My office is a combination of offices (for VPs and up, of which we have quite a few…), directors get a “true” cubicle (with very high walls - like 8 or 9 ft, surprisingly private) and everyone else gets to deal with the large pits of open space in those annoying 42" tall almost-cubes.
It is nice in that all the offices and cubes are in the interior, so the outer desks get to see out the windows.
That said, it we also have a very high ceiling and it is very, very loud. People have to be on phone calls all the time, conversations happen everywhere and for some reason the guy next to me likes to randomly whistle, sing and have his cell phone go off every 5 minutes.
But the worst, absolute worst part of it is that there’s no where to hide to anymore. We’re so full that our facilities guys are trying to make extra space and stick desks in hallways or other areas because the home office says our “square footage should fit more people”. And to top it off, we have only a handful of conference rooms (6 or 7), so they’re booked literally all the time. It’s not unusual to see the breakroom/kitchen area have 4-8 meetings at every minute of the day outside of lunch. Offices are coming close to a shared commodity that people sneak into for a conference call or 1/2 hour meeting.
Its very difficult to get any true thinking done and writing any sort of document longer than a couple paragraphs is next to impossible. I’m supposed to be in a high-walled cube, but we’ve run out of those too.
Even partial-open office plans suck so very, very much.
Open offices aren’t going away. Space is just too expensive.
Take heart, though. The next step invariably is “work from home.” My international, Fortune 500 company went from offices to walled cubicles to wall-less rooms with 6 foot cubicles to 5 foot cubicles. And just this year, they started a program where no one has a dedicated office anymore. Everyone, including managers, has to work two days from home, unless you have a compelling reason (e.g. young children that are cared for at home). And when you come in, you grab any of the desks assigned to your group.
If you use Outlook, and rooms are booked via Outlook for some other calendar, it’s amazingly simply to write a quick script that sends 15 minute meeting notifications from the start of your work day to the end, for as many weeks, months, or years as you want.
The guy I report to works from home 3 days a week (in a neighboring state). He’s in the office 2 days a week, and the local team all try to be in the office on those days. I’ve been working from home 2 of the days per week that he’s not in, and he seems fine with that. (He’s told me before, he doesn’t care where we work, it could be Starbuck’s, so long as we get our work done.)
I love working from home, even if the cat peeks her head over my laptop and extended monitor setup and “supervises”. I may have to get the cat screened and cleared from my employer, since I bounce ideas off her all the time.
I’m not in an open-plan office - except for my desk. Now, I have a lot of room, and I don’t have to share it with anyone, so I know I don’t have it as bad, but it’s still annoying that I can never shut my door, not even when everyone is being super loud in the office. And some of my coworkers feel the need to say something to me every time they walk by, so I have to distract myself from whatever project I am doing. And then the “SMILE!” I’m concentrating bitch I don’t just sit here and smile goofily to myself.
I’m not sure what “too expensive” means in this context. Space certainly costs money, and it always has. Office rent runs in boom-and-bust cycles, but I don’t know that the long term trend is any greater than inflation.
The typical corporate budget that I’ve seen, over the years (in the Chicago area) shows office rental at about 10% of the wages and benefits for the people working in the office.
So logically, you have to be very careful in cutting $10 of office expenses so that you don’t injure the productivity for which you are paying your people $100. Even a small decrease in productivity will eat up any savings.
But managers don’t think that way. They see the $10 as easier to cut than the $100, because people will bitch to high heaven if you cut their salary or benefits, but they’ll just bitch a little bit if you shrink their cubes.
But, people still have to work in those shrunken cubes. And they can’t concentrate, and they can’t find a meeting room, and they have to take a cell phone into a broom closet when they want to call their doctor and don’t want the whole office to hear.
But, managers don’t care about that. In their minds, non-managers are fungible and dumb and don’t need to concentrate (on their routine unimportant non-managerial tasks) and don’t deserve privacy (because they aren’t managers). So cut the $10 and voila–free money!
Here’s the thing: the company I work for owns the buildings on its campus. They aren’t renting all or part of them, and they’re not renting out unused space. The unused space–an entire floor of one building and some sections of another–are not closed off (due to the asinine architecture, but that’s another rant), so leaving them empty has no effect on climate control costs. They’re on the same lighting control circuit as the rest of the building, so there are usually lights on in the empty rooms (unless someone goes through and manually turns them off). Janitors include the empty areas in their cleaning schedule. That space is costing the company–as a whole–the same amount, whether it’s being used or not.
