Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriving for an oversold airplane? Now you can have that at work every single day!
Truly modern offices have hot desks AND are wired for teleconferencing - right in the open areas! That's right, if "open" is good for communication then a 60" screen on the wall with video cameras pointing at you is even better! You can share in the dull roar of collaboration with people on other continents ALL DAY! In the average open space you can fit at least two, maybe three such screens. When you have them installed, get the tradesmen to come during office hours. It costs way more if they come after hours and your employees should get the chance to see drills, saws and nailguns operated by professionals, they may learn something.
We all know there's nothing that stimulates productivity like the sound of productivity, right? So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of hot food - all these things will make employees feel right at home. Using only the most modern materials in the office - lots of glass and steel - will ensure the entire workforce shares the joy. You don't want to be damping the precious sound waves with carpet or plasterboard.
I visited a place that was a giant room of ~100 people working. No one had their own computer, instead you just sat down and whatever computer was there and started working. The guy running this insanity said they re-image all the machines all time taking settings from one of the machines that has been in use. His theory was that over time everyones preferences would merge.
It was interesting to see and a little frightening. Right off the bat the noise level would have turned me off. I asked how hard it was to hire and he said interviews are held in the room with him or another senior person pair coding with the candidate.
At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform.
The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the machine acted funny, it would wipe the hard disk and reinstall both OS' from a network image. The whole process was completely automatic and was done in 20 minutes.
So it was real hot desking, and it worked great. You sat at any computer, it became your computer. Way before Google started to talk about stateless computers and their chromebook.
That works pretty well on Linux systems, where you can simply remote mount (usually NFS) your home directory.
For Windows, what's actually happening is that your user profile is getting copied to the system. Which is why logging off takes so long -- the profile is getting copied back to the server.
Do this on an underprovisioned and busy network, or worse, one on which work cycles are highly synchronized (e.g., students, in standard class blocks, over the course of a day), and where account profiles can grow without limit (at one point I had tools to ID and prune large profiles), and things go all to hell.
The Linux / Unix model actually can be quite useful, and it isn't too dissimilar from my own initial experience: console logins to the campus Unix network from dumb serial terminals (precisely zero local state).
Sun Microsystems did some work with this (in conjunction with their own hotdesking workplace experiments) as well.
The downside is when you're doing highly compute- or data-intensive work, in which case the amount of information transferred across even NFS links becomes problematic, and/or you need to provision some really beefy servers. At that point you likely want some sort of shared batch compute resource. Again, more easily accomplished under Linux/Unix than other platforms.
I've configured a number of student labs exactly as eloisant explained. In windows we've used folder redirection which has options to disable the "offline files" type features such that it doesn't do any copying of profile files to the local drive.
We had this for meeting rooms at a previous job. It worked quite poorly, since it took a long time to pull in your profile. Meeting runners learned to get to the thirty-minute meeting ten minutes early so that there was some hope of being able to use the computer for part of the meeting. Also, the Windows profiles we were using didn't include applications, so there was the fun of each person who needed, say, Skype, or Chrome, downloading it onto each computer that they hadn't previously used it on.
The university I went on used a similar setup, and pulling the profile took no time.
I don't know what's wrong with corporate enviroments, that Windows profiles take so long to roam. That seems to be true to all of them. Also, corporate IT has an extremely irrational aversion to simply installing the software on all the computers for once. Even when it's free software, or things that everybody uses. That also repeats everywhere.
I remember from the old days when I used to deal with this. It was most often a case of people putting a lot of big files on their Windows desktops.
Certain people refused to put their big files on the network share because they said it took to long to load and then complained that their roaming profiles took to long to load because they had those big files on their desktop.
The fact that MS platform management separates user capabilities (profiles) from platform capabilities (applications, installed and managed per-host) results in some particularly painful characteristics.
This is where the ability to have automatically configured (puppet / chef / ansible / cfengine) clusters of servers for 'Nix hosts, or NFS-mounted /usr, so much more powerful.
My university still does this, it works perfectly on the Linux computers. I'm not sure how well it works with Windows machines since I don't use them more than I have to, but you at least get access to your home directory.
UT Austin, nearly 20 years ago. NFS and NIS and a locally-written authentication system meant you had the same home directory on any Unix machine you sat down at. Since your configuration was all in your home directory, personal configuration was also instant. A skilled and somewhat crazy sysadmin team meant that (almost) all of the programs that were available on one system were supported on all of them, so you had the same environment on any of about six different OS/hardware setups.
My university did this as well. I also worked on the software that handled the configuration management for these machines too. Really awesome setup. http://www.labnet.ca/MainPage/index.html
Systems like this were very common in universities, especially in the late 80s/early 90s. Thin client computing (or simulated thin client) went out of fashion after mid-late 90s implementations of similar things on top of Windows were massively disastrous.
