6 ms·

The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration

48 points by prostoalex 8y ago

dang 8y ago
All: if commenting, please make it specific and unpredictable—such as about this study—rather than posting generically about open offices and hating them. There have been tons of those threads and they're all the same. It's the diffs that are interesting.
izzydata 8y ago
I don't think the article sets out to answer this specific question, but is face to face time inherently better than online interaction in terms of workplace productivity? Maybe the counter intuitive nature of open office layouts is actually better because it has people communicating faster over email.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  There's tradeoffs involved for moving things to text. On the bad side, it's inherently a low-bandwidth channel, and you cannot interrupt to prune irrelevant digressions from the conversational tree. On the plus side, however, it creates a written artifact that people can refer back to later. This can be incredibly useful, particularly for people with working memory or other executive function issues. Or for things that are complicated enough that a normal amount of WM/EF cannot cope with what's being communicated.
at-fates-hands 8y ago
The interesting thing is just four years ago, Writer Nikil Saval penned his book on cubicles and postulated about why cubicles made us all miserable and opined for more open office spaces: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/our-cubicles-ourselves-how-the-modern-office-shapes-american-life/360613/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/our-cub... Four years later and we still see plenty of backlash from the open office concept. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, or will there be a sort of hybrid cubicle/open office concept in the near future? I'm curious to see what the future holds for office spaces if neither of these are decent solutions.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Perhaps the environment is being (wrongly) blamed for what are ultimately culture and leadership issues? Seems likely, yes.
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  My recollection is Peopleware lists as an anecdote a Coding War Games study (not alot of data is in the book) where they pit team against team in different work environments, the study is about 30 years old at this point and as far as I know, no one has bothered to either recreate or disprove it. It showed a clear winner in terms of work environments (which was written by one of the book authors so it agreed with the general sentiments of the book.)
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I worked for a while in a what you might consider a hybrid system: small rooms of around a dozen people. Usually you don’t have problems of noise or distractions, since there isn’t that much going on, but you can quickly ask people about your issues without even getting up.
walshemj 8y ago
The first line is incorrect "Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration" Its actually about saving money. This is as they say in yes minister "not readily believable"
- mrob 8y ago
  I don't believe it's about saving money, because the savings over cubicles are too small to be worth the risk of reduced productivity. The more plausible explanation is that private workspaces signal high social status, and managers prefer their subordinates to look obviously inferior.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    Cubicles are open office
    - mrob 8y ago
      I've never heard anybody else call them that. The article considers cubicles to be non-open workspaces: "At the time of the study, OpenCo2 was in the process of a multi-year headquarters redesign, which—as in Study 1—involved a transformation from assigned seats in cubicles to similarly assigned seats in an open office design, with large rooms of desks and monitors and no dividers between people's desks."
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        I sit in a cube farm and it's like open office. It's noisy and distracting. And I have to stare at a gray wall the whole day. that alone makes me thing about quitting. It's bad for my soul.
        bradknowles 8y ago
        Take away that nice gray wall. Take the space you have now in your cube with your desk, and cut that by a factor of four -- or maybe a factor of ten. You're now sitting at a table, with someone sitting right next to you and their arms are literally inches away from yours), and you have someone sitting right next to you on the other side, just as close. You have someone sitting across from you, and you are constantly fighting for foot space underneath the table. The table is just wide enough for your computer and your monitor, and you have no place to hang any paper or reference material. You do not have space for a second monitor. You don't have space for a pad of paper next to your keyboard. You don't even have space for your coffee cup where there isn't a high risk that it will get knocked over and spill all over the electronic devices you're using. You have literally three feet width of table space, and maybe two feet depth. You've got a chair, and you can roll it back far enough to get into it and slide your legs under the table, but if you try to roll it back any further than that then you will hit your neighbor behind you. That is an open office. Welcome to my world.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
> "In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM." Moi? I see flags raising when tools are blamed (?) for cultural issues. In addition, it's not the quantity of face to face interactions that matter but the quality. All that said, the open office approach itself is a cheap cheat / proxy for an open minded collaborative organization. It's popular because it worked at successful companies. The problem is, for those conpanies it was more a correlation than a cause. Yes, face to face matters. But, as mentioned, so does quality and context (i.e., culture).
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > socially withdraw from officemates I'm trapped in a dystopian open-office nightmare as well. When somebody comes up and starts talking to the guy who sits next to me, right in my ear, it's distracting as hell. So when I'm considering talking to somebody else in the office, I take into account the fact that I'm going to be distracting all of the people within earshot of this conversation that they almost definitely don't care about. As a matter of politeness, I try to use chat tools so that I don't disrupt any more people than I need to. Of course, cubicle walls solves that problem and permits face-to-face conversation, but that's not worth a few extra bucks apparently.
