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I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is: - A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I
by fishtoaster 13y ago
I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is:
- A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal.
- A reasonable number of walled-off rooms for anyone to use. Need to take a phone call? Have a quick 1-on-1? Debate something loudly with 3-5 people? You need to have rooms, of varying sizes, to handle these use cases near at hand.
- Minimal noise that's not related to collaboration. Eg, no loud ringing phones. No phone-based customer support department in the same room as the devs. No kitchen (full of dishwashers, coffee grinders, etc) area facing the open workspace.
Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work. Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction. I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.
- jyrkesh 13y agoBut if you implement all of that perfectly, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having an open office? (I.e. to stimulate more spontaneous collaboration)
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoThe main purpose of open offices is to save on real estate costs, stimulating more spontaneous collaboration is just a flimsy excuse.
- nikatwork 13y agoPartitions can still be installed between the work pods to provide a measure of privacy. Many of the open-plan offices I've seen have no partitions, the only thing between you and everyone else is a computer monitor. It's insane.
- ktsmith 13y agoPartitions don't do much to cut down on noise unfortunately.
- nikatwork 13y agoWith partitions, at least I don't have to watch the office gumbies milling around flapping their arms and smacking their pieholes. Half of my monkey brain is tracking their movements for threats, and the other half is struggling to prevent me flinging handfuls of my faeces at them out of annoyance. For sound? I can just put on headphones.
- dredmorbius 13y agoIt depends on the partitions and how other surfaces are finished. With sufficiently high walls (about 6'), carpeting, and acoustic ceilings, you'll actually cut noise quite a bit. Lower and sound travels in straight lines. One of my gigs had a "pod" style cubical layout with 6' high walls, glass in the upper 2' or so, arranged in groups of four (see diagrams below). It's still one of the best workspace designs I've seen, period. https://plus.google.com/photos/104092656004159577193/albums/5923493810329062497 https://plus.google.com/photos/104092656004159577193/albums/...
- loceng 13y agoI think one benefit is the cost savings? More people in smaller area + large area for group chats when needed, etc?
- voidlogic 13y agoCost savings until Cold/Flu season hits. Watch that burn through the office...
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoThey are recirculating too much HVAC air, too.
- loceng 13y agoIf people are in the same office space overall, everyone will likely catch whatever's going around anyway.
- jacques_chester 13y agoThe actual purpose of open offices is to save money. The collaboration stuff is marketing nonsense managers tell themselves to try and ease the cognitive dissonance of lying about it.
- obiterdictum 13y agoIt highly depends on the team. In a small team that know each other well, it can work. Most of the time it's not the case, however.
- tsotha 13y agoDepends on the kind of work you do. If you're in sales or marketing the open office plan may indeed stimulate creativity or whatever. But for people who have to concentrate (like software developers) it's a productivity killer. Joel Spolsky used to touch on this occasionally - he claims all sorts of research shows the most productive arrangement is to put everyone in his own office with a door. Where I work that will never happen, because there are corporate-wide rules about who gets an office and who doesn't. You have to be a director to get your own office, which is two levels above non-managers. They're so anal about it one time I worked on a floor with no directors and they left all the offices unoccupied. They crowded everyone into cubes and even doubled one up when they ran out of (cubicle) space.
- oyvindeh 13y agoThen the question comes: Do they really save money, or does it just appear like they do? Saving money on office space is money saved. People being distracted and doing poor work is money lost. I wonder how it sums up.
- kps 13y agoMoney saved on office space is easily measurable and directly attributable to the bean counter responsible. Productivity loss is hard to measure, and even when it's blatantly obvious, it's easy to shift the blame.
- aimhb 13y ago> One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. A little bit off topic, but I too have experienced this, and I have to say, it's awful for productivity, team building, and team assimilation. As a new hire, I would send my mentor a question and it might be ten minutes to fifty minutes before I would get a reply. By then, I'd all but forgotten what I was asking about in the first place, since I had moved on because of not knowing how long I'd have to wait. That led to wasted time and an overall loss of focus. No matter the environment, text-based and asynchronous communication just aren't very effective compared to spoken communication, even when considering the interrupted party momentarily losing their flow.
- jacques_chester 13y agoThis isn't really a feature of the environment, except accidentally. What's really at stake here is striking the balance between the short term cost of integrating a new team member and the long term cost of failing to integrate them well.
- Domenic_S 13y agoI sat next to my very first technical mentor for a few years, and he had no compunction about holding up a finger and saying "hang on" curtly when I'd start to ask something. If you all agree that it isn't rude in this context, I think that reaction can help. I do it myself occasionally and usually can keep about 80-90% of my flow. Try doing that to your wife on work-from-home days at your own peril.
- djillionsmix 13y agoWife nothing, try doing it to the exact same mentor who felt entitled to do it to you. If my experience / observation is any guide, the result is utterly epic shitfit.
