I spent some quality time inside IBM’s UK headquarters. It is a miracle that I was responsible for no casualties during that engagement. 4’ partitions with no more than 2 sides per desk. Roughly one Brazilian desks. I don’t think I got anything done the entire time I was there.
Hahahahahahaha. Times like this I’m glad I have a cubicle.
The only time I ever had to work in an open-floorplan office was back in the '80s when I worked as a classified ad rep at a midsize newspaper. It was all one big open room with everybody’s desks. I didn’t mind it, though, because I always had specific things to do and they didn’t require a lot of brainpower beyond basic sentence construction and helping customers on the phone or in person.
However, I know such a plan would drive me nuts in my current job (technical writer). I spend a lot of time doing things that don’t look much like work, punctuated by spurts of frantic activity. I get all my work done on deadline and well, and my bosses have always been cool with the fact that even though I goof around a fair bit, I also do good work. Having people behind me watching me would put me under a constant amount of stress. I can’t even work on an airplane because I’m convinced the person next to me is reading over my shoulder. Low-walled cubicles would be just as bad.
I’ve worked in environments with high-walled cubes, which were fine, and closed-door offices, which were better. The only time I ever had to share space with anyone was at a startup where I shared a cubicle with my spousal unit (I was tech pubs, he was QA). Surprisingly, it worked fine. I don’t think I could have handled that kind of proximity with anyone else, though.
Now, I have the best of all worlds: I’ve been reclassified as remote and I get to work at home every day. I love it! I’m not a social type so I don’t need the constant interactions to keep me happy, and if I need something from somebody I can IM them or send them email (or have an online meeting). My company has an extremely loyal employee in me just for the fact that they let me do this.
I sit in the last seat in the aisle on the way to the bathroom. It’s like a fucking race track sometimes.
I made them buy me a privacy screen for my laptop because every single person who walked by would turn and look into the cube. I don’t know why, I don’t know what they were looking at. But it’s annoying and I hate feeling like everyone’s looking at what I’m working on (or goofing off on).
Don’t try putting a cube farm in any European country. My British coworkers recently came back from a visit to a factory that’s got those and the least colorful description was “all they were missing was being chained to the desks.” Someone else compared the area to a stable, they had no problem understanding why when I said “those places are often called cube farms”. Mooooooo!
Cube farms are marginally better than open plan if the partitions are high enough for some degree of privacy.
We went to an open office plan about 2 years ago, after the company claimed “our focus group of more than 200 employees overwhelmingly agreed that they would encourage collaboration and team-building…” Ye-ah. I know a LOT of people in my company, and I’ve talked to a LOT, and NO ONE, not a single person, likes open offices. They hate them with a passion. They are mostly scientists and engineers who want to basically crawl into a private space with their laptop and go into “problem solving trance.”
Thankfully for me, I was promoted a while before to a position where I warrant a real office, with walls and door etc. I would not have done well at all in our open office, and I would probably have to either retire or work from home if they tried to move me to one.
Oddly, I’ve actually worked in or around a “cube farm” in Madrid and another in Leon, Spain. As well as ones in France, Italy, England, Ireland, Scotland, Poland, Greece, Portugal, etc. So they certainly do exist in Europe.
In fact, quite a few of them have been in England, such as London (various places), Manchester, Birmingham, Plymouth, Cardiff, Wolverhampton…if your co-workers haven’t seen them before…I don’t know.
I have a regular office in a corridor with colleagues in a related department; for the first week or so that I was there, they were in my office constantly to complain about my actual department. No knocking, no ‘excuse me.’ They’d see my light on or door cracked open, and barge in to bitch about something over which I have no control (or interest).
I found that removing all of the chairs from my office save for the one that I use has reduced the tendency for people to swing through my open/semi-closed door a la Lenny and Squiggy almost to nil. That and probably me kindly offering to cut their chairman if he interrupted me again for some lame shit.
Open plan offices for an academic setting is a nightmare; no privacy for tutorials, &c.
I have my own office and I would have a difficult time adjusting back to a cube. In a previous job I had a shared office and that worked out well. I adored my office-mate.
But hey, sometimes a person needs to be able to close the door and cry about how much she hates her job, amirite? Also, when I worked in a cube, all of the important but private phone calls I needed to make never got done. I really didn’t need my coworkers hearing me schedule a mammogram, and yet I wanted to be at my computer for that call so that I could see my calendar.
In order to “encourage collaboration” (as if we didn’t know how to collaborate if we need to now) when they remodel our offices they’re taking away our desks. We’re getting, like, a locker for our purses and then workstations that aren’t ours where we’ll dock laptops. It’s AWFUL. Just thinking about it makes me want to punch somebody in the throat. What’ll happen is that we’ll just have to end up building ersatz cubes out of book carts. Because we have a ton of paper stuff to process, and it has to go somewhere!