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    And thus, you are the rare gem that actually considers the outcome of your actions on others. In contrast, most people are totally happy to blather about mindlessly, without any thought or care at all about who they are bothering with their chatter.
    - chiefalchemist 8y ago
      > "In contrast, most people..." 1) This isn't only at work, it's everywhere. Just yesterday I was wondering: When / how did walking around talking out loud to yourself (i.e., your phone) become normalized. How / why does having an unseen device in your hand or pocket make rude acceptable? 2) I also wonder how cultural this is? That is, is it only a USA thing? Are there cultures where this is less common? Where open plans might be doable, or at least less offensive?
Blinks- 8y ago
My experience has been fine once I got some good noise canceling headphones, before that I had serious issues concentrating. My main issue is not having long uninterrupted blocks of time to complete projects that require a lot of focus.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  For me headphones don’t help. The constant peripheral movement and people walking aroundbehind me are the biggest issues, just triggers a fight vs flight reflex to constantly check where people are around me. Lighting and other environmental factors are second biggest issue.
  - djhalon 8y ago
    You are not the only one: https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/17/panasonics-wearable-blinkers-concentrate-open-plan-offices-technology/ https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/17/panasonics-wearable-blinke... The simple fact that Panasonic sees a (profitable) need for something like their Human Blinkers, it feels more like a cure for the symptom and not the cause.
  - codyb 8y ago
    Yea visual stimulation is _at least_ as distracting as audial for me as well. I'm not sure I get the fight or flight response, but I certainly am constantly aware of the people walking by constantly.
abalone 8y ago
There were a lot more cubes in the olden days and people hated those as well. Please, don't forget that historical knowledge. But open plan is not better. I think what happened is, very basically, we saw that water cooler / hallway conversations were so much easier than going and bothering someone in their cube or office. You knew in that context that you were not bothering someone so much, just mentioning something at lunch. At lot more cross pollination. So people took that and ran with it, thinking that tearing down the walls would increase collaboration. But what the missed was the context. Hallway context = you're not bothering too much. Open plan context = now you're bothering not only that person but everyone around them as well. It wasn't the walls, it was expectations for focus in a given space. The Big Thing to remember here is that we still need regular workday contexts where we do lower the threshold to team collaboration. Many of us engineers here on HN love to get on these thread and say stuff like, total isolation and concentration all day long? Sounds great! Maximize my productivity! That brings us back to cubes. But it's actually important to strike a balance with team productivity and cross pollination as well. Open plan is not it though. Maybe we need to bring back the water cooler with the tiny cups.[1] [1] Just kidding, that would be terribly wasteful.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  > There were a lot more cubes in the olden days and people hated those as well. Please, don't forget that historical knowledge. People hated cubes in contrast to having an office, not in contrast to sharing one huge office without any privacy at all.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Exactly. Cubes and open office are on the same end of the spectrum. Private office is on the other.
    - olliej 8y ago
      Cubes are far closer to an office than they are to open plan. Easily.
Karupan 8y ago
I’ve mentally given up trying to fight open workspaces and hotdesks. Arguing about why it’s become the standard doesn’t help me. So I either work from home when I feel like doing intense work, or I’ve accepted that my productivity isn’t going to be as high at office. And it’s not just the noise. I don’t like it when I feel like people are looking over my shoulder. I just concentrate better in a smaller, self contained room.
otakucode 8y ago
>yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes wat. There are literally more than 1,000 studies that have been done on the impact of open floor plan offices to productivity (almost universally finding very significant negative effects). My mind boggles at how anyone interested in the topic could possibly conclude that there is scant evidence on the subject. It's extremely well-trod terrain. Office spaces were designed for repetitive office tasks which assisted repetitive manufacturing operations. Mental work is profoundly and fundamentally different in character, and offices have never been designed with the goal of enhancing it. The place of work in society, the idea of the 40 hour work week, and all such things are still following practices optimized for manufacturing. That human beings have different capacities for mental exertion compared to physical exertion, that the benefits of uninterrupted concentration are super-linear in terms of time spent in that state, and that mental work of poor quality can have very negative value, causing the expenditure of far more effort overall than necessary, these sorts of things get ignored. Doing anything in a business which appears to make things 'easier' on workers is reflexively viewed at least with suspicion, if not outright derision. That's a social problem, mostly, and not one that is likely to change over short time spans or without great effort and risks being taken. It's understandable that most companies are risk-averse, so change happens slowly.
hirundo 8y ago
The quest for diversity in the workplace should include the physical layout. To gather a diverse set of solutions to a business problem, collaboration is essential, but so is a limit to collaboration. Assign three people to generate a proposed solution. You'll get a more diverse solution set to cherry pick from the _less_ they collaborate. After that is the right time to collaborate. A physical layout that supports this includes both isolated workspaces and conference rooms. Or, coming soon, save money on floor space by cramming folks together like sardines but wearing VR rigs to simulate isolation. Or use the same tech to simulate collaborative spaces among remote workers.
