I am pretty sure this article is missing the point. Companies like Google and Facebook do in fact employ open work spaces. But they also deploy areas where employees can work with a lot more space. Areas like the sleep pods etc that Google is known for.
You can't just take the bits you like from a plan and throw out the stuff you don't want to pay for. There is a yin and yang to office spaces. This is a classic case of taking what you want and throwing out the rest because who needs that hippy bullshit.
Also, if you have a flexible enough schedule, your desk is only a satellite office. If you want to be alone and in the quiet all day, home is often great for that.
I think some people miss out on the possibility that their employer pays more for their office than they pay for rent!
The final note about feeling self conscious leaving right at 5, I get it, but if you're effective, and the company is run with appropriate principles, that shouldn't be a thing. Leave at 3, catch up mail at home, who cares?
It's not reasonable to keep a bunch of opaque walls separating all employees so they can have flexible schedules while pretending not to. That is not progress.
Exactly. I think there’s also a distinction to be made between engineering and writing/editorial environments. Then again, the opinion of one is not a fair reflection of the majority. Sounds like her office lacks ample break-out rooms, though who really cares if it’s a “fishbowl” office or not?
> Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited personal cellphone use isn’t occupying billing hours
As a boss, this is not why I advocate open spaces.
Personally I hate them because they destroy my productivity and that's the one thing I enjoy about work.
The trade off is that I hear a lot more office gossip as well as lots of details of my coworker's personal lives, including their children's play date plans, personal health issues, etc. If that's what my boss is after then the open office plan is working splendidly.
I like having my teams sit together, not isolated from each other because it increases collaboration. This was my experience back in 2007 when I first worked in a shared office with 3 other people.
I empathize with you. The way we approach what you've discussed is to gently remind people when things get loud, that we have a "quiet library" policy.
It's certainly not so I can monitor what my teams are doing.
If I could design my own office it would be similar to Valve's model. Semi isolated areas with desks on wheels, so teams could sit together. There would also be "quiet" offices, where people can go work when they need complete isolation. This isn't too unlike what MSFT Google and FB already have today.
My problem with offices is that no matter how you slice it, they always end up being a proxy for status. It's difficult to scale offices with the number of people, so you have to allocate them in some sort of "fair" fashion. At one company, offices were originally assigned by tenure. As the company expanded, a number of executives and upper level managers specifically wanted offices because of their "title." The company changed it's stance to instead allocate offices by each department, based on role, then tenure.
Do people just throw the name "Google" into headlines now as a means to grab attention? Google neither invented nor popularized the open office, which has been around since the 1960's.
The perfect office is a combination of working from my home some days, coming into an open office on others, then working remotely while traveling, and sometimes working in an office at the office.
There are rough corners, but there's also room for improvement:
"Now Herman Miller, the firm that, however unintentionally, started the shift to cubicles, is trying to reshape the office yet again. The “Living Office” is a new attempt to combine the best of private and social space. It looks rather like a fancy hotel: open-plan but with desks set in friendly clusters and separated by low, clear partitions. Workers can also perch at a counter-top next to the coffee station, or lounge on sofas in a plaza or café-style seating in a courtyard. Benches nicknamed “landing strips” are placed outside conference rooms to encourage post-meeting chats. Pods are available for concentrated work, and even for relaxation. Everywhere there are glass-encased meeting rooms and a few solo spaces. About 30% of the staff have no permanent desk.
Light streams in and sound is controlled with dividing walls and “pink noise”—white noise focused on the frequencies of human speech, which can reduce the distance at which a conversation is audible from 50 feet to 12-16 feet. The result, the firm says, is greater focus, accuracy and short-term memory."
I have the opposite yet same reaction to open office environments. I was always the loud person in the group, and I have a hard time staying out of conversations with others. I try to keep myself to myself, but I know that I distract others around me.
Ironically, having a private office not only kept my noise from other people, but I actually got quieter because it was simply the presence of the group around me that got me loud. I got a lot more work done too, since I wasn't constantly distracted from the discussions going on around me, work related or not.
I work in an open office and it's certainly got a fair share of ups & downs. It makes for a more sociable office resulting in a stronger 'team' feel. However, the music/noise/chatter force me to wear headphones (and crank them up). Even with the 'phones, I'm definitely more effective working from home (even the team agrees).
