I just finished up a visit to the new corporate HQ. Nice new building, great amenities. But no cubicles. Everyone has desks without walls.
After years of working in my corporate environment, I have learned to love my cubicle. I get a small measure of privacy. If I am having a lousy day, I hide out doing my stuff and don’t have to deal with any BS.
In this new environment, they talk about how it allows employees to collaborate. But I didn’t see any collaboration at people’s desks. I didn’t see much collegiality among the employees at all.
I kind of felt that every time I got up to go to the bathroom, a hundred eyes were upon me. If my phone buzzed with an email, I was nervous about checking it with people on either side of me. One of my habits that I would probably have to break is swearing at my computer. Ick. I don’t like being that self conscious while I work.
So would you prefer a cubicle or an open environment? I am trying to buy a small tent that I can put over my desk if the corporate slugs ever get around to deciding that we have to have the same office environment.
cubicle, no argument there and for exactly the same reasons.
Plus I like to organize my crap, and the wall pockets are great for paperwork, better than the little 3 shelf high thingys. And how are you supposed to hang a calendar, or white board or little corkboard for sticking stuff?
Not to mention those cube walls cut down on ambient noise. That place will just freaking echo with phone calls =(
Yes, human dignity demands some type of partition between you and your cow-orkers.
I have to say one of the greatest things about my company is that they give everyone an office - with walls.
If I need to collaborate with my next door neighbor, I’ll just dial their 4 digit extension and talk to them on speakerphone. It’s great to be a fat and lazy office worker.
Never has been in a cubicle, so I can’t say for sure, but I think I wouldn’t like this. It seems a bit clautrophobic, a bit like the movie “Brazil”, a bit like you really become an anonymous drone.
I think I prefer an open environment, as it is the case currently (and that despite the fact that I’ve right now big relationship issues with my coworkers).
But ideally, I’d rather have an individual office, as someone mentioned with walls, and a wooden door (as opposed to glass doors). Unfortunately, I only had one once, and quite a long time ago.
That’s a justification worthy of “Office Space.” Open plan offices are intended to dehumanize, and they do a great job of it. They’re a terrible way to work - you’re absolutely right when you say you feel like you’re being scrutinized - you are. Everyone is always in everyone’s business in an open plan office. They’re noisy. They’re unpleasant. They allow zero privacy. They’re just one more step on the ladder to disposable employees.
I think this is a function of experience as much as anything. Personally I can’t think of anything more dehumanizing than staring at 3 fabric walls all day long. Like **clairobscur ** it makes me feel a bit claustrophobic to think about it. It seems so isolating.
We have low partitions between our desks and it does encourage discussion and collaboration. Mine is a job which is dependent on tasks performed by other people in the team - if I had to email or phone, or even tbh shift my backside, to speak to any of them everything would take much much longer. If I want to make a private call, or swear about something, or shout at someone, I find a corner of the building to do it.
I would be a WalMart greeter before I’d work in an open office plan, and I’d seriously consider the greeter position over cubicles as well.
I need four walls and a door. I’m a programmer; most of the time I don’t need to collaborate with my coworkers. I need quiet and no distractions to do my job correctly. When I’m really working hard on something, I need a door I can close so I ensure I have no distractions.
When I do need to collaborate, that’s what conference rooms are for. I can collaborate all I want in the conference room, with the door closed, so the programmers who aren’t in the meeting aren’t distracted by those of us who are in the meeting.
It’s amazing how many employers just don’t get this. If your employees are doing stuff they need to concentrate on, they need QUIET! It’s different if you’re a marketing person who spends a lot of time on the phone, or some other type of work where putting your head down and thinking isn’t a large part of the job.
I’m definitely old and crotchety about this, and I’d have to be pretty desperate to take a job where they wanted me in a cube or (ack!) open floor plan. Luckily I’m self-employed and work at home in an office with a door that is far away from the rest of the house where I can work without distraction pretty much 24/7 if I want.
I’ve been out in the open before, I’ve been in cubes, and I’ve had my own office. Cubes are better than being out in the open, for reasons given above.
The cube I’m in now has the opening to the back of the chair, which is completely ridiculous. You have to “knock” on cube walls to let people know you are there.
The company I’m working for currently uses a “pod” format. Four cubicles all face in towards each other, and each pod gets a work table and a movable whiteboard partition. You don’t need to ‘collaborate’ with everyone in the company after all, right? Chances are you have just a few people who you might need to work with.
This is nice for us. I’m working in the Help Desk and we can easily turn around and ask people questions or collaborate on issues, but when we face our PC, we face a reasonably high wall which helps the sound issues. Part of this wall is see-through mesh so it doesn’t seem so isolating, either.