This is a great idea! You could apply genetic algorithms to the process. Pick the most popular and productive computers and re-image from these, eventually identifying the optimal configuration. Popularity of a shared resource could have nothing to do with location, hardware specs, or other external factors. Likewise, productivity is only going to have a miniscule correlation with the actual person behind the computer as opposed to the configuration of the operating system. Forget individualized tooling, single licensing, and security. We want to encourage cross-pollination of skills. If the accounting package is available to everyone, well, they might just learn some accounting. Win - Win for everyone.
Hell, you might as well leave some of the viruses on there. Haven't some viruses integrated with the human genome? We want the same concepts to apply to our IT and office layout. Perhaps one of those viruses is closing security vulnerabilities and keeping other viruses out.
Some years back I walked into a startup for an interview.
First impression: no lobby, no receptionist. I had to interrupt someone at a "desk" to announce myself.
Second impression: the "desks" were in fact folding Costco tables, arranged in ranks of around 10 and about 6-8 files through a cavernous space, edge-to-edge.
Third impression: site had some exceptionally poor security practices (and is among the more notable password disclosure case histories), which constituted a considerable part of my own interview content. The expressed interest in changing procedures was near nil.
I phoned the recruiter as I walked out (early) telling her that this was my new reference point for the worst interview experience ever.
That is inspired. I use VsVim and remap certain keyboard chords that I rely heavily on, whereas the rest of my office have very vanilla setups. Days where my settings are the baseline would be glorious.
> So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen
> open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the
> sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy
> PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of
> hot food - all these things will make employees feel
> right at home.
This is an accurate description of lunchtime at the digital shitshow where I work. An open plan kitchen really is the handiwork of the idiot. Sometimes I'm glad the toilets were prebuilt when we moved in, or else I fear we'd have open plan shitting as well.
I think my ideal office space would have both - little separate rooms for one person or, depending on preference and necessity, a small group. And then there'd be large and quirky open areas where people could go and sit down with their laptops randomly.
Because I have experienced both extremes (including my own startup) and they're not ideal. Having your own office is nice, but sometimes you want to ad-hoc with a small group of other people, or maybe you just want a quick change of scenery, maybe go to a place where there is some background activity. You shouldn't have to go find a Starbucks for that.
For me, these laptop-only environments don't work very well either, because at some point I want to have my desktop with a decent multi-screen setup.
Lastly, there should always be the option of working from home when appropriate.
So, if I ever start a company again, I'd try to just keep all these options available and let people find the right balance that works for them individually.
Our laboratory actually employed hot desking for a bit, albeit out of necessity. We had a limited amount of desks (in an open office configuration no less) available, and they were distributed by seniority. All the graduate students, undergrads, and some post-docs were forced to share a small, hot room with long benches for doing computational work. There was also inadequate space in this room, so people would have to go elsewhere to do work at times. The results were literally disastrous. Tension built up among the people sharing the room, and also between people with and without desks. People stopped coming into work or would leave early etc. It was bad enough to warrant our purchase of another room to solely devote to personal cubicle space for these hot desking individuals, which also isn't perfect but it's better.
This reminds me of the hip news organization on House of Cards where everyone is sitting around on stair steps and such. I wonder how productive such an environment is for anyone, and whether the decision to design an office in such a way is solely for the sake of image.
Considering it's not a real office, yes, it's purely for image. It's meant to communicate "Slugline is so creative and forward-thinking that they don't even need non-beanbag furnishings!", and contrast against the Post's button-down, cubicle hell style.
The sad part is that some people see things like that in TV shows and try to duplicate them in the real world, without realizing that devices that work to communicate something on television don't necessarily actually work for doing the thing that the TV people are supposedly doing.
Funny that – I often imagine that a nicely productive compromise would be a scheme like the SCDP office on “Mad Men“: mostly private offices, but with a pseudo-open “Creative Lounge“ that facilitates collaboration but retains basic human stuff like doors, for some sense of sonic isolation.
That particular plan is far from perfect – they have often used the lack of isolation (e.g. people peeping on neighbors through ceiling-level windows) as a plot device – but I still like the actual looks of it, based on actual experience with the open-plan-induced drudgery discussed in the article.
> like the SCDP office on “Mad Men“: mostly private offices, but with a pseudo-open “Creative Lounge“ that facilitates collaboration but retains basic human stuff like doors, for some sense of sonic isolation.
small (permanent) war rooms for workgroups and private offices for management/shared offices for drones (2-3/office) is a great setup, imho.
I worked at a place that did big war rooms per project and had tons of empty "home" cubes where you went for an hour or two per day to do non-primary work. I think a fixed-time system in the groups would be best.
I work in a news organization. Seating is scarce, the environment is loud and distracting, and going on vacation means you just might be moved to a new desk when you return. Fortunately as a developer my computer is off limits to most but the open office layout completely wrecks my anxiety and pushes my stress levels through the roof while my productivity plummets from distraction.
One job I had went to hot desking for a campus of over 1000 people. The oversubscription ratio was 1.25 people to 1 station, with the assumption that every 5th person would be not in a desk for some reason (travel, vacation, sick, in meetings -- they actually measured this by taking headcounts). The idea is that if you were going to leave your desk for more than some specified amount of time you'd pack everything up.
My friend hot-desks in an oversubscribed office which solves the oversubscription problem with a work-from-home-day rota. The punchline: he's a quant for one of the world's biggest banks.
We've just moved into our first place where everyone has a private office. It's absolutely amazing! I had been complaining for years about open-plan offices [1], but I was actually surprised at just how much more productive it is to have a door that closes!
My team recently moved to a quieter area within the same office. On the second day I powered through an annoying task I'd been putting off for a month. I realized after I finished that the main reason I'd been putting off the task was that I knew it would require the type of focus and uninterrupted time I wasn't going to be able to get. Since then I've been thinking a lot more about how the office space influences how, and when, and whether various types of work get done.
I've personally had the opposite experience. I'm far more productive in a team environment. In video games my most product times are when an artist and/or designer and I sit together and work together. Even when we are not directly interacting with each other seeing stuff on each other's screens lets us see what each other is working on and communicate early and often.
I understand that some people in certain roles would do much better with no interruptions in a private office but it's not a one size fits all solution. If your work consists of something you can mostly do on your own that's certainly one case where private offices might be a win. If your work consists of lots of collaboration it seems less clear. At least to me.
I'll also note that at least for me I'm much happier around other people than isolated in a private office. I'm not saying I want to be an a 1960 bullpen but a room/area with 2 or 3 other coworkers I'm working on stuff with is my personal ideal.
"I've personally had the opposite experience. I'm far more productive in a team environment. In video games my most product times are when an artist and/or designer and I sit together and work together."
A few people working together on a single task is not an open office. In a "real" open office you couldn't actually talk to the artist and designer beyond a few sentences because if you did you would disturb the other 10-20 people within earshot.
Working alongside 2 or 3 other coworkers isn't really the same thing as an open-office though. At the moment I'm sitting in an office of approximately 30+ people. Working on my own in this environment is annoying. Working with my team (2-3 other people) is also annoying, as we can't speak without being overheard. And I'm sure when we're working as a team, and conversing a lot, we'll be annoying others who require some quiet.
A private office doesn't mean you have to work on your own, it just means you have the option to.
I am in an office of 4. It used to be an office of two, which was great - most productive time of my working life.
Even with just 4 of us, it means there is a good chance someone will be asked something, and regularly the head comes down to discuss stuff with one of us (often me). I can deal with it for the standard bug fix type work, but trying to learn something new is really difficult with constant interruption.
As others have mentioned this is where the definition of open breaks down. Team environments are great. Many open office advocates are small companies who, because of their size, are really advocating team environments.
Now grow that same company to 100s of people and see if the open office still works. What I have seen is that even the biggest open office advocates start putting up walls (even if movable) and segmenting once again into a teams.
Those are shared/team offices, not open offices. And I agree: it has been the most effective configuration I've worked in. I used to work in an environment with 4-5 people per (large) office. It worked out really well, and we'd reconfigure the seating arrangement as needed. Where I'm at now the entire building only has three private offices, the rest are completely open. Those type of spontaneous, collaborative discussions are helpful, but tend to piss off the other ~10 people within earshot more often than not.
The once mandatory "visitors chair" in every workspace and most people had two or three.
Folks younger than a certain age miss out knowing the social etiquette relating to visitors chairs, such as stacking "stuff" or coats on your visitor chair is anti-social and very strongly frowned upon. Also it was socially acceptable, standard even, to simply walk into someone's cube and sit down in their (visitor) chair and wait till they could talk, especially if you were (currently) working together on something.
Also "back in the old days" we had intentionally unreservable conference rooms scattered about. So if you needed 6 people on the spur of the moment you simply walked in to the nearest empty room, confident no one reserved it because it was un reservable.
This is pretty much how things were in the early 90s or so. Honestly I don't think I could handle the constant interruption and infinite distraction of an open office, which makes me think about a startup or something; I just can't imagine working in a "modern" office environment. It just sounds horrifying to productivity, like a prison yard or a doctor waiting room or something. Creeeepy.
As a parent when I need to get stuff done at home, like if I'm working at home, I kick everyone out of the room and work in peace and quiet. I never, ever, invite seven neighbor kids over and hand out toy whistles as a gift and nerf toys and then sit in the center of the maelstrom and try to concentrate. Nobody who "works at home" sneaks into a day care center with their laptop to concentrate on their finest work. There's a time and place for that kind of stuff, and its not the workplace.
Precisely. And that's still the culture in some places (Microsoft being a good example). Generally many devs will establish a rapport with folks on their team and in other parts of the company to a degree where occasional visits won't translate into wondering what needs fixing ASAP. Also, if everyone has an office then you can schedule meetings with other folks in their office, or your office. As long as it's not more than like 3 or 4 people. Or, if you're working on something and need to ruminate you go wander into a friend's office and talk about it or whatever. Though if someone has their door closed they probably don't want to be disturbed.
People who don't have experience with offices have these bizarre notions about office etiquette and collaboration. They also easily fall into post hoc / confirmation bias fallacies, where they see some positive result of collaborating in an open plan office and imagine that they would be forced to live in a world without the benefit of that spontaneous collaboration in an environment with offices. But they ignore the fact that such things very much do occur with offices, and they also ignore the opportunity cost of open plan layouts. Of conversations which don't happen because the work space is deathly quiet due to everyone trying to work, and you can't just hop into a friend's office space and close the door so you don't bother other people, as just one of many examples.
WRT "Though if someone has their door closed they probably don't want to be disturbed." there was some cultural variation but every place I worked at, as opposed to heard about, it was a huge gossip worthy social faux pas to close an office door unless there was a private managerial activity going on in the office at that moment (yelled at, review, interview, etc). You closed the door at night or when unoccupied because you had $200K of hardware prototypes and protocol analyzers and laptops literally laying around unsecured. And it was a major social faux pas to open a closed door unless you were a resident of that room. Even if you were best friends you don't just walk in, any more than you'd dig thru their filing cabinet or wallet without them present.
90s office work reminded me a lot of dorm room life and culture. Dorm culture probably hasn't changed in the past couple decades, and having dorm rooms with doors hardly eliminates all social activity; if anything it encourages it and military basic training style barracks are not considered a requirement of socialization.
Why was it a faux pas? Did people assume closed doors meant slacking off? Or was it considered rude to call/knock on someones' door, therefore rendering them inaccessible?
I don't think its a generational thing so much as a self inflicted culture thing. I was in college in the mid/late 00s and being social/collaborating never suffered for us having offices (two grads to a lab/office usually). We used computer labs or the common areas instead of conference rooms but same same.
That said in addition to a mandatory visitors chair, white boards everywhere. Just fucking everywhere. Nothing seemed to help collaboration like being able to start water cooler level talk about a problem and with out even noticing transition to hashing it out on a whiteboard.
I think there is a generational gap in that some youth in general don't seem to realize most offices were not a broom closet with precisely one desk and one chair. Usually we had at least one spare table (maybe a cheap lunchroom class table, but still..) and piles of extra chairs and often a desk for the guy who quit last month and hasn't been replaced yet.
So the "old timers" get very strange questions like "what if you're in an office and need to talk to someone" where the younger people don't understand the architecture and the older people don't understand the younger people's lack of experience.
In 1995 the office I worked in had 4 desks (usually 3 empty because of flex time/remote work, meetings, collaboration, etc) and 4 chairs (again, usually 3 empty) and two big lunchroom sized folding tables and I believe six chairs crowded around the lunchroom tables. Admittedly mostly covered with these new fangled (at that time) "cisco multiprotocol router" things. So if someone walked into my office and wanted to talk, or even a moderately large team appeared at my door with pitchforks or whatever, I could and did occasionally host parties of ten plus people, like if there was an emergency and we had to config and ship out like an entire data center of routers at the same time. And yet most of the time my office was ALSO blissfully empty and silent so I could concentrate on studying release notes and design new configurations and test network designs using routers set up all over the conference tables. It was extremely flexible, and therefore extremely productive, unlike an open office.
"Back in the old days" we had huge cubes with plenty of desk space and cabinets. One time, way before all this "collab-friendly" stuff hit, some guys put masking tape on the floor of a fellow coworkers cube, with corners outlining a fairly small rectangle. When he came back and saw the tapes, he's like "What is this? Why is this tape on the floor?"
"Oh, some guys from floor support were doing that, something about the new cubicles."
"WHAT!! Where the hell am I going to put my books! This isn't enough space, blah blah blah". He was a hot head and immediately flew off the handle, much to our pleasure. Well, a year or two later, we did actually go to smaller cubes, and then a few more years later to the "open" floor plan (un-ergonomic tables with no kind of adjustments). People way to close to each other. While it does come in handy when we are discussing problems and bringing new people up to speed, I definitely think the negatives outweigh the positives.
Sometimes I just don't want to be around people!
That's how interaction works with my boss. He has a couple chairs and a small bench, and I'll often go in and sit quietly until he's ready to talk. It's a good system, and without it I don't think he would be able to get anything done.
There's one environment in which an open-plan office makes sense: a trading desