15 ms·

That's not true. I'm an engineering director involved in planning space for 5,000+ software engineers. I went into this strongly preferring individual offices

by wdr1 6y ago

That's not true. I'm an engineering director involved in planning space for 5,000+ software engineers. I went into this strongly preferring individual offices, or a shared office of 2-4 people. We spent a lot of time talking to people over the past year (before COVID). What I learned was pretty surprising: (1) Most of our people prefered an open floor plan. They like the sense of community that comes with it. (2) People hate "noise", but what they consider noise is interesting. They like noise from their own team. It helps them stayed plugged in & informed. What they hate is noise from other teams. Stepping back it makes sense. If Alice is talk to Bob about Foo, and Charlie works on Foo, he's glad he overhear it. On the other hand if Danielle is on another team & has never heard of Foo, it's just a distraction. So in the end, despite starting out as basically hating open floor plan, that's what we're doing & I'm strongly supportive. We're still being thoughtful about noise, and will have ways so teams don't hear the noise of other teams, but we're basically doing an open floor plan. And while there are a lot of cost considerations, it wasn't a factor at all in making this decision. (And, fwiw, I still retain my own personal preference for individual offices, but I'll have a desk in the open just like everyone else.)

m0zg 6y ago
Por que no los dos? Give offices to those who need to focus and open plan to those who like getting distracted all day. Seems like a win-win to me. What's with this dogmatic "everyone must sit in a bull pen" trend?
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I assume you are getting downvoted for tone, but the idea itself seems reasonable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
paulryanrogers 6y ago
I do wonder if some of the preference is dependent on stage-of-life too. When I was younger and had fewer friends I enjoyed open offices more. As an older employee with a family and more non-work friendships the disadvantages of open plans are more obvious
opo 6y ago
Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it. Create an open floor plan with say 100 engineers. Survey job satisfaction before and N months after. At that point decide how people can be the most productive. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. >Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage. https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-offices-are-now-dumbest-management-fad-of-all-time.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of... >..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration." https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-... An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example: >...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace. >...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...
hitekker 6y ago
How do you know your engineers like the open floor plan when most engineers are currently working from home?
- google234123 6y ago
  Are you serious? Maybe this person is using evidence gathered from before WHF? Would you also argue that you can't talk about open floor plans at night because technically all the engineers would presumably be at home sleeping?
foobarian 6y ago
I came into an open plan workplace with low expectations due to so many complaints seen on community sites like this. But I was pleasantly surprised and found I like it a lot better than being isolated in an office. Keeping a team sitting together like you said is key. I also feel it's a little easier visiting other teams, since you can see them from afar and just walk over. Coworkers are generally good about being mindful about noise and grab a nearby meeting room when needed. One thing that surprised me I didn't expect is, our building has an open ceiling design with the pipes, cables, lighting, structural beams, etc. all exposed. Furthermore they are sprayed with some kind of chunky foam material, and together this has pretty unbelievable noise suppression ability. In a previous building sound traveled a lot further due to flat ceilings, but here I can barely even detect that someone two rows away is talking, let alone make out what they are saying.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Would you really want to be in meeting rooms post Covid?
  - fooker 6y ago
    Compared to a zoom meeting, definitely!!
- YZF 6y ago
  How many years have you had an office with a door and how do you compare that? I've never worked in a completely open plan. The closest was this sort of "pod" setup where it's semi open and it can be terrible. It's not terrible if you have some premium corner or window spot where you are semi-isolated, if you're anywhere close to where people are walking or are surrounded from all directions then you (well I) can basically do not real work the entire day. In that latter scenario I pretty much did all the "real" work by staying late after everyone went home. I've seen setups where people are packed into huge rooms and I'd need to be in pretty dire straights before I ever consider working there. Where exactly are you situated in this open plan? Are people walking right in front of you for example? Or immediately behind your back? Let's say you want to get a coffee, are you walking immediately behind someone's back or immediately in front of their faces? How many people have headphones on all day or try to insulate themselves from the environment in other ways? When people get sick, is the entire office sneezing and coughing? Curious minds want to know ;)
notsuoh 6y ago
This is really well said and I hadn't thought about it quite like this. It's true, I really don't mind when my colleagues on my team are talking within earshot or even adjacent teams I may tangentially support. What I hate though is engineers on teams I have nothing to do with or, worse, non engineering teams talking nearby.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scarface74 6y ago
After my last job with a noisy open office, I was so happy that we had to start working remotely. I loved my company, coworkers, the technology I was working on, pay was decent, etc. But, pre-Covid, I was desperately looking for a fully remote job to guarantee that I never had to work in an open office again. Then Covid happen and I stopped looking. Management was trying to get us back in an open office in July. It was even going to be worse. No one was using conference rooms for calls and quick chats before. They definitely weren’t going to do it post Covid. I was desperate to find another job before July. I was lucky enough to find a fully remote role.
m463 6y ago
Are you an extrovert? Do your people have actual deadlines or shipping products? Because for an introvert it can turn into a sort of pressure cooker sometimes. Noise yes, but visual distractions too. I started preferring off hours, when what I would REALLY prefer is to be with my team, just not in this terrible way. Worst is when the guy you are facing has raised is desk to standing height when I am sitting.
YZF 6y ago
I would treat this as an example of people not knowing what they want. How many of those people who preferred an open floor plan have worked somewhere where they had an office with a door? I'll hazard a guess, <5%? How can they tell? It's like asking someone from the Sahara desert how they think they'd do in the north pole. A private office doesn't mean don't talk with your team. You get people crowding an in office for discussion, you have meeting rooms, if you feel like hanging our with your team member(s) and they feel like hanging out with you then by all means hang out. If you need to disconnect from them to get something done, shut the door and focus. In any sort of normal place with offices people hang together all the time, but since nobody has offices any more, nobody knows that...
- jlokier 6y ago
  I agree. I've seen places where people leave their office door open when they are fine with being visited, or just want to see other people go by. Where a closed door means don't visit or at least knock, but it's not usually closed.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I basically have a private office right now (WFH, lol) and I'm the only person on the project right now, so for me it works. But previously I've always worked in teams, 3 - 8 people. The noises from one's own team is almost never noise, because it's pertinent to the project you all are working on (if everyone is working on something else you're not an actual team). The noises from other teams though, ugh. Last job I had, we had "team rooms"; thankfully I was able to provide input and managed to steer them away from doing an open office. That is ideal, I think, if you've got teams working on different things. I've worked in a fully open office with about 8 teams, that was too much. I've worked in a half-open office which I was really sceptical about at first (we moved into it while I was working there), it wasn't just an open office but it was three floors with an open atrium in the center. But it worked, somehow; there wasn't too much noise coming from the atrium, and every team had their own area cordoned off with half-walls (whiteboard walls) so you could walk around them, but there was no visual distraction and noise was muted / indirect. I think that's the best way to do open offices. Wouldn't have minded if they put some noise insulation in between the whiteboard walls though.
himinlomax 6y ago
It's more than that. Open floor plans make it impossible to talk with your team. Because if you do talk you're bothering everyone else. Working from home, it's much easier to do phone conferences, because people don't have to lower their voices to not disturb other office drones. Apparently you're supposed to go to a meeting room, but in many places they're often 100% used most of the time, and what's the benefit of moving to a different room for an impromptu, 5 min chat?

