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They're cheaper and they look good. The hidden costs of lower employee productivity and happiness are just that, hidden. I've worked at places with completely o
by llampx 8y ago
They're cheaper and they look good. The hidden costs of lower employee productivity and happiness are just that, hidden. I've worked at places with completely open offices and with smaller offices for teams of 4-6 people and its much nicer to have some private space, especially when you need to sit down and think through some problems.
One company handed out noise-canceling headphones but that's just a bandaid over the problem.
One extra benefit to fail-fast startups and landlords is also that space can be simply reconfigured by adding and removing desks. No pesky walls to knock down or glass doors to add when your brand new pizza delivery app fails and has to make room for a beauty box startup.
- tetha 8y agoI've found, anecdotally, that offices with 3-6 employees working on the same area offers the best communication. If you're in a room with that amount of coworkers, you do have a certain level of noise. People talk, someone usually has a customer on the phone. However, the background conversations tend to be on-topic and this seems to be much less distracting opposed to lots of noise about everything. On top of that, you pick up what the rest of the team is working or struggling on to some degree. And this is really, really valuable we've found.
- sroussey 8y agoI agree. The problem is when you have an eight person team and a five person team, etc. You start to lose a lot of space when there is a mismatch. 20 years ago I used to be in a 20 person group, multiple teams but not everyone. I think I would have preferred 12 (there were a couple of those). But managers had glass wall private offices.
- pfranz 8y agoYep. I interviewed at a place with 3 tech leads were all in the same room. One had given notice and I figured I'd be his replacement. When I showed up on day one I found that they had hired an additional person who started the week before. So the three of them were in one office and I was next door. After awhile when I mentioned being left out of important decisions they offered to have all of us move into the hallway...which would have sucked for everybody.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> After awhile when I mentioned being left out of important decisions they offered to have all of us move into the hallway...which would have sucked for everybody. Yikes. I started my career 20 years ago as a junior sysadmin in the networking closet (seriously, my boss helped me pull a desk in there). I would take that over an open office plan any day.
- lumost 8y agoMy office has 1 person cellphone booths for use when someone needs to meet 1:1 with a remote office. In my ideal world I'd just have one of those as a dedicated space to work in when I needed it. With such a setup there needn't be any expensive office rework between tenants.