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I am not surprised. I was working in an open-plan office for a few years, and I also preferred talking to colleagues sitting only a few meters away via mail. It
by lqet 8y ago
I am not surprised. I was working in an open-plan office for a few years, and I also preferred talking to colleagues sitting only a few meters away via mail. It's incredibly stressful to talk to a person face-to-face knowing that everyone on the team listens to the conversation. Not only do you have to constantly weight and evaluate your sentences, you also have the constant feeling that you are disturbing other team members just by talking. On the other hand, you also don't want to drag a person into another room for privacy if you just want some quick update on something. Some team members might use noise-cancelling headphones to keep out the typing noise and occasional conversation, but these headphones are an additional barrier for face-to-face talk. You don't want to snap them out of a musical experience, and getting a person with noise-cancelling headphones to notice you are standing behind him/her might get very awkward.
If you are convinced that stuffing people into a room with little to no privacy leads to increased social interaction, you should start riding public transit during rush hour.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 8y agoTotally. At my last $dayjob, we had a group chat for the room, where we would type stuff instead of saying it out loud. This way, conversation only flowed between people who were willing to participate at the moment. (It didn't work perfectly. Typing is silent, but laughing at what you just read isn't.)
- inetknght 8y agoTyping isn't always silent; not everyone has quiet keyboards.
- matz1 8y ago>It's incredibly stressful to talk to a person face-to-face knowing that everyone on the team listens to the conversation. Not only do you have to constantly weight and evaluate your sentences, you also have the constant feeling that you are disturbing other team members just by talking Fortunately I don't have this physiological barrier. I don't care if everyone on the team listens to the conversation.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoYou are probably also oblivious to the very real consequences of other people knowing various things or having partial information, etc. It's stressful because it has consequences. If you don't find it stressful, you probably are failing to connect the dots and see that x outcome is related to y behavior.
- matz1 8y agoOf course there is consequences for everything, I just embrace it. Having to be stressful because of this is in itself stressfull.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mercer 8y agoDo you also do this when the 'conversation' is just you making statements about yourself that serve no purpose other than providing you with the pleasure of making statements about yourself?
- matz1 8y agoNot sure what you are talking about ? The poster I'm replying to is about face-to-face conversation with other teammate
- mercer 8y agoApologies for being a bit snarky, but I found your comment to not really add much to the conversation because it just pointed out that you do not personally suffer from the problems that the person you responded to does. That, combined with the fact that you don't seem to care how your open-office talk might affect others, reminded me of the various "that guys/gals" that I've encountered in my open-office experiences. They'd regularly annoy or interrupt everyone else in the room by having no consideration, self-awareness and/or sensitivity, and usually they'd do so for the worst reason: talking about themselves. The inane shit they were up to in the weekend, or the funny YouTube video that you just have to watch awkwardly. But again, my apologies for projecting that on you, because obviously I have no idea if any of this applies. It just reminded me of something that ruined open-offices for me.