by wdr1 6y ago

m0zg 6y ago

Por que no los dos? Give offices to those who need to focus and open plan to those who like getting distracted all day. Seems like a win-win to me. What's with this dogmatic "everyone must sit in a bull pen" trend?

im3w1l 6y ago
I assume you are getting downvoted for tone, but the idea itself seems reasonable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

paulryanrogers 6y ago

I do wonder if some of the preference is dependent on stage-of-life too. When I was younger and had fewer friends I enjoyed open offices more. As an older employee with a family and more non-work friendships the disadvantages of open plans are more obvious

opo 6y ago

Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it. Create an open floor plan with say 100 engineers. Survey job satisfaction before and N months after. At that point decide how people can be the most productive. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. >Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage. https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-offices-are-now-dumbest-management-fad-of-all-time.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of... >..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration." https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-... An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example: >...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace. >...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...

hitekker 6y ago

How do you know your engineers like the open floor plan when most engineers are currently working from home?

google234123 6y ago
Are you serious? Maybe this person is using evidence gathered from before WHF? Would you also argue that you can't talk about open floor plans at night because technically all the engineers would presumably be at home sleeping?

foobarian 6y ago

I came into an open plan workplace with low expectations due to so many complaints seen on community sites like this. But I was pleasantly surprised and found I like it a lot better than being isolated in an office. Keeping a team sitting together like you said is key. I also feel it's a little easier visiting other teams, since you can see them from afar and just walk over. Coworkers are generally good about being mindful about noise and grab a nearby meeting room when needed. One thing that surprised me I didn't expect is, our building has an open ceiling design with the pipes, cables, lighting, structural beams, etc. all exposed. Furthermore they are sprayed with some kind of chunky foam material, and together this has pretty unbelievable noise suppression ability. In a previous building sound traveled a lot further due to flat ceilings, but here I can barely even detect that someone two rows away is talking, let alone make out what they are saying.