Of course, I preferred having my own office, but it’s not really bad. I’d hate, hate, hate being on an open floor plan, unless it was for just a small number (less than 5) people who worked together. I honestly would probably not even consider a job where I had no privacy from 100 other people.
At my old job I told my boss I would take an office in lieu of a raise, and I offered to convert a broom closet myself. I didn’t get it. The racket was unbelievable, and it wasn’t work-related; I could have tolerated that. Just the never-ending gossip, yap yap yap.
Now I have my own office and an assistant who comes in two days a week, plus I work at home one day a week. Neither one of us talks much, so that’s pretty good, but I’d really prefer to have it all to myself. Cubicles are not great, even if you have quiet co-workers, but open plan is just not tolerable.
When I first started 14 years ag. we had desks in open offices (and smoking was allowed!) The we got shared cubes, and when we moved to a new site we all got offices. I am having a hard time imagining what it would be like to work in an open office again. Would be horrible. I wonder how large of a pay cut I would take instead…
The worst office I’ve ever seen was a company I interviewed with- no cubicles, and everyone was on the ground floor.
Management, however, was on the floor above them, in their own offices connected by metal catwalks- you know, so they could wander around making sure everyone was working. It was exactly like a post-industrial slave galley.
We have low dividers between our desks and that’s fine by me. There are only 11 of us in the “open plan” part of our office, plus there are four proper offices and the kitchen. Ours is quite a pleasant atmosphere, we can talk to each other if we want to be sociable but at the same time, if you have your head down working on something, you get enough privacy to get on with it.
I would hate to work in a place that just had desks and no cube walls, where would I put all my crap? At the moment my desk has two four-tray racks, five box files, a box of course books, a box of course materials and a rack with six ring-binders in it. All pretty essential stuff at some point during the academic year, and without the cube walls it would probably all end up on the floor!
I’ve worked in pretty much all of these environments. The open air plan is horrible, but made even worse if everyone is made to share a table. I once worked in a room with a table that could accomodate maybe 6 people. 12 of us shared it. I literally rubbed elbows with the people next to me.
I brought this up to management many, many, many times. They wouldn’t hear it. One of them, at one time, read in some management 101 manual that open air environments promoted cooperation, and dammit, that was policy, no questions asked. I once even got written up for not being a “team player” for my “attitude.”
Far worse, though, was when we would share an office with one other person. If that other person was a programmer, then great. But for about 6 months I shared an office with a sales guy who just happened to have the most annoying voice EVAR. And he was on the phone all day. I ended up strangling him with his own phone cord.
I’ve worked in total open-plan pretty much my entire career.
When I went to manage a team the US, I hated the cube farm we were put in. I much prefer open. One thing I noticed was that the cubes created an environment of false privacy. I overheard so many private conversations (including the head of IT saying “we can’t use that [eminently suitable] technology because I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to look bad”).
Anyway, I got my team in a different room and got rid of the cubes, and they were uncomfortable at first, but later agreed that they preferred an open plan environment as it was way more collaborative. Then again they may have been sucking up to me.
I’m a Spaniard: no cubicle. As a culture, we go for either offices (with windows) or open-plan. Note that we’re also used to it, many people here report getting claustrophobia in cubes (I definitely do). The closest thing to cubes I’ve seen in Europe has been some service offices in Switzertland and Germany, where the high screens between desks were supposed to be for the customer’s privacy, not the worker’s.
The last couple of places I worked had sort of half-cubicle arrangements. The walls were about eye-level while sitting down. This was a pretty good compromise between privacy and collaboration (and these were places that required a lot of collaboration with coworkers).
Where I am now, I have a standard full-height cubicle. It’s nice for privacy but I do feel a little isolated sometimes.
Didn’t Peter intentionally dismantle his cubicle?
I don’t really see how cubicled employees are any more or less humanized or dehumanized from “free-range” employees. Then again, as a manager, you’re all disposable carbon blobs to me anyway.
New-age ergomanagement stuff aside, I would recommend whatever setup works best for your particular work environment. For small teams, I recommend an open environment where they can see and interact with each other. If your works is more solitary, noisy, or requires privacy, cubicles or offices are preferred.
Personally, I like the “half-cubes”. They provide some privacy but occassionally I can pop my head up like Wilson from Home Improvement if the conversation gets interesting.
“Fishbowl” cubicles are sort of the worst. They are isolating, yet everyone can see what you are doing.
I’ve experienced private office, shared office, cubicle and huge shared area. The last is really bad for programming and I generally hated it. The others were all OK though a private office was nice it was not actually needed.
