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You can pack people more densely, and therefore the office space you need to pay for is smaller for the same number of employees. At my office (which I haven't
by geofft 6y ago
You can pack people more densely, and therefore the office space you need to pay for is smaller for the same number of employees.
At my office (which I haven't seen since March), I have one desk large enough to fit two monitors, and a chair. That's all the space that's for me. My desk is part of a row of 4 desks side-by-side, and there's 4 more desks facing them. If you set up cubicles, with the density I had last time I had a cubicle, you could probably fit half as many people. If you set up offices you could fit even less.
My employer rents half the floors in one building and just about all the floors in the building across the street, so having to find twice as much space would be not only expensive but logistically complex - either we'd all have to move, or you'd have to commute to get to certain teams.
- ksec 6y agoThank You. In other words, it was not Open Office, per se that was cost saving, it was using Open Office as a tool to give less space to employees that was cost saving. I mean you could have small cubicles too, I once worked in a office cubicles that physically could not fit anyone taller than 6"2. There are simply not enough leg room.
- geofft 6y agoIt's difficult to pack small cubicles and have them still really count as cubicles. Looking for some random pictures from Google Images, my office looks kind of like this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/mentoring.redesign/s3fs-public/open-office-plan.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/mentoring.redesign/s3fs-public/open... And here is a random picture of a small cubicle design: https://cubiclebydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Workstations-12.jpg https://cubiclebydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Works... Note the dividers in the center area extend back to the sides of the chairs, even though the chairs are not pushed in. If you tried to do that in the first image, you would block the walkway. (You certainly couldn't do the design of the farther-away cubicles; they take up much more room per employee.) You could do something like this: https://www.quill.com/content/index/resource-center/office-furniture-tips-ideas/tips-and-tricks/how-to-arrange-cubicles-for-an-efficient-office-layout-and-employee-satisfaction/images/arrange-cubicles-for-efficient-office-layout-1205.jpg https://www.quill.com/content/index/resource-center/office-f... But I'd probably call that an open office layout, honestly.
- ksec 6y agoThanks for putting the time and getting the image for illustration. I guess I need some time to think deeply about it before it sinks in.