scarface74 6y ago
Would you really want to be in meeting rooms post Covid?
- fooker 6y ago
  Compared to a zoom meeting, definitely!!
YZF 6y ago
How many years have you had an office with a door and how do you compare that? I've never worked in a completely open plan. The closest was this sort of "pod" setup where it's semi open and it can be terrible. It's not terrible if you have some premium corner or window spot where you are semi-isolated, if you're anywhere close to where people are walking or are surrounded from all directions then you (well I) can basically do not real work the entire day. In that latter scenario I pretty much did all the "real" work by staying late after everyone went home. I've seen setups where people are packed into huge rooms and I'd need to be in pretty dire straights before I ever consider working there. Where exactly are you situated in this open plan? Are people walking right in front of you for example? Or immediately behind your back? Let's say you want to get a coffee, are you walking immediately behind someone's back or immediately in front of their faces? How many people have headphones on all day or try to insulate themselves from the environment in other ways? When people get sick, is the entire office sneezing and coughing? Curious minds want to know ;)

notsuoh 6y ago

This is really well said and I hadn't thought about it quite like this. It's true, I really don't mind when my colleagues on my team are talking within earshot or even adjacent teams I may tangentially support. What I hate though is engineers on teams I have nothing to do with or, worse, non engineering teams talking nearby.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

scarface74 6y ago

After my last job with a noisy open office, I was so happy that we had to start working remotely. I loved my company, coworkers, the technology I was working on, pay was decent, etc. But, pre-Covid, I was desperately looking for a fully remote job to guarantee that I never had to work in an open office again. Then Covid happen and I stopped looking. Management was trying to get us back in an open office in July. It was even going to be worse. No one was using conference rooms for calls and quick chats before. They definitely weren’t going to do it post Covid. I was desperate to find another job before July. I was lucky enough to find a fully remote role.

m463 6y ago

Are you an extrovert? Do your people have actual deadlines or shipping products? Because for an introvert it can turn into a sort of pressure cooker sometimes. Noise yes, but visual distractions too. I started preferring off hours, when what I would REALLY prefer is to be with my team, just not in this terrible way. Worst is when the guy you are facing has raised is desk to standing height when I am sitting.

YZF 6y ago

I would treat this as an example of people not knowing what they want. How many of those people who preferred an open floor plan have worked somewhere where they had an office with a door? I'll hazard a guess, <5%? How can they tell? It's like asking someone from the Sahara desert how they think they'd do in the north pole. A private office doesn't mean don't talk with your team. You get people crowding an in office for discussion, you have meeting rooms, if you feel like hanging our with your team member(s) and they feel like hanging out with you then by all means hang out. If you need to disconnect from them to get something done, shut the door and focus. In any sort of normal place with offices people hang together all the time, but since nobody has offices any more, nobody knows that...

jlokier 6y ago
I agree. I've seen places where people leave their office door open when they are fine with being visited, or just want to see other people go by. Where a closed door means don't visit or at least knock, but it's not usually closed.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I basically have a private office right now (WFH, lol) and I'm the only person on the project right now, so for me it works. But previously I've always worked in teams, 3 - 8 people. The noises from one's own team is almost never noise, because it's pertinent to the project you all are working on (if everyone is working on something else you're not an actual team). The noises from other teams though, ugh. Last job I had, we had "team rooms"; thankfully I was able to provide input and managed to steer them away from doing an open office. That is ideal, I think, if you've got teams working on different things. I've worked in a fully open office with about 8 teams, that was too much. I've worked in a half-open office which I was really sceptical about at first (we moved into it while I was working there), it wasn't just an open office but it was three floors with an open atrium in the center. But it worked, somehow; there wasn't too much noise coming from the atrium, and every team had their own area cordoned off with half-walls (whiteboard walls) so you could walk around them, but there was no visual distraction and noise was muted / indirect. I think that's the best way to do open offices. Wouldn't have minded if they put some noise insulation in between the whiteboard walls though.

himinlomax 6y ago

It's more than that. Open floor plans make it impossible to talk with your team. Because if you do talk you're bothering everyone else. Working from home, it's much easier to do phone conferences, because people don't have to lower their voices to not disturb other office drones. Apparently you're supposed to go to a meeting room, but in many places they're often 100% used most of the time, and what's the benefit of moving to a different room for an impromptu, 5 min chat?