olliej 8y ago
What I don't get is why they hand wave as to why the f2f interaction reduces. They even say "people isolate themselves with headphones", and don't look at the converse: if you need to wear headphones because of people talking, you probably realize the frustration you cause other people if you have a conversation around them. This is not a hard concept, and it remains weird that they don't address it. They talk about all sorts of complex topics ("Similarly, recent collective intelligence work suggests that, like our open offices, too much information from social data can be problematic", "assumes that spatial boundaries built into workspace architecture support collaboration and collective intelligence by mitigating the effects of the cognitive constraints of the human beings working within them.", etc), rather than going: 1. Open plan means more distraction. By design: that is the increased f2f interaction. 2. Basic decency means people attempt to reduce unnecessary distractions for others.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Unfortunately, "basic decency" is like "common sense", in that it is actually pretty rare.
  - olliej 8y ago
    Not my experience - people do talk in open offices because fundamentally there is a point where email, etc just doesn't work. Open offices shift the cost of f2f communication vs. email/chat. Different people have different thresholds, but I suspect that there are few people for which open office doesn't move the talk vs. text bar.
mr_tristan 8y ago
I wonder if any of these studies of workspaces take sound into consideration. These studies seem visual in nature, where sound tends to be as significant for many of us. I've worked remotely, from cubes, open offices, and have spent plenty a working hour in cafes. And amazingly, I've noticed I focus best either isolated (at home), or at a cafe, where I'm effectively surrounded by white noise. Edit: I'm not just interested in "is person talking" or not, but what is the nature of the sound environment.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  For me, people talking is not "white noise". People banging on things is not "white noise". Machines dinging and donging and bleeping and blarping is not "white noise". For me, only actual white noise would qualify as "white noise". And even true white noise can be pretty distracting if it is too loud. YMMV.
  - mr_tristan 8y ago
    Enough people talking, such that you can not follow any one conversation, functions like white noise.
rpeden 8y ago
As dang mentioned, threads about open office hate are pretty common on HN, so I'll talk about the time I liked an open office plan, and try to figure out why I liked it. The one time I really, really enjoyed an open office was when my desk was in a corner. I sat with my back to the corner, facing out toward the open room. So I felt like I got to enjoy a bit of privacy, while still enjoying the benefits of the openness. Things never really got so noisy that I couldn't concentrate, which was nice. I wore headphones sometimes, but it was because I wanted to, do because I felt like doing so was necessary for concentration. In contrast, I don't think I'd do as well in an office with nothing but long rows of developers packed in like sardines. It feels a bit too much like this: https://maas.museum/app/uploads/sites/7/2018/08/xCaption-9_edited.jpg.pagespeed.ic.i3lfVHEVEg.webp https://maas.museum/app/uploads/sites/7/2018/08/xCaption-9_e... Does anyone else feel this way? As though there are both good ways and bad ways to do open plan offices?
- abtinf 8y ago
  I also once (and only once) had a positive experience with an open office. At the first startup I worked at, the entire team of about 10 people sat in a ~700sqft "war room." Computers and desks lined two of the walls, whiteboards lined the other two walls. Open space in the middle. Everyone was in a technical role. I was very junior at the time, but I learned a lot. I had the opportunity to listen to how the senior engineers discussed problems and the considerations they thought important. The writing and diagrams on the whiteboard were the reference for component interactions and process flow. The room was mostly quiet, except for technical discussion. It was easy to run end-to-end tests by simply talking to the person who owned the component at the other end of the stack. I learned a lot in that role. We were a small team focused on the same product. Every issue any one person ran into was within the scope of concern of every other person in that room. I think it was an effective setup.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  For contractors at my current place of employment, we don't get that much space. Direct employees of the company get more space than that, but not us dirty, rotten, stinking contractors.
fogetti 8y ago
I think similarly important research would be to measure the health impact of these offices. We should make the business world visible/transparent and legally responsible of their impact on human societies.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  These are companies, whose sole purpose is to generate wealth for their shareholders. For them, humans are a cost center. And cost centers exist for only one purpose -- to be squeezed out of existence. So why do you think they would care about how the humans in the company are treated?
openOrifice 8y ago
Fuck you, dang. Your comments are not unlike an open office floor plan to me.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It’s critical to not let up on this topic, and to pedantically keep energy focused on hammering home the points that cost-effectiveness does not support choosing open plan layouts, headphones don’t solve the problem, and to understand this choice by corporations you have to look at status signalling and sociological problems. Even treating the topic like it’s some kind of even or fair debate about productivity is a problem now. It’s well beyond dispute that productivity suffers to such a degree that it erases any cost savings. It’s important to stop acting like there is some need for further proof or debate about this, and move on to social outrage and unwillingness to engage with companies that choose for _everyone_ to be embedded in open plan layouts (rather than letting some workers choose open spaces if they like it, other workers choose private offices if they need it, and simply just paying what this costs).

