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>The bottom line: workers in enclosed offices were by far the happiest, reporting the least amount of frustration on all 15 of the factors surveyed. Workers in

>The bottom line: workers in enclosed offices were by far the happiest, reporting the least amount of frustration on all 15 of the factors surveyed. Workers in cubicles with high partitions were the most miserable, reporting the lowest rates of satisfaction in 13 out of those 15 factors. Really? you don't think that he people with personal offices are not in better, higher paying, less menial jobs to begin with? I think that would be obvious and clearly a better reason that they are happier. If there are some distractions and lack of total privacy, but you love what you are doing, do you really think that you are going to be miserable? Please stop with the correlation posts where there is more obvious potential conclusions. So annoying.

owenmarshall 13y ago
While I share your (healthy) skepticism about scientific reporting, a good researcher would've attempted to structure their experiment to control for this very effect. I don't have ScienceDirect access so I can't check the research or methodology, but from reading the abstract & the tables I can see it appears the reporter's conclusion came directly from the experiment, so it's far less likely that this is a reporter mistaking correlation for causation.
- pekk 13y ago
  A good researcher would have the cash to hire hundreds of people and intentionally randomly assign them to different work environments, I guess. Then we would be picking on how they measured productivity and whether the results held up over long periods.
  - goggles99 13y ago
    >A good researcher would have the cash to hire hundreds of people and intentionally randomly assign them to different work environments, I guess. Wrong, you lack the same basic, problem solving logic that I am referring to. A good researcher would have asked additional questions such as "On a scale of 1-10" - "how enjoyable is the actual work that you do here?", "how satisfied are you with the amount of money that you are making?", "where do you see yourself in five years". These aren't the best quesions that I could come up with, I am just giving examples off the top of my head. It would be easy to see how unhappy these workers are with other things in their lives rather than if they were in a cubicle vs a private office.

owenmarshall 13y ago

While I share your (healthy) skepticism about scientific reporting, a good researcher would've attempted to structure their experiment to control for this very effect. I don't have ScienceDirect access so I can't check the research or methodology, but from reading the abstract & the tables I can see it appears the reporter's conclusion came directly from the experiment, so it's far less likely that this is a reporter mistaking correlation for causation.

pekk 13y ago
A good researcher would have the cash to hire hundreds of people and intentionally randomly assign them to different work environments, I guess. Then we would be picking on how they measured productivity and whether the results held up over long periods.
- goggles99 13y ago
  >A good researcher would have the cash to hire hundreds of people and intentionally randomly assign them to different work environments, I guess. Wrong, you lack the same basic, problem solving logic that I am referring to. A good researcher would have asked additional questions such as "On a scale of 1-10" - "how enjoyable is the actual work that you do here?", "how satisfied are you with the amount of money that you are making?", "where do you see yourself in five years". These aren't the best quesions that I could come up with, I am just giving examples off the top of my head. It would be easy to see how unhappy these workers are with other things in their lives rather than if they were in a cubicle vs a private office.