I'd like to see companies implementing mixed layouts, perhaps where teams work together in open offices, but not the entire company/multiple teams. Or - as per the article - a mix between working in-open-office and from home.
Needless to say this is not a vigorously researched opinion piece. She claims open plan leads to more illness because "last flu season took down a succession of my co-workers like dominoes" -- the epitome of anecdotal evidence.
As for the claim that communication's not a problem with private offices. Cornell did a study awhile back that found something interesting. The standard for team collaboration changes depending on whether you have private or open offices. With open plan "frequent communication" means several times a day, often on the fly. But if you have a private office you concept of "frequent" means "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1]
So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because they've lowered their standard for team interaction.
Cornell also noted that office workers are usually incentivized to prioritize their personal productivity over team productivity, because compensation is only or mostly tied to the former. That goes a long way towards describing why employees often complain that they can't focus and want to be left alone, while management extolls the virtues of increased team collaboration. Management are the ones that are properly incentivized to balance individual and team productivity.
Do you have evidence that open office actually increases team productivity? Not anecdotes, since as you point out those aren't worth much. And not team interaction, which is tangential to the real goal- team productivity.
Do you have evidence that private offices do? I'd imagine that it's a hard question for which to construct a perfectly controlled experiment in the real world. The Cornell study is one of the better ones I've seen.
Yes, overall, I much prefer having a separate office. When I consider taking on a new position, an open office is a huge negative and I expect a higher salary/benefits to compensate for it.
It's true that there is a bit less communication happening when each employee has a separate office but each interaction is MUCH more succinct and productive. There is no chit-chat and employees don't get penalized for not fitting in socially (you get more varied personality/thinking types). Also, employees feel more valued if they have their own office and they are more motivated to deliver results.
Open offices mix work and social aspects together and it makes it difficult for introverts to strive in the workplace.
It's OK for small startups but it's terrible for large companies. It's discrimination against introverts - These people will either leave your company or get fired because they won't be able to focus on their work whenever someone walks behind them.
Between morning rituals, standups, meetings, breaks, and blocking tasks I'm probably spending around 40% of my time on real work. Open offices probably cut that in half.
The problem is most claimed benefits are really just poor project management - which is really the biggest cause of low productivity. It isn't a good thing that you can easily interrupt a neighbor to solve an issue. Because 9/10 neighbors won't complain and you'll keep on doing it because you keep getting your issues solved. Interruptions should be difficult to encourage the creation of self-service tools or processes to solve common problems. I've seen the same person interrupted like 10 times in 30 minutes because he is so damn good at fixing everyone else's problems.
Most places don't use available tracking software well and they hire non technical people to manage technical projects. This leads to using multiple task tracking systems poorly and poorly defined direction and tasks. There aren't good processes in place to solve different types of issues so they revert to the lowest common denominator (face to face or email) when they could otherwise be handled asynchronously.
If everyone gets nice clearly defined tasks defined and managed in a single place and there are tools in place so they can help themselves you get a bunch better environment regardless of how people are sitting.
18 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 49.1 ms ] threadYou can't just take the bits you like from a plan and throw out the stuff you don't want to pay for. There is a yin and yang to office spaces. This is a classic case of taking what you want and throwing out the rest because who needs that hippy bullshit.
Also, if you have a flexible enough schedule, your desk is only a satellite office. If you want to be alone and in the quiet all day, home is often great for that.
I think some people miss out on the possibility that their employer pays more for their office than they pay for rent!
The final note about feeling self conscious leaving right at 5, I get it, but if you're effective, and the company is run with appropriate principles, that shouldn't be a thing. Leave at 3, catch up mail at home, who cares?
It's not reasonable to keep a bunch of opaque walls separating all employees so they can have flexible schedules while pretending not to. That is not progress.
As a boss, this is not why I advocate open spaces.
Personally I hate them because they destroy my productivity and that's the one thing I enjoy about work.
The trade off is that I hear a lot more office gossip as well as lots of details of my coworker's personal lives, including their children's play date plans, personal health issues, etc. If that's what my boss is after then the open office plan is working splendidly.
I like having my teams sit together, not isolated from each other because it increases collaboration. This was my experience back in 2007 when I first worked in a shared office with 3 other people.
