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I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on. Does anyone have

I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on. Does anyone have experience of this? I have worked in open plan offices since 1999 and I've never experienced productivity problems. If anything I'd expect working in a cube would lead to more time wasted cruising websites since your screen is more obscured. I dunno, I've only worked in cubes a handful of times.

rgblambda 7y ago
I've never really worked in a cubicle (once had a mid tower PC and dual monitors acting as partitions to the front and left) but wouldn't an advantage of an open plan office over a cubicle be that you can see your manager walking towards you from a mile off and be able to quickly look like you're working.
- t-writescode 7y ago
  These issues sound a lot like managers not trusting employees to get work done, which sounds like a bigger issue.
  - LeSaucy 7y ago
    Not to mention that as knowledge workers, a lot of the value+ideas you provide come from reading and research that is not explicitly work related. I encourage my team to spend time doing non-related research and work/tinker on finding new things they are interested in, and to not feel guilty if I walk by and they have reddit or hn open/visible. That being said, working in an open office is like being stuck in a plane of purgatory.
  - lxcfan 7y ago
    This, but, for both sides. Managers should trust their employees to get stuff done, and not micromanage their time. Employees should get stuff done whether their managers are watching their every move or not, and, trust their managers to not be micromanaging their time. We both need to create a trustworthy relationship. I have no sympathy for employees who do not do work without being forced to any more than I do for bosses who want to micromanage every minute of employee time or every website they visit. You're both hurting all of us.
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      Here's another perspective: mercenary-leaning personality types may be able to compartmentalize micromanagement, but highly intrinsically-motivated minds are totally disrupted by it. The anxiety of observation lingers even when the boss isn't looking and all work begins to carry the sting of coercion. Effort for these people grows out of aligning personal agency with meaningful production, so forced conformity to arbitrary management practices (or worst of all, counterproductive ones) actively kills all but the minimal output to remain employed and put food on the table. But personalities who don't experience the world this way interpret it under the simplistic moral judgment of "laziness", thus perpetuating the very incentive structure that causes it in the first place. I find it highly dubious that there's a significant fraction of humans who are basically not industrious. That just doesn't seem possible or adaptive in the context of a tribe of hunter-gatherers eeking out survival on the savannah. Rather it seems that we're clinging to unsophisticated organizational structures from the Industrial Revolution, which enabled a highly technical society to emerge in the first place but were never iterated to handle things like psychological diversity or the explosion of highly specialized knowledge work. That’s why we have insanities like software designers working factory shifts, in noisy distracting settings, taking marching orders from people who have no idea what they do.
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Like all relationships it is reciprocal notably. Demotivated or stressed employees are more likely to "full slack" (not doing any work as opposed to say switching to a lower intensity duty). Bosses who distrust their employees are more likely to micromanage and stress and demotivate. Proper results oriented approaches can help for both parties. At the end of the day throughput is what matters for productivity not how hard they work. But that is logistically nontrivial to set up and calibrate properly, let alone other temptations and pressure to try to "optimize" beyond the ability to be sustained. Knowledge work in even the lowliest sense isn't optimal like an assembly line. Making matters worse as usual for any would be reformers are inertia and politics of course. It is the ultimate "dancing monkey" but instead of being between security and the monkey choosing the latter, the choice is practical and wise decisions or politically pleasing ones.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
joegahona 7y ago
I just recently went from a personal office to an open plan and find the new situation devoid of merit. Noise-canceling over-the-ear headphones are a must, and phone calls are impossible. Since meeting rooms are minimal, that's an issue too. I've done a handful of meetings in my car.
- joncrane 7y ago
  Are you looking for a new job?
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Even if he was, it’s a waste of time - even if the company started out with sane working conditions, they’ll eventually switch over to an open office because it saves 2% of the operating budget (on paper).
    - clarry 7y ago
      Remote. They can't take my apartment and my private office innit away.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  > phone calls are impossible And woe to those who need to take a conference call with multiple of their desk neighbors but no conference rooms are available. Nothing like a bunch of people all sitting next to each other talking on the same phone call. Why companies would implement an open office without a plethora of private meeting spaces is beyond me.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    I suspect that, as people have been discussing upthread, open offices and a lack of meeting rooms are both symptoms of the underlying problem that a company just doesn't have enough space. I worked in an open office once where the company wasn't under space pressure, and it wasn't nearly as bad.
Majromax 7y ago
In an open-plan office, "turning their chair around to chat" involves everyone in the vicinity who overhears the conversation, and "turning around" is only possible for the single-digit number of next-seat neighbours. Consider the opposite extreme of private offices. An impromptu meeting involves some walking, but otherwise the meeting stays between just those directly-involved. There's no cost to anyone else. Keeping this distracting effect in mind, silent communication (messaging) looks more attractive.
jyounker 7y ago
Because people understand how distracting their conversations are to those who are not involved in the conversations.
neogodless 7y ago
