there staring ad a worky-looking screen, waiting for someone to either (A) ask me to do something or (B) start some boisterous, spontaneous, concentration-shattering fun. Which happens approximately every 42 seconds (or 17, if you include instant-messenger pings).
Time for me to change something in my life, though since this asinine open-office fad has taken over the entire work-world, I don’t see any option except alcoholism and the attendant early death typically associated with it. Which at this point I frankly would rather vomit up my own liver than go into the office Monday morning and listen to everybody talk about their weekend from 8-12am, then spend 1-5pm group-brainstorming about why we never seem to get anything done. Fuck it.
My office doesn’t have a window. But I did have a screen door put in so I’m not cut off from everything. I like being able to hear what’s going on in the hallway, down the hallway, and in the lobby. Sometimes I need to answer the front door, so it’s good to hear the bell and whether anyone opens the entryway door in a timely manner. Plus, I have filing cabinets and a department’s mailboxes that people need to get into multiple times a day, so I have people coming in and out of here all the time.
Plus, people will stop in the hall and chat with me through the screen door. In a way, it’s not much more private than a cubicle. But, I do still have the heavy fire door that when closed, people leave me alone. Except I pretty much never close it.
When the screen door was new, people called my office “the veranda.” Funny.
Right there with ya, buddy. I like people, but they stress me the fuck out and when I’m doing my job I just want to be left alone. This can’t be a good idea from an employer’s perspective; save a few bucks on cubicles in the beginning but pay for it in lost productivity for years.
I wonder if the types of cubes make a difference, too. Back when I worked in one, all three sides plus a portion of the fourth were tall. I think it helped that I could only see one person across from me. I could certainly hear other people, but not having to see them helped me ignore them and buffered the sound quite a bit.
I’ve been in those large rooms with all short cubes where you can see everyone’s heads. It was kind of awful.
Oh, yes. “Open” plans are a recipe for psychotic episodes.
Believe me, I understand the value to collaboration of actually sitting and interacting with someone. A good tag-team approach can get a lot of work done quickly, more accurately, and with less stress.
However, I am not collaborating with everyone in the fucking room. There are 30 people in that bay. The majority are not in my department or working on anything related to what I do. Interacting with them–or, more likely, trying to tune out their noise–is not going to help me get anything done. If I’m going to work with someone, I can go to their cube or office, sit down with them, and settle into the mode where we get a lot done…or I could if they had a cube or office. I used to have a folding screen I put up next to my desk to block off at least a little of the distractions…but a draconian nutcase took over the facilities department, and they started going through and “confiscating” personal items that weren’t put away in cabinets at the end of the day, so I took it home before they could steal it.
“Open” plans are the work of cheapskate bean-counters who only want to cram as many bodies as possible into a smaller space* and managerial types who don’t know–and don’t care to know–what their minions actually do.
*This is especially moronic at my workplace, because there are areas left empty, and the empty areas cost the company just as much (or as little) as the occupied ones. Leaving a room empty just keeps another department from charging them for the space; it’s all about shuffling money around inside the company.
Yay for regular offices. Even if there aren’t enough offices that every worker can have his or her own, workers can always double up. In my experience, having my own office has always always ideal, but even if I have to share one with a couple of other people, it’s an order of magnitude better than being in a cubicle farm.
I thought I’d hate the open office, we just rearranged things to form it a month ago, and it’s not too bad. Yeah there are loudmouths who sometimes distract but for the most part it’s not too bad. And I surprise myself with that because I truly thought I’d hate it.
For one more week, I work in a large, open-plan office (line of sight to maybe 100 people in this part of the building). At times, the noise is like a colony of fucking gannets.
The worst offenders are the young males who seem to like having standing-up-meetings - not Scrum style standing up meeting, just several people turning up at someone’s desk and projecting their voices across the whole space. If two of these idiotic standing-up-meetings happen at the same time, they’ll naturally compete against each other and the volume escalates until people end up literally shouting to be heard.
There are meeting rooms, or they could sit down on the spare chairs that are dotted around for the purpose of informal small meetings, but no. It’s got to be done standing up, bellowing like a howler monkey.
In a week, I’m going to a new job in a smaller organisation - I’ve already spent a day in my new office and it’s blissful. Open plan, but studious, industrious and calm. It can be done.
My company is slowly converting the building to open plan offices and taking away our walls and doors. It’s awful. It’s a disaster. I hate it.
We do work that takes concentration and attention. I need my walls. We all also have personal conversations—with spouses, with doctors, etc. Privacy is important to people’s dignity.
I should mention a) that for many years my office environment was an 8 x 24-foot steel laboratory unit aboard an offshore rig, usually with 4-6 people working in an area with really three usable workstations; b) at one point I had an office that was a corner of the server room with a tottering old desk propped up on a cinder block; c) that many of the colleagues I deal with today are, right this minute, toiling away in a windowless cube farm adjacent to an area that is being converted to individual offices, offices that they will not get when the remodeling work is done. Between that and the construction noise, I’m surprised someone hasn’t gone berserk with a fire axe.
For any of the above, the OP’s situation would be something of a step up. But I’ll just enjoy my little sea of tranquility for as long as I can, thanks.
You hit the nail on the head, it can be done well in many ways, In fact I’ve been in 3 such environments that succeeded for different reasons:
Full-on shared table office space. Normally the most odious open-plan space, this is what I’m currently stuck in. However, I saw it work at a previous employer with some specific cultural factors: All the workers had similar responsibilities, similar schedules, and respect for one another’s environment. If a meeting was required, a conference room was reserved. Conversations were rare, brief, and quiet. It will surprise nobody to hear that this was in Japan, but it could be done in any place that would recognize and enforce those norms.
Team rooms. In a spacious room adjoining a full-size window, 8-12 desks were arranged around the edge, facing the center. Opposite the window was the opening to the hallway. Here, you get full-voiced conversation limited to people who actually need to be conversing all the time. The arrangement allows, but does not encourage, interlopers to stop by.
Radial clusters. An open space surrounded by minimally private cubicles open at the back. When you are working, your forward and peripheral views are nothing but wall. If a team meeting is desired, everybody simply turns around and scoots inward a couple of feet.
Minimally private cubicles in any arrangement. I plea with you… a wall 16 inches high, 16 inches on the side, just enough to protect forward and peripheral vision when I’m actively working. It’s easy to collaborate, it’s easy for Big Brother to monitor everybody’s attendance and screen activity just by standing up and walking around.
So clearly, it can work if anybody is willing to put thought and resources into it. But most places don’t consider it beyond “it lets us cram in more bodies per square foot, and I heard it boosts collaboration or something.”
I also hate them. Luckily I can work from home a few days a week and actually get some gorram work done.
I work in software development, and some dumb bitch in the company’s HR department decided that an open plan would let us collaborate.
You’d think that said dumb bitch from HR would have checked and found out that open office plans have been demonstrated to be the WORST for productivity.
So I just give that as feedback (along with copies of the studies) when management asks what we think would make us more productive. One day, I will get walls and a door.
I work in an office, but I used to work in a cube, and I used to work on a trading floor. I never thought it was that bad. I actually miss the insanity of the trading floor sometimes.
