Would have to see if someone conducted a scientific poll, but I would think small shared offices > cubicles > open offices. It seems like high walled cubes were the best compromise between cost and employee tolerance.
Going too cheap (open office) leads to a lot of employees willing to look for their next job. I’ve seen this happen and heard it from others. But I can’t provide a valid cite.
Where open offices do work, is a mobile and largely work at home work force, even in this case though some intelligence has to be used. Customer service and possibly AR should be given some isolation from other groups so they don’t disturb others working.
Honestly for programming and engineering staffs, they should be in small cheap two person offices. You pay these types a lot, you want them productive. Quite probably accounting also.
Wow. I have a nice corner cube with windows (that open!) and beautiful mountain views. So I am luckier than most. Two co-workers share my two cube walls. We have zero problem communicating when we need to. I couldn’t imagine hot desking, I want my space.
I would have been the sixth but I didn’t say anything.
Er, everybody in my little section likes the open plan better than the cubicles. It really does foster communication if you can actually see the other person; having an opaque cubicle wall between you and them encourages your mind to forget they’re there. Which can be good for concentration, but isn’t good for communication (if only because you don’t won’t to end up stupidly talking to their empty chair).
Of course we preferred the version of the open plan where we all were facing walls (actually shallow open-backed cubicles) and had to turn around to actually see anybody, but this thread is all about people forced into suboptimal seating arrangements by confused/deluded upper management.
Scrum is the best thing that happened to our company - keeping in mind that we don’t actually really follow proper scrum. (Of course as best I can tell nobody follows proper scrum 100%.) And while some of scrum most definitely exists to placate the managers, a bunch of it is about intelligent task organization and prioritization. It certainly better than waterfall by any measure.
I’m in a programming shop. The open plan works because at least in this building it turns out that programmers are a fairly quiet lot. We only call across to one another when we actually need something - which does happen often enough to justify and show obvious benefits in the open plan.
Most actual brainstorming and flowcharting takes place in other rooms and offices, because we don’t want to bother everybody.
The place I would be horrified about an open plan is if people’s jobs forced them to talk all the time. Sales, support, purchasing, management - cubicles for all!
I don’t even know what “productivity” means in my largely service-oriented business. Number of emails or PowerPoint slides per hour?" Average head count per conference call?
I know kanban, etc are old Japanese work concepts. But I don’t think Agile or Scrum is generally considered a “Japanese” phenomenon, or do we look at Japan as a rising dominant business force anymore.
I would agree that Agile or Scrum teams are more effective when they are able to co-locate in some physical space. Except that hasn’t been the reality for most of the teams I’ve managed for the past ten years or so. More often then not, the teams are distributed across various locations (often working from home). So our daily “standup” call might be the only time we are all in one place.
The most ridiculous example was at my last company where I had to commute 2 hours a day to hold video conferences with teams spread out across half the USA.
Fortunately I mostly work from home, as does everyone else in my company apparently. I came in today because it’s near Penn Station, but there is like one other dude in an office meant to seat 50 people.
Ultimately, for any business it’s “net profit per hour worked.” Unfortunately this is very difficult to actually measure, and so quite a number of executives focus on minimizing the costs that they can measure without giving any thought at to whether this might be increasing costs that they can’t measure.
In some jobs, an open plan really is best. Years ago, I worked in customer service at an office machine company. While others complained about the noise in our area, for us it was important. If I took a call from a customer with a rush request, I could immediately ask the tech-side person for an arrival estimate for the repair person. Sometimes, we could coax them through the problem to repair it themselves and sometimes a coworker overhearing the issue would offer to overtake the call to help. Our competition had their dispatch teams in separate rooms and didn’t have twice the turnaround time we did. They were that slow.
However important collaboration is in the software world, there comes a time when you have to focus to get things done. I worked by a door where everyone would have their standup meetings. I asked my boss to put the kibosh on it because of how distracting it was. She was responsive so doorway meetings must be held in the hall instead of on our side of the door. And headphones were (are) our lifesavers. We were also allowed to work one day a week at home, initially due to a lack of parking space, but later due to increased productivity. I saved up all my review work for the “home” day because I could do a better job of spotting holes and errors when in a different environment from the one that created them.