I'm working in an open office now. With few exceptions, every single person wears headphones (presumably noise-canceling) most of the day. Some people (especially me) have video conferences from our desks. For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off. Don't think any of us resort to email, but then again I'm only on one of many teams. We do use Slack but again I don't know how many private Slack conversations occur. (Most of my team is not located here, so everything is Slack, and most of it is in a team channel.) I'm not sure I have a solid takeaway, but I can say that I'm much, much more engaged with my remote teammates than my local ones.
- bobbiechen 7y ago
  >For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off. I think it's pretty tough to read if it's okay to interrupt when your teammate is wearing headphones (especially if, as you said, everyone wears them most of the day). Sometimes I'm just wearing headphones to listen to some music while doing something easy and tedious, which would be okay to interrupt. But if I'm diving deep into some system to find a mystery bug, then I'd be annoyed if interrupted. I'm currently working on a project exploring physical interruptions and would appreciate hearing about your (and other HN users') experiences: https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7 https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7
- tyurok 7y ago
  I've worked on an open plan startup and was a slack admin. 90+% of the messages were private, and we had pretty good activity on public channels.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
I worked in an open-office for a year and my experience there was pretty bad. I was in a deep-work, heavy focus department sandwiched between two walking paths (we called our desks "Review Island") and literally anyone in the company including CEO could walk within 2 feet of you when they headed for coffee or water. So, you're on edge, your peripheral vision is a ton of people walking by. Then, the two departments next to us were very collaborative, they involved a lot of conversations...and yet, they also hated the open-office. People want to have conversations when they want to; at other times, they want silence. I think there was an effect where no one wanted to interrupt others' silence, so they just emailed or chatted when a simple walk-over-and-chat would suffice...if we had had more space and more individuals with offices, I think a lot more productive collaboration would've occurred. So, in summary, the noise/distraction was already so bad, we didn't want to make it worse.
Androider 7y ago
Simple, when you go visit someone in a private office you can close the door and have a long conversation about your topic and really hash out the details. If you turn around and start blabbering to one of your teammates in an open office plan, everyone within hearing distance will want to murder you. If you're not aware of this, I guarantee everyone within 30 feet of you is already wearing headphones and hates you. So now you have to coordinate on Slack to go to one of the shared team meeting rooms instead. At that point you might as well have your conversation in Slack, even if the person is sitting right next to you. And that's the state of open offices today, co-located but void of any actual collaboration. I've worked in single person offices, 2-3 person offices and open offices. 2-3 person offices where everyone works on the same thing is the best, by far. Remote work is the new private office, not quite as good as a 2-3 person office, but infinitely better than an open office.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Private offices aren't cubes. You can still hear conversations with cubicles. And if you have an office with more than one person, the long conversation still disrupts the other people in the office. Long conversations do deserve private space, but this can be resolved by having ample meeting spaces.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    You can hear loud conversations. Those fabric walls do a surprisingly good job at limiting the spread of a normal-volume conversation to about 1 cubicle around you, and you can speak in soft tones and not be heard at all.
- bradlys 7y ago
  Honestly, I don't see this as a thing once you get to a certain size. It used to be a thing at my workplace when we were smaller. However, now, the place is just so loud with conversation/whatever on a daily basis that people are less bothered by individual conversations near them. It's like complaining about conversation next to you when you're in a cafeteria full of it already. Everyone wears headphones at my place if they're trying to focus. Last job literally handed out construction ear muffs. Also, all the rooms are taken up by meetings. Mostly by business/product. There's no rooms left for engineers to hash things out, frequently.
Hamuko 7y ago
>I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on. Well first of, if I just turn my chair around, I'm talking to the wall. Secondly, I could yell at another develop from one table and they might not even realise because they're wearing noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, of course they are, they are in a room with 30+ other people. If I want to collaborate in an open office, I need to get up from my desk, walk to someone else's desk, tap them on the shoulder to get them to remove their headphones and then stand there and talk to the other person + 10 people around them.
amalcon 7y ago
You would message and email more because you can't just turn your chair around to chat about something you are working on. If you do that, you kill the productivity of a dozen other people while you have that chat, and get them mad at you as a bonus. I remember one office design where they had these tables placed between desks faced back to back, on the theory that people would use those tables for collaborative work. Instead, the tables just became oversized bookshelves. People couldn't have a conversation over them because conversations make noise.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Wearable chairs and chat bots can increase open office productivity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1uCYK6wnjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1uCYK6wnjk
amf12 7y ago
> I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on. I have observed two main reasons for this. 1. More people now have headphones on to keep them focused. So people send IM's so as not to distract them. 2. It is easy to disturb others when having face to face conversations in the open area.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> if they can just turn their chair around By definition, there can only be max four people (usually less) you can just “turn your chair around and talk to” without shouting over somebody else’s head - or just getting up and walking over to where they are just as you would if people had cubes. Your insinuation that this is possible or meaningful is so obviously disingenuous that I’m having a hard time you’re making it in good faith: if you’d tried it for even a few hours you’d be able to see the flaw in it.

rgblambda 7y ago

I've never really worked in a cubicle (once had a mid tower PC and dual monitors acting as partitions to the front and left) but wouldn't an advantage of an open plan office over a cubicle be that you can see your manager walking towards you from a mile off and be able to quickly look like you're working.

t-writescode 7y ago
These issues sound a lot like managers not trusting employees to get work done, which sounds like a bigger issue.
- LeSaucy 7y ago
  Not to mention that as knowledge workers, a lot of the value+ideas you provide come from reading and research that is not explicitly work related. I encourage my team to spend time doing non-related research and work/tinker on finding new things they are interested in, and to not feel guilty if I walk by and they have reddit or hn open/visible. That being said, working in an open office is like being stuck in a plane of purgatory.
- lxcfan 7y ago
  This, but, for both sides. Managers should trust their employees to get stuff done, and not micromanage their time. Employees should get stuff done whether their managers are watching their every move or not, and, trust their managers to not be micromanaging their time. We both need to create a trustworthy relationship. I have no sympathy for employees who do not do work without being forced to any more than I do for bosses who want to micromanage every minute of employee time or every website they visit. You're both hurting all of us.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    Here's another perspective: mercenary-leaning personality types may be able to compartmentalize micromanagement, but highly intrinsically-motivated minds are totally disrupted by it. The anxiety of observation lingers even when the boss isn't looking and all work begins to carry the sting of coercion. Effort for these people grows out of aligning personal agency with meaningful production, so forced conformity to arbitrary management practices (or worst of all, counterproductive ones) actively kills all but the minimal output to remain employed and put food on the table. But personalities who don't experience the world this way interpret it under the simplistic moral judgment of "laziness", thus perpetuating the very incentive structure that causes it in the first place. I find it highly dubious that there's a significant fraction of humans who are basically not industrious. That just doesn't seem possible or adaptive in the context of a tribe of hunter-gatherers eeking out survival on the savannah. Rather it seems that we're clinging to unsophisticated organizational structures from the Industrial Revolution, which enabled a highly technical society to emerge in the first place but were never iterated to handle things like psychological diversity or the explosion of highly specialized knowledge work. That’s why we have insanities like software designers working factory shifts, in noisy distracting settings, taking marching orders from people who have no idea what they do.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Like all relationships it is reciprocal notably. Demotivated or stressed employees are more likely to "full slack" (not doing any work as opposed to say switching to a lower intensity duty). Bosses who distrust their employees are more likely to micromanage and stress and demotivate. Proper results oriented approaches can help for both parties. At the end of the day throughput is what matters for productivity not how hard they work. But that is logistically nontrivial to set up and calibrate properly, let alone other temptations and pressure to try to "optimize" beyond the ability to be sustained. Knowledge work in even the lowliest sense isn't optimal like an assembly line. Making matters worse as usual for any would be reformers are inertia and politics of course. It is the ultimate "dancing monkey" but instead of being between security and the monkey choosing the latter, the choice is practical and wise decisions or politically pleasing ones.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