I haven’t, the closest I’ve come is large desks with small partitions, but I’ve never seen here the kind with long desks and really high partitions (except for language labs) - maybe we have different definitions of “cube farms”. Some banks have high partitions between desk neighbors, but there’s rarely more than three in a row. There is a room that might be the worst office in Spain, 300 people of which over 100 are on the phone constantly (CSRs for one of the big utility companies); ideas to put up high partitions “like in Dilbert” (note the source for the reference) get shot down on grounds of “as if this fucking underground room wasn’t claustrophobic enough!” The one time I had to sit in an underground language lab with high partitions I had my only attack of claustrophobia, trying to follow the damn slow-ass stupid tape when your brain is yelling “getmeoutofhere!” was a bitch.
Were those companies American, or Spanish?
Spanish - utility. I can’t really say more in public.
I’ve worked in single-person cubicles, 2-person cubicles, 2-person half-open work stations, quad cubicles, and open offices. I’ve found the work space wasn’t as much of an issue as my coworkers were. In the open office where pretty much everyone was doing their job, it wasn’t horrible, apart from having to hear far too many phone conversations. I shared a cube with a lying asshole who would start his day reading his Bible, then spend the rest saying whatever he needed to say to make himself look good. Bastard even took credit for something I did!!
I’ve had cubes where I still overheard guys spending all day making calls about their kids’ little league games or guys bitching about how “fat” their wives still were 6 weeks after giving birth. I shared a quad with a jerk who was doing his side business during our work hours (he was a wedding photographer) and who would crank up the local “morning zoo” radio show, then leave. Yes, I’d turn it off.
I only had a real, honest-to-goodness office with a door one time, and that was just for a few weeks when I was waiting for my security clearance to come thru. I was mostly in training, so I didn’t have a whole lot of demanding tasks, and I got pretty lonely and bored.
I think the best was when our team had its own office area, and we each had the half-open two-fer cubes for 12 of us, plus a separate meeting room and a small office for the boss. Individuals wore headphones if they wanted music. Cell phones were banned because the work was all classified. Collaboration was easy because the group was small and we could just about see everyone if we spun our chairs around. But most of all, everyone was professional and they did what they were supposed to do with minimal BS. Plus the boss was da bestest! I truly hated to retire from there - in fact, if the rest of the organization was as great, I’d have stayed, but that’s another story.
I have tape on the floor around my desk showing where walls should (and one deservedly will) be.
We went with a fully open building concept about 5 years ago. Our whole building is one huge, long room with cubes all the way. Managers have glass officies with open tops so we can always see and hear whatever is going on in there. What that means is that there is zero privacy for such activities as quarterly reviews.
I’ve had to take staff members ‘for a walk’ outside a couple of times so we could discuss preformance issues without a dozen people listening in. I see people in the cafeteria all the time, heads together, trying to have a private meeting. Of course, the upper managers have private offices so they just can’t understand why their useless employees are always complaining about the wonderful new offices.
We’re not quite “open plan” yet; we still have cubicles. But the walls are only breast high – shoulder high if you’re a local national employee. And they’re Chinese. And when Chinese speak to each other – especially on the phone – they scream at top volume. A perfectly normal, nice, Chinese conversation might sound like, “YOU ABHORRENT MONSTER. I SPIT ON YOU AND YOUR PROGENITORS AND I HOPE YOU LIVE AN INTERESTING LIFE, YOU DIRTY DEGENERATE BEING.” Of course I only understand minimal Chinese, and so the normal conversation is probably more akin to, “OH, THAT PICTURE IS YOUR DAUGHTER? OH SHE’S SO BEAUTIFUL! YOUR PARENTS MUST FEEL SO VERY LUCKY THAT YOU WERE ABLE TO DELIVER THEM SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER!”
In my home country I’d have an office, not a quarter-height cubicle.
Ah, the horrible ex-government monsters…
Were they the kind with high partitions? Because seriously, my experience is that people throughout Europe interpret the appearance of those in a movie as meaning “horrible workplace” (rather than just “workplace”) and have problems believing that someone could actually prefer those to offices, small shared offices, or large room with offices on the sides. In the words of a former coworker “God damn it, if I’m going to be hearing my coworkers I want to be able to catch their eye!”
Management’s attitude is:
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Your work can’t possibly require concentration and attention, because you’re not a manager. Non-management work is easy.
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If you’re having personal conversations at work, you’re slacking off.
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Dignity applies only to managers. Non-managers by definition have no dignity because they are not managers.
Notice when they go open-plan the senior managers almost always keep their offices.
Sometimes I see images of open-space work plans that are appallingly crowded.
Remember that security footage that was famous maybe ten years ago? It was of a guy who went apeshit in an open-space office. He flung monitors around and kicked things over and jumped up on a desk and screamed. When you watch the footage carefully, you see what set it off. The workers were crammed into an open space like sardines, squeezed in between piles of paperwork.
A manager type bent over to talk to a worker, and his ass knocked over a pile of the flipout guy’s paperwork. He went absolutely ballistic, and I don’t blame him. There was more room for the slaves on one of those horrible slaver ships than there was in this office.
Hopefully someone learned something from that and open-plans aren’t so cruelly crowded.