That’s a good question, I haven’t really raised it directly.
Part of what drives the whole office thing is management’s unspoken need to see people working and socializing. It gives people warm fuzzies that everyone’s working and collaborating.
People are allowed to be remote for reasons like their commute is very far, or they were hired in another city and decline to relocate. When you don’t come into your home-base office, people make comments. People know I live close by with a reasonable commute, so my only excuse would be to flatly state that it’s hard for me to work in that environment. I’ve had the conversation before, and it drifts back toward “just wear headphones” or “use the cramped semi-private booths”, before settling on “others do it, why can’t you?” and “you don’t want solutions, you just want to be unhappy”.
And the sad thing is, I actually like my co-workers. I like working in person with them. There’s a not a bad apple among them. It’s just the environment makes it challenging.
Ah well, I guess I just need to make the case that I need to be full-time remote because I’m just fundamentally incompatible with the chaos and noise.
I should count my stars because we do have a separate floor that’s 100% dedicated to those functions, it’s all 100% open, and most of them are constantly on phone calls (some of them speakerphone).
If I were a customer on the receiving end of one of those sales calls, I would feel so disrespected with all the crosstalk in the background.
And even HR has no private cubicles either. Have a private matter to discuss with HR? No problem, book one of the glass-walled meeting rooms where everyone can see exactly who’s meeting with HR and when.
At this point everyone has pretty much said what there is to say, so now I’m just venting (but it does feel good to vent!)
We went to an open floorplan last year and I despise it with every fiber of my being. The theory that it “fosters collaboration” is just nonsense for what we do… in my area, people are constantly on LOUD conference calls and the concept of volume modulation just doesn’t exist. They put up signs (lol) to remind people to be “courteous” and keep the volume down or take the call elsewhere. Of course that didn’t have any impact.
The only good side… they relaxed the telecommute policy so I work 2 days / week at home. It is the only thing that’s allowing me to stay sane… I refuse to believe there is any productivity-enhancing benefit of an open office for the majority of jobs.
To add to my previous rant above - today the guy behind me spun around several times to talk on his headset to the back of my head, while looking over my shoulder at my monitors. There was also a woman pacing up and down the aisle on her cordless headset with her meeting, so we call only got snippets of the meeting content. I said ‘enuf’ and came home mid-day.
Unlike those who thought this thread would be about the OpenOffice package, I actually interpreted the title as being an open thread about hating offices in general. For what that’s worth!
But yeah, open offices are good for some things – and wretchedly bad for others. Specifically, any job where workers have to spend significant amounts of time thinking about what they’re doing—programming is a prime example—is a poor match for an open office. But tragically, most management drones love the idea of one-size-fits-all.
Half the people where I am cope with the open floorplan by wearing headphones pretty much 100% of the working day. Thus, on the occasions when I actually do need to collaborate with them, the open office actually makes it harder rather than easier.
There is an interesting Freakanomics podcast on open offices that gives some measurable substance to the loathing of the floor plans. IIRC, studies found that people collaborate face-to-face less and increase their use of email and IM, and tend to turtle inwards and project a ‘do not disturb’ vibe as a defensive means to concentrate and get work done.
I’ve been in cubicle, open office, and office-with-doors jobs and hate open office in comparison to all others. I’m not afraid of talking to people when I need to, and work terribly under constant visual and noise distractions. It’s like trying to get work done while riding on a crowded city bus or busy restaurant.
The few people I’ve known who claimed “I just block it all out” in Open Office environments I’ve noticed don’t produce great work.
I have noticed many notable authors, designers and composers live in quiet rural areas or surrounded by a lot of property.
I get the bottom line about saving space and commercial real estate costs, but employers would be wise to encourage work from home. It would also save money for the company by being able to pay lower salaries based on the cost of living areas. With all the technology in place to do this, it is amazing how slow some companies are to do this.
As for all this collaboration, most jobs aren’t involved with brain storming a new widget ever single day.