joegahona 7y ago

I just recently went from a personal office to an open plan and find the new situation devoid of merit. Noise-canceling over-the-ear headphones are a must, and phone calls are impossible. Since meeting rooms are minimal, that's an issue too. I've done a handful of meetings in my car.

joncrane 7y ago
Are you looking for a new job?
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Even if he was, it’s a waste of time - even if the company started out with sane working conditions, they’ll eventually switch over to an open office because it saves 2% of the operating budget (on paper).
  - clarry 7y ago
    Remote. They can't take my apartment and my private office innit away.
nkrisc 7y ago
> phone calls are impossible And woe to those who need to take a conference call with multiple of their desk neighbors but no conference rooms are available. Nothing like a bunch of people all sitting next to each other talking on the same phone call. Why companies would implement an open office without a plethora of private meeting spaces is beyond me.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  I suspect that, as people have been discussing upthread, open offices and a lack of meeting rooms are both symptoms of the underlying problem that a company just doesn't have enough space. I worked in an open office once where the company wasn't under space pressure, and it wasn't nearly as bad.

Majromax 7y ago

In an open-plan office, "turning their chair around to chat" involves everyone in the vicinity who overhears the conversation, and "turning around" is only possible for the single-digit number of next-seat neighbours. Consider the opposite extreme of private offices. An impromptu meeting involves some walking, but otherwise the meeting stays between just those directly-involved. There's no cost to anyone else. Keeping this distracting effect in mind, silent communication (messaging) looks more attractive.

jyounker 7y ago

Because people understand how distracting their conversations are to those who are not involved in the conversations.

neogodless 7y ago

I'm working in an open office now. With few exceptions, every single person wears headphones (presumably noise-canceling) most of the day. Some people (especially me) have video conferences from our desks. For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off. Don't think any of us resort to email, but then again I'm only on one of many teams. We do use Slack but again I don't know how many private Slack conversations occur. (Most of my team is not located here, so everything is Slack, and most of it is in a team channel.) I'm not sure I have a solid takeaway, but I can say that I'm much, much more engaged with my remote teammates than my local ones.

bobbiechen 7y ago
>For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off. I think it's pretty tough to read if it's okay to interrupt when your teammate is wearing headphones (especially if, as you said, everyone wears them most of the day). Sometimes I'm just wearing headphones to listen to some music while doing something easy and tedious, which would be okay to interrupt. But if I'm diving deep into some system to find a mystery bug, then I'd be annoyed if interrupted. I'm currently working on a project exploring physical interruptions and would appreciate hearing about your (and other HN users') experiences: https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7 https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7
tyurok 7y ago
I've worked on an open plan startup and was a slack admin. 90+% of the messages were private, and we had pretty good activity on public channels.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

I worked in an open-office for a year and my experience there was pretty bad. I was in a deep-work, heavy focus department sandwiched between two walking paths (we called our desks "Review Island") and literally anyone in the company including CEO could walk within 2 feet of you when they headed for coffee or water. So, you're on edge, your peripheral vision is a ton of people walking by. Then, the two departments next to us were very collaborative, they involved a lot of conversations...and yet, they also hated the open-office. People want to have conversations when they want to; at other times, they want silence. I think there was an effect where no one wanted to interrupt others' silence, so they just emailed or chatted when a simple walk-over-and-chat would suffice...if we had had more space and more individuals with offices, I think a lot more productive collaboration would've occurred. So, in summary, the noise/distraction was already so bad, we didn't want to make it worse.

Androider 7y ago

Simple, when you go visit someone in a private office you can close the door and have a long conversation about your topic and really hash out the details. If you turn around and start blabbering to one of your teammates in an open office plan, everyone within hearing distance will want to murder you. If you're not aware of this, I guarantee everyone within 30 feet of you is already wearing headphones and hates you. So now you have to coordinate on Slack to go to one of the shared team meeting rooms instead. At that point you might as well have your conversation in Slack, even if the person is sitting right next to you. And that's the state of open offices today, co-located but void of any actual collaboration. I've worked in single person offices, 2-3 person offices and open offices. 2-3 person offices where everyone works on the same thing is the best, by far. Remote work is the new private office, not quite as good as a 2-3 person office, but infinitely better than an open office.

UncleMeat 7y ago
Private offices aren't cubes. You can still hear conversations with cubicles. And if you have an office with more than one person, the long conversation still disrupts the other people in the office. Long conversations do deserve private space, but this can be resolved by having ample meeting spaces.
- falcolas 7y ago
  You can hear loud conversations. Those fabric walls do a surprisingly good job at limiting the spread of a normal-volume conversation to about 1 cubicle around you, and you can speak in soft tones and not be heard at all.
bradlys 7y ago
Honestly, I don't see this as a thing once you get to a certain size. It used to be a thing at my workplace when we were smaller. However, now, the place is just so loud with conversation/whatever on a daily basis that people are less bothered by individual conversations near them. It's like complaining about conversation next to you when you're in a cafeteria full of it already. Everyone wears headphones at my place if they're trying to focus. Last job literally handed out construction ear muffs. Also, all the rooms are taken up by meetings. Mostly by business/product. There's no rooms left for engineers to hash things out, frequently.

Hamuko 7y ago

>I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on. Well first of, if I just turn my chair around, I'm talking to the wall. Secondly, I could yell at another develop from one table and they might not even realise because they're wearing noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, of course they are, they are in a room with 30+ other people. If I want to collaborate in an open office, I need to get up from my desk, walk to someone else's desk, tap them on the shoulder to get them to remove their headphones and then stand there and talk to the other person + 10 people around them.

amalcon 7y ago

You would message and email more because you can't just turn your chair around to chat about something you are working on. If you do that, you kill the productivity of a dozen other people while you have that chat, and get them mad at you as a bonus. I remember one office design where they had these tables placed between desks faced back to back, on the theory that people would use those tables for collaborative work. Instead, the tables just became oversized bookshelves. People couldn't have a conversation over them because conversations make noise.

DonHopkins 7y ago
Wearable chairs and chat bots can increase open office productivity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1uCYK6wnjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1uCYK6wnjk

amf12 7y ago

> I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on. I have observed two main reasons for this. 1. More people now have headphones on to keep them focused. So people send IM's so as not to distract them. 2. It is easy to disturb others when having face to face conversations in the open area.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> if they can just turn their chair around By definition, there can only be max four people (usually less) you can just “turn your chair around and talk to” without shouting over somebody else’s head - or just getting up and walking over to where they are just as you would if people had cubes. Your insinuation that this is possible or meaningful is so obviously disingenuous that I’m having a hard time you’re making it in good faith: if you’d tried it for even a few hours you’d be able to see the flaw in it.