48 points by prostoalex 8y ago

dang 8y ago

All: if commenting, please make it specific and unpredictable—such as about this study—rather than posting generically about open offices and hating them. There have been tons of those threads and they're all the same. It's the diffs that are interesting.

izzydata 8y ago

I don't think the article sets out to answer this specific question, but is face to face time inherently better than online interaction in terms of workplace productivity? Maybe the counter intuitive nature of open office layouts is actually better because it has people communicating faster over email.

ThrustVectoring 8y ago
There's tradeoffs involved for moving things to text. On the bad side, it's inherently a low-bandwidth channel, and you cannot interrupt to prune irrelevant digressions from the conversational tree. On the plus side, however, it creates a written artifact that people can refer back to later. This can be incredibly useful, particularly for people with working memory or other executive function issues. Or for things that are complicated enough that a normal amount of WM/EF cannot cope with what's being communicated.

at-fates-hands 8y ago

The interesting thing is just four years ago, Writer Nikil Saval penned his book on cubicles and postulated about why cubicles made us all miserable and opined for more open office spaces: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/our-cubicles-ourselves-how-the-modern-office-shapes-american-life/360613/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/our-cub... Four years later and we still see plenty of backlash from the open office concept. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, or will there be a sort of hybrid cubicle/open office concept in the near future? I'm curious to see what the future holds for office spaces if neither of these are decent solutions.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Perhaps the environment is being (wrongly) blamed for what are ultimately culture and leadership issues? Seems likely, yes.
stevenwoo 8y ago
My recollection is Peopleware lists as an anecdote a Coding War Games study (not alot of data is in the book) where they pit team against team in different work environments, the study is about 30 years old at this point and as far as I know, no one has bothered to either recreate or disprove it. It showed a clear winner in terms of work environments (which was written by one of the book authors so it agreed with the general sentiments of the book.)
saagarjha 8y ago
I worked for a while in a what you might consider a hybrid system: small rooms of around a dozen people. Usually you don’t have problems of noise or distractions, since there isn’t that much going on, but you can quickly ask people about your issues without even getting up.