No money is being saved by not using the space to spread out the existing employees. It’s left empty as a result of interdepartmental politics.
Also, the main pic hereis exactly what my office cube is like. Ugh. At least I don’t have to share in a dual cube; I talked myself into a single cube “veal fattening pen” on the end.
I worked on a project with a monthly burn rate of over a million dollars where they went out and bought used cubicles because it saved them a few thousand dollars. The project I’m on now is having such a hard time filling open head count for programmers that they were offering a ten thousand dollar bonus for referrals that led to a hire. Then during that time two more programmers quit. They’ll spend all kinds of money to hire good people, then put no thought or resources against keeping the ones they already have.
It’s not just the cost of the physical space, but everything that goes with it – gas and electric, maintenance, carpeting, painting, landscaping, security, cleaning staff, parking lots, parking lot lighting, etc. The more people you can cram into a space, the lower these costs are per employee. (And in our case, moving into cubes meant we could close (and sell) entire buildings.)
Of course I see the point that saving money without looking at the impact on productivity is short-sighted. But when management answers to Wall Street, it’s a rare case where employee satisfaction will trump cost savings.
I used to work for a pharmaceutical in midtown in the 2000s. We (non-managerial) all had our own nice modern offices a block from the Chrysler building with room to spare. The programmers had window offices. Christmas party at the Waldorf Ballroom. Life was good!
One year the Christmas party was in a room with a steam table above a bar and we were all laid off by April. A recruiter sounded mystified when I came back from an interview and complained about there not being an office for me.
I’d rather management had some common sense and had us in an open plan (where we started actually) and still have that job. Not that our opulent office space had everything to with axing our department.
Now I’m in an open plan where even the management don’t have offices. They go into the conference rooms to get their privacy and do their loud talking. I’ve adjusted. sniff
I’m in an open-plan office. I understand that’s pretty typical for IT departments.
Mine isn’t bad. I have a lot of desk space (more than I actually need, since we try pretty hard to be paperless). My workstation is huge (six monitors), and I tend to kind of get lost in it and tune out the outside world. I have lockable drawers and overhead cabinets, not that I keep anything in them that I have to lock up.
It’s easy to talk when I need input or advice, and big enough so that I have a bit of peace and quiet. Some of my colleagues wear headphones and listen to music. I don’t, at least most of the time, but I could if I wanted to. If I need to talk to someone lost in his or her music, I just IM to get their attention.
All in all, it’s not bad. I have more space than I would if I shared an office with someone.
The department head has her own office, with a window that looks out into the department. She’s nice, though, and doesn’t watch us like a hawk. She doesn’t have to – she can track our billable hours easily enough and make sure that we’re not goofing off all the time.
Cubes in my office have ONE desk cabinet – two little ones, and one big one for files. Except that I can’t put files in it because I have to lock my purse in, because we now have someone who steals money from desks.
My supervisor wants to move our team into an open office so we’ll be more “collaborative.” Really I think it’s because she wants to know every little thing I do and she can tell me how I’m doing everything wrong–and by doing it wrong, I mean not doing it like she would do it. :rolleyes: I hate being micromanaged, and she wasn’t really a micromanager when I started this job, but it’s getting worse all the time.
I don’t understand why she doesn’t realize that it’s a huge step down for me to have to move out of a quiet office with a door that I can close when it gets noisy so I can actually concentrate to do my work. I told her that it wouldn’t be good for my productivity, but she never actually listens to anything I say. I can hear the calliope music playing in her head when I’m talking. I’m hoping that we won’t have the money to remodel the office so maybe it won’t happen for a while and I’ll have time to find another job before I have to share an office with her, because she smacks her gum really loudly and I CAN’T STAND IT. I can hear her smacking her gum through the wall between our offices (they’re flimsy walls, but still, it shouldn’t be that loud). I get all tense when she walks into my office as it is. I’m going to be very unhappy if I have to share an office with her all the time.
Big O&G corporation. They tried cubical life some years ago in a few of the US locations and they were quite unpopular. They were too cramped, limited wall space to hang maps/ x-sections, and noisy. Eventually most of the bosses relented and went back to the standard office. There are still cubicles for many groups ( IT, clerical, etc. ) but all the technical groups and their staff have normal offices.