- showsover 13y ago
- pixelcort 13y agoBut if no one talks in the open plan layout, what's the benefit of open plan at all? Might as well give people their own private space free of visual distractions.
- noarchy 13y agoPrivate space for everyone costs more. The entire point of the open plan is to save money, but it gets sold as something entirely different.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoI worked in one of these places where we were expected to do real engineering work, but with an overhead loudspeaker paging system for incoming sales and service calls. "Bong, Rick Line 1, Bong Dale Line 6" Those were the days... (not really).
- abalone 13y agoYou mentioned headphones. Headphones seem to be an essential part of open plans. Not only do they send a don't-bother-me signal, they also drown out the noise. But that's also a really annoying part of it. I don't want to have to put on headphones all the time.
- gametheoretic 13y agoIf the top post indicates anything, it's the high precedence the psyche places on framing. Switch around your default- and exception cases and see if that helps take your mind off it. It's a real thing. This summer, because my room would get hot at night, I had to leave a fan on. At first, I couldn't sleep with the noise. But now that it's getting colder, I've tried leaving it off, and guess what. Ha. Now I need the noise.
- ktsmith 13y agoI have worked in an open office plan and simply can't work with people around me talking. I had to wear my headphones all day every day. I would never accept a job in an open office again.
- collyw 13y agoI have an office of 4, which is bearable. I have gone for a few interviews recently, and open plan seems to be the norm. It seems difficult to find a productive working environment. I was way more productive when there were just two of us in the same office. That was when the organisation was just starting out.
- walshemj 13y agoI got marked down as not a culture fit when at an interview with a digital agency - I pointed out that the camped noisy office environment (all working on laptops no double screens and popper docking stations) would be effecting their efficiency. The role I was going for was as a technical consultant to improve the quality of the work - go figure
- 5teev 13y ago
- Osiris 13y agoI'm in a cube farm right now and I don't find that the cubes make the noise any softer than my co-workers in another office that have an open plan. I can still plainly hear everything that people around me are talking about. I still find headphones a necessity.
- twistedpair 13y agoI can still hear my coworker clipping his toe nails each week two cubes down. Cubes don't help much.
- ams6110 13y agoOne of the worst things for me in open plan offices is you can hear people eating at their desks. For me nothing is more annoying and distracting than to hear someone crunching on cookies or popcorn or potato chips at his desk. That's an instant headphones-on for me. It's worse than all the other background noise/conversations put together.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoI work in China in a semi-open office, every afternoon they make fruit available for consumption. Whenever the fruits are relatively juicy (e.g. Chinese pears), I can't get any work done due to all the smacking and slurping around my work area; I have to go to Starbucks.
- stephengillie 13y agoWhat gets me is the smell of delicious food being eaten by my coworkers...I have to stick to plain food in small quantities to keep from getting fat again, and I get jealous...
- tempestn 13y agoI worked in an open office situation once with a co-worker across from me who listened to sports talk radio all day - no headphones. I literally can't imagine a more distracting work environment.
- zackbloom 13y agoI completely agree, wrote up essentially the exact same thing: http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/open-plan-offices http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/open-plan-offices
- gradstudent 13y ago> Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work. Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction. I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study. No, they're universally bad. No door, no privacy and a constant stream of chatter from other people. Yuck.
- perlpimp 13y agoOpen office does not scale beyond 6-10 people. There was an article though about a firm that did have open office but had special function areas - like quiet work area or meeting room are. If you are in quiet room area, you don't talk there at all. Huge open office I think is bad as it invites distraction. Many companies grow from open offices as startups but then they have to change they way they do the open office if they want to preserve the "open office". my 2c.
- jonnathanson 13y agoI would add to that: don't have fewer rooms than you have continual need for. In a previous job, we had an open office layout with a handful of small conference rooms. The rooms were always being fought over -- resulting in the institution of a byzantine booking system involving Outlook calendars and admin permissions, with the office manager as bottleneck to booking a room. As a client-facing person (i.e., someone who needed to be on the phone a lot), I hated it. More often than not, I found myself walking around downstairs, in the building lobby, or out on a balcony somewhere when trying to conduct business. I got sick of fighting over conference rooms, and sicker still of trying to evict squatters from rooms that I'd booked for urgent meetings or calls. And if I ever needed a quiet place to go concentrate on something, that was pretty much out of the question for most of the day. I ended up taking a lot of work home with me every night, simply because I couldn't get it done at the office. I enjoyed some great chit-chat with coworkers, and I probably saw more YouTube videos and memes in that office than I have anywhere else. Productivity kind of sucked, though.
- normloman 13y agoPolicies that enforce silence is what's needed for open office plans to work. But silence would also cancel out any supposed creativity benefits.