I empathize with you. The way we approach what you've discussed is to gently remind people when things get loud, that we have a "quiet library" policy.
It's certainly not so I can monitor what my teams are doing.
If I could design my own office it would be similar to Valve's model. Semi isolated areas with desks on wheels, so teams could sit together. There would also be "quiet" offices, where people can go work when they need complete isolation. This isn't too unlike what MSFT Google and FB already have today.
My problem with offices is that no matter how you slice it, they always end up being a proxy for status. It's difficult to scale offices with the number of people, so you have to allocate them in some sort of "fair" fashion. At one company, offices were originally assigned by tenure. As the company expanded, a number of executives and upper level managers specifically wanted offices because of their "title." The company changed it's stance to instead allocate offices by each department, based on role, then tenure.
Done.
"Now Herman Miller, the firm that, however unintentionally, started the shift to cubicles, is trying to reshape the office yet again. The “Living Office” is a new attempt to combine the best of private and social space. It looks rather like a fancy hotel: open-plan but with desks set in friendly clusters and separated by low, clear partitions. Workers can also perch at a counter-top next to the coffee station, or lounge on sofas in a plaza or café-style seating in a courtyard. Benches nicknamed “landing strips” are placed outside conference rooms to encourage post-meeting chats. Pods are available for concentrated work, and even for relaxation. Everywhere there are glass-encased meeting rooms and a few solo spaces. About 30% of the staff have no permanent desk.
Light streams in and sound is controlled with dividing walls and “pink noise”—white noise focused on the frequencies of human speech, which can reduce the distance at which a conversation is audible from 50 feet to 12-16 feet. The result, the firm says, is greater focus, accuracy and short-term memory."
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21637359-how-wor...
Ironically, having a private office not only kept my noise from other people, but I actually got quieter because it was simply the presence of the group around me that got me loud. I got a lot more work done too, since I wasn't constantly distracted from the discussions going on around me, work related or not.
I'd like to see companies implementing mixed layouts, perhaps where teams work together in open offices, but not the entire company/multiple teams. Or - as per the article - a mix between working in-open-office and from home.
As for the claim that communication's not a problem with private offices. Cornell did a study awhile back that found something interesting. The standard for team collaboration changes depending on whether you have private or open offices. With open plan "frequent communication" means several times a day, often on the fly. But if you have a private office you concept of "frequent" means "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". [1]
So that's consistent with private office people saying everything's fine -- because they've lowered their standard for team interaction.
Cornell also noted that office workers are usually incentivized to prioritize their personal productivity over team productivity, because compensation is only or mostly tied to the former. That goes a long way towards describing why employees often complain that they can't focus and want to be left alone, while management extolls the virtues of increased team collaboration. Management are the ones that are properly incentivized to balance individual and team productivity.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...
It's true that there is a bit less communication happening when each employee has a separate office but each interaction is MUCH more succinct and productive. There is no chit-chat and employees don't get penalized for not fitting in socially (you get more varied personality/thinking types). Also, employees feel more valued if they have their own office and they are more motivated to deliver results.
Open offices mix work and social aspects together and it makes it difficult for introverts to strive in the workplace.
It's OK for small startups but it's terrible for large companies. It's discrimination against introverts - These people will either leave your company or get fired because they won't be able to focus on their work whenever someone walks behind them.
The problem is most claimed benefits are really just poor project management - which is really the biggest cause of low productivity. It isn't a good thing that you can easily interrupt a neighbor to solve an issue. Because 9/10 neighbors won't complain and you'll keep on doing it because you keep getting your issues solved. Interruptions should be difficult to encourage the creation of self-service tools or processes to solve common problems. I've seen the same person interrupted like 10 times in 30 minutes because he is so damn good at fixing everyone else's problems.
Most places don't use available tracking software well and they hire non technical people to manage technical projects. This leads to using multiple task tracking systems poorly and poorly defined direction and tasks. There aren't good processes in place to solve different types of issues so they revert to the lowest common denominator (face to face or email) when they could otherwise be handled asynchronously.
If everyone gets nice clearly defined tasks defined and managed in a single place and there are tools in place so they can help themselves you get a bunch better environment regardless of how people are sitting.