walshemj 8y ago

The first line is incorrect "Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration" Its actually about saving money. This is as they say in yes minister "not readily believable"

mrob 8y ago
I don't believe it's about saving money, because the savings over cubicles are too small to be worth the risk of reduced productivity. The more plausible explanation is that private workspaces signal high social status, and managers prefer their subordinates to look obviously inferior.
- walshemj 8y ago
  Cubicles are open office
  - mrob 8y ago
    I've never heard anybody else call them that. The article considers cubicles to be non-open workspaces: "At the time of the study, OpenCo2 was in the process of a multi-year headquarters redesign, which—as in Study 1—involved a transformation from assigned seats in cubicles to similarly assigned seats in an open office design, with large rooms of desks and monitors and no dividers between people's desks."
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I sit in a cube farm and it's like open office. It's noisy and distracting. And I have to stare at a gray wall the whole day. that alone makes me thing about quitting. It's bad for my soul.
      - bradknowles 8y ago
        Take away that nice gray wall. Take the space you have now in your cube with your desk, and cut that by a factor of four -- or maybe a factor of ten. You're now sitting at a table, with someone sitting right next to you and their arms are literally inches away from yours), and you have someone sitting right next to you on the other side, just as close. You have someone sitting across from you, and you are constantly fighting for foot space underneath the table. The table is just wide enough for your computer and your monitor, and you have no place to hang any paper or reference material. You do not have space for a second monitor. You don't have space for a pad of paper next to your keyboard. You don't even have space for your coffee cup where there isn't a high risk that it will get knocked over and spill all over the electronic devices you're using. You have literally three feet width of table space, and maybe two feet depth. You've got a chair, and you can roll it back far enough to get into it and slide your legs under the table, but if you try to roll it back any further than that then you will hit your neighbor behind you. That is an open office. Welcome to my world.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

> "In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM." Moi? I see flags raising when tools are blamed (?) for cultural issues. In addition, it's not the quantity of face to face interactions that matter but the quality. All that said, the open office approach itself is a cheap cheat / proxy for an open minded collaborative organization. It's popular because it worked at successful companies. The problem is, for those conpanies it was more a correlation than a cause. Yes, face to face matters. But, as mentioned, so does quality and context (i.e., culture).

commandlinefan 8y ago
> socially withdraw from officemates I'm trapped in a dystopian open-office nightmare as well. When somebody comes up and starts talking to the guy who sits next to me, right in my ear, it's distracting as hell. So when I'm considering talking to somebody else in the office, I take into account the fact that I'm going to be distracting all of the people within earshot of this conversation that they almost definitely don't care about. As a matter of politeness, I try to use chat tools so that I don't disrupt any more people than I need to. Of course, cubicle walls solves that problem and permits face-to-face conversation, but that's not worth a few extra bucks apparently.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  And thus, you are the rare gem that actually considers the outcome of your actions on others. In contrast, most people are totally happy to blather about mindlessly, without any thought or care at all about who they are bothering with their chatter.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    > "In contrast, most people..." 1) This isn't only at work, it's everywhere. Just yesterday I was wondering: When / how did walking around talking out loud to yourself (i.e., your phone) become normalized. How / why does having an unseen device in your hand or pocket make rude acceptable? 2) I also wonder how cultural this is? That is, is it only a USA thing? Are there cultures where this is less common? Where open plans might be doable, or at least less offensive?

Blinks- 8y ago

My experience has been fine once I got some good noise canceling headphones, before that I had serious issues concentrating. My main issue is not having long uninterrupted blocks of time to complete projects that require a lot of focus.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
For me headphones don’t help. The constant peripheral movement and people walking aroundbehind me are the biggest issues, just triggers a fight vs flight reflex to constantly check where people are around me. Lighting and other environmental factors are second biggest issue.
- djhalon 8y ago
  You are not the only one: https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/17/panasonics-wearable-blinkers-concentrate-open-plan-offices-technology/ https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/17/panasonics-wearable-blinke... The simple fact that Panasonic sees a (profitable) need for something like their Human Blinkers, it feels more like a cure for the symptom and not the cause.
- codyb 8y ago
  Yea visual stimulation is _at least_ as distracting as audial for me as well. I'm not sure I get the fight or flight response, but I certainly am constantly aware of the people walking by constantly.

abalone 8y ago

There were a lot more cubes in the olden days and people hated those as well. Please, don't forget that historical knowledge. But open plan is not better. I think what happened is, very basically, we saw that water cooler / hallway conversations were so much easier than going and bothering someone in their cube or office. You knew in that context that you were not bothering someone so much, just mentioning something at lunch. At lot more cross pollination. So people took that and ran with it, thinking that tearing down the walls would increase collaboration. But what the missed was the context. Hallway context = you're not bothering too much. Open plan context = now you're bothering not only that person but everyone around them as well. It wasn't the walls, it was expectations for focus in a given space. The Big Thing to remember here is that we still need regular workday contexts where we do lower the threshold to team collaboration. Many of us engineers here on HN love to get on these thread and say stuff like, total isolation and concentration all day long? Sounds great! Maximize my productivity! That brings us back to cubes. But it's actually important to strike a balance with team productivity and cross pollination as well. Open plan is not it though. Maybe we need to bring back the water cooler with the tiny cups.[1] [1] Just kidding, that would be terribly wasteful.

newnewpdro 8y ago
> There were a lot more cubes in the olden days and people hated those as well. Please, don't forget that historical knowledge. People hated cubes in contrast to having an office, not in contrast to sharing one huge office without any privacy at all.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Exactly. Cubes and open office are on the same end of the spectrum. Private office is on the other.
  - olliej 8y ago
    Cubes are far closer to an office than they are to open plan. Easily.

Karupan 8y ago

I’ve mentally given up trying to fight open workspaces and hotdesks. Arguing about why it’s become the standard doesn’t help me. So I either work from home when I feel like doing intense work, or I’ve accepted that my productivity isn’t going to be as high at office. And it’s not just the noise. I don’t like it when I feel like people are looking over my shoulder. I just concentrate better in a smaller, self contained room.

otakucode 8y ago

>yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes wat. There are literally more than 1,000 studies that have been done on the impact of open floor plan offices to productivity (almost universally finding very significant negative effects). My mind boggles at how anyone interested in the topic could possibly conclude that there is scant evidence on the subject. It's extremely well-trod terrain. Office spaces were designed for repetitive office tasks which assisted repetitive manufacturing operations. Mental work is profoundly and fundamentally different in character, and offices have never been designed with the goal of enhancing it. The place of work in society, the idea of the 40 hour work week, and all such things are still following practices optimized for manufacturing. That human beings have different capacities for mental exertion compared to physical exertion, that the benefits of uninterrupted concentration are super-linear in terms of time spent in that state, and that mental work of poor quality can have very negative value, causing the expenditure of far more effort overall than necessary, these sorts of things get ignored. Doing anything in a business which appears to make things 'easier' on workers is reflexively viewed at least with suspicion, if not outright derision. That's a social problem, mostly, and not one that is likely to change over short time spans or without great effort and risks being taken. It's understandable that most companies are risk-averse, so change happens slowly.

hirundo 8y ago

The quest for diversity in the workplace should include the physical layout. To gather a diverse set of solutions to a business problem, collaboration is essential, but so is a limit to collaboration. Assign three people to generate a proposed solution. You'll get a more diverse solution set to cherry pick from the _less_ they collaborate. After that is the right time to collaborate. A physical layout that supports this includes both isolated workspaces and conference rooms. Or, coming soon, save money on floor space by cramming folks together like sardines but wearing VR rigs to simulate isolation. Or use the same tech to simulate collaborative spaces among remote workers.

olliej 8y ago

What I don't get is why they hand wave as to why the f2f interaction reduces. They even say "people isolate themselves with headphones", and don't look at the converse: if you need to wear headphones because of people talking, you probably realize the frustration you cause other people if you have a conversation around them. This is not a hard concept, and it remains weird that they don't address it. They talk about all sorts of complex topics ("Similarly, recent collective intelligence work suggests that, like our open offices, too much information from social data can be problematic", "assumes that spatial boundaries built into workspace architecture support collaboration and collective intelligence by mitigating the effects of the cognitive constraints of the human beings working within them.", etc), rather than going: 1. Open plan means more distraction. By design: that is the increased f2f interaction. 2. Basic decency means people attempt to reduce unnecessary distractions for others.

bradknowles 8y ago
Unfortunately, "basic decency" is like "common sense", in that it is actually pretty rare.
- olliej 8y ago
  Not my experience - people do talk in open offices because fundamentally there is a point where email, etc just doesn't work. Open offices shift the cost of f2f communication vs. email/chat. Different people have different thresholds, but I suspect that there are few people for which open office doesn't move the talk vs. text bar.

mr_tristan 8y ago

I wonder if any of these studies of workspaces take sound into consideration. These studies seem visual in nature, where sound tends to be as significant for many of us. I've worked remotely, from cubes, open offices, and have spent plenty a working hour in cafes. And amazingly, I've noticed I focus best either isolated (at home), or at a cafe, where I'm effectively surrounded by white noise. Edit: I'm not just interested in "is person talking" or not, but what is the nature of the sound environment.

bradknowles 8y ago
For me, people talking is not "white noise". People banging on things is not "white noise". Machines dinging and donging and bleeping and blarping is not "white noise". For me, only actual white noise would qualify as "white noise". And even true white noise can be pretty distracting if it is too loud. YMMV.
- mr_tristan 8y ago
  Enough people talking, such that you can not follow any one conversation, functions like white noise.

rpeden 8y ago

As dang mentioned, threads about open office hate are pretty common on HN, so I'll talk about the time I liked an open office plan, and try to figure out why I liked it. The one time I really, really enjoyed an open office was when my desk was in a corner. I sat with my back to the corner, facing out toward the open room. So I felt like I got to enjoy a bit of privacy, while still enjoying the benefits of the openness. Things never really got so noisy that I couldn't concentrate, which was nice. I wore headphones sometimes, but it was because I wanted to, do because I felt like doing so was necessary for concentration. In contrast, I don't think I'd do as well in an office with nothing but long rows of developers packed in like sardines. It feels a bit too much like this: https://maas.museum/app/uploads/sites/7/2018/08/xCaption-9_edited.jpg.pagespeed.ic.i3lfVHEVEg.webp https://maas.museum/app/uploads/sites/7/2018/08/xCaption-9_e... Does anyone else feel this way? As though there are both good ways and bad ways to do open plan offices?

abtinf 8y ago
I also once (and only once) had a positive experience with an open office. At the first startup I worked at, the entire team of about 10 people sat in a ~700sqft "war room." Computers and desks lined two of the walls, whiteboards lined the other two walls. Open space in the middle. Everyone was in a technical role. I was very junior at the time, but I learned a lot. I had the opportunity to listen to how the senior engineers discussed problems and the considerations they thought important. The writing and diagrams on the whiteboard were the reference for component interactions and process flow. The room was mostly quiet, except for technical discussion. It was easy to run end-to-end tests by simply talking to the person who owned the component at the other end of the stack. I learned a lot in that role. We were a small team focused on the same product. Every issue any one person ran into was within the scope of concern of every other person in that room. I think it was an effective setup.
bradknowles 8y ago
For contractors at my current place of employment, we don't get that much space. Direct employees of the company get more space than that, but not us dirty, rotten, stinking contractors.

fogetti 8y ago

I think similarly important research would be to measure the health impact of these offices. We should make the business world visible/transparent and legally responsible of their impact on human societies.

bradknowles 8y ago
These are companies, whose sole purpose is to generate wealth for their shareholders. For them, humans are a cost center. And cost centers exist for only one purpose -- to be squeezed out of existence. So why do you think they would care about how the humans in the company are treated?

openOrifice 8y ago

Fuck you, dang. Your comments are not unlike an open office floor plan to me.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

It’s critical to not let up on this topic, and to pedantically keep energy focused on hammering home the points that cost-effectiveness does not support choosing open plan layouts, headphones don’t solve the problem, and to understand this choice by corporations you have to look at status signalling and sociological problems. Even treating the topic like it’s some kind of even or fair debate about productivity is a problem now. It’s well beyond dispute that productivity suffers to such a degree that it erases any cost savings. It’s important to stop acting like there is some need for further proof or debate about this, and move on to social outrage and unwillingness to engage with companies that choose for _everyone_ to be embedded in open plan layouts (rather than letting some workers choose open spaces if they like it, other workers choose private offices if they need it, and simply just paying what this costs).