I do. This is the view to my left right now. Not many people are here yet as it’s still early.
It took some getting used to, but it’s not so bad. I’d rather be in this environment than cooped up in a tiny office all by myself.
Meh. We have an open office plan, and it’s worked. For decades. It’s helped collaboration around here. Our work tends to be more collaborative than a lot of office work, though, and absolutely requires people to talk to each other on a daily basis. That makes some difference.
Of course, this scheme requires people be respectful of each other. That’s the hard part. People suck sometimes. But get rid of those folks or have a word with them, and it works out ok unless your hiring strategy involves getting as many narcissists and psychopaths as possible.
One thing we did a few years back that helped a bit was put up partitions. So rather than a completely open floor, there are 4’ partitions separating each person’s desk. Not full cubicles but partial cubes. So, you get some privacy if you sit down, but you don’t get that claustrophobic cubicle farm feeling. Also, individual offices for managers are on the interior walls, so all the open area desks have views of windows while actual offices have the worst views. That helps, too.
OK. Say I knock down that nice private wall behind the monitors. Then say I knock down that wall behind your desk to fit 6 more rows of desks exactly like yours. And put a ping-pong table in there somewhere. You don’t get to play ping-pong, that’s someone else’s part time job apparently.
How’s it feeling now?
Speaking of, what is/are the best of these? I need to arm myself. Sometimes there are many Nerf darts flying about.
Maybe it depends on what you do for a living. My job is almost exclusively writing.
No, open plan office spaces are why people take up alcohol.
Many years ago I worked briefly as a contractor for Northwest Airlines.
Big open room, low cubes, matrix management style. I don’t mean big as in 30 or even 50 people in the room. I mean big like 300+ IT professionals in one room that you can see (and hear) all of from your chair.
it is very very different from being in a full height cube. We have close to that number of people on my floor where I work now, but cubes, walls, conference rooms etcetera block it all off to make it more personal. The low wall open plan is a nightmare of distracting sound and sight and utter lack of any privacy at all.
I have a serious suggestion to you OP: Do less work. Surf the internet, put work off until later, and chat with people you like to chat with. Reduce your work output to that of the lowest common denominator. If the bosses want open offices, they get open office quality work. If its truly universally bad as you say, then they won’t notice you slacking off too
Where’s my cheese?!?! I will cut you!
I agree with the OP. These are productivity killers. Morale too, as people tend to get pissed when with the loud talkers, or those who camp out in the meeting and team rooms because they need some space to think. I suppose for normally extroverted people it’s no big deal, but for me its a killer. Especially since my work often requires sensitive discussions that I don’t want or need everyone around me to hear.
You’re right, and I’m starting to see that. People here invest a lot more effort in looking busy than accomplishing anything. I guess that’s an adjustment I need to make. But it’s a huge source of stress that (A) eventually tasks are going to come due, and (B) I don’t want to contribute to distractions.
I can’t fathom these people… to me, the way to relax is to meet your deliverables first, and relax later. To reverse those things and spend all your time making excuses for failure just seems like an incredibly stressful way to live, but that seems to be the norm.
Open office plans are sold to the employees as a way to encourage collaboration. They are sold to executives as a way to reduce cost by putting more people in less space.
It’s very cost effective. There are no fucks to give about collaboration.
I would love that kind of setup. My immediate team is very small (4-5 people), so we could fit into an office, and have meetings with the door closed so we didn’t disturb anyone else. Plus, with work from home, we aren’t even all in the office at the same time.
None of the people I interact with are in the office. I interact with end users over the phone or by e-mail, and with my team via instant messaging.
I have a cube, and right now I can hear snippets of 3 different conversations. It would more productive for me to move my desk in to the utility closet.
This, also. Transparency is good, but there are also drawbacks to everything being broadcast all the time. Honest conversations don’t occur in groups - people will say absolutely anything to avoid open conflict or disharmony. Developing new ideas can be difficult when they are, from the very beginning, exposed to critical review by everyone (especially those who are fearful or territorial).
And let’s set aside the fact that I have to get up and leave my workspace if I want to do some minimal private thing like shift my (ahem) junk for maximum comfort and ventilation.
I work at a Federal agency. Junior staff have 2-person offices; mid-level staff have individual interior offices (no window); management staff has individual office with window; and the upper management has BIG office with window. It’s been that way for at least the 15 years I’ve worked here. About 4 or 5 admin assistants on my floor have cubicle-type offices.
But now, it seems that whoever oversees Federal government building logistics realized some federal agencies have cubicle or open floor plan arrangements. So now they have decided that it is not fair that some agencies have individual offices for personnel and some do not. We have been told that within the next year, they are going to gut our building to make sure no one has an office–cubicles for everybody! Except for the upper management–they get demoted down to small single offices.
People here are not thrilled, to say the least. To be yanked out of an office for no better reason than “well, that’s the way other agencies do it.” And I can’t see how gutting a perfectly fine and functioning building for interior remodeling is a good use of taxpayer funds.
Went through this last year, in a 4-year-old building that had a perfectly nice setup, well nice for a cube farm. They decided that since the European groups were doing it, we should too. No consideration of our processes, or that we were not a collaborative group.
We each had our own workload to manage. Same process, but completely different contacts and materials, so no interaction needed whatsoever. Within a month, it was everyone just watching each other to see who they could rat out and what the absolute minimum was that they could get away with.
Turned a bunch of professionals into a kindergarten. :mad:
One of the nuttiest layouts I’d seen was an inbound call center where the staff were at 4-station pinwheel “pods” where if you looked up, you’d see your neighbor’s left profile, and there was an 8-inch fence that only served to keep the phone from wandering to a neighbor’s desk. 100+ conversations free-flowing through the room. I hope everyone had good noise-canceling headsets.
I was there to make some updates to their ACD (automatic call director) and when I asked about the noise, they said the open plan encouraged collaboration. To my ears, I thought it encouraged “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
If I ever felt cooped up (I don’t) I could open the door. Which is glass. With that and a window, I never feel cooped up.
No one has any problems talking to other people in offices. I can close the door when I’m concentrating, open it when I’m just thinking. The guy down the hall does speakerphone calls with his door open (he is nice in all other respects) but I can close mine.
I worked in a floor of cubes once. We had about 20 conference rooms ringing it from small to large when you wanted to talk at length with someone. In that company everyone from the CEO down had cubes. I’ve interviewed places where the peons have cubes and managers offices - one of several reasons not to be interested. But open plan sounds awful unless you throw paper at each other for some reason.
Yup, it’s all for style and show. I work at a newspaper, and the advertising department has just moved into a new open plan giant room - no sound-deadening at all except for the very flat carpet - so that we can convince ourselves that we are a modern digital company (even though 72% of the advertising revenue still comes from the print product, and 86% when you factor in circulation revenue). And so that we can attract modern new people, who apparently won’t realize they are working for our stupid old newspaper until it’s TOO LATE!
You know that loud guy character in Dilbert? We have two of those. In the same room.
Double-ear headphones are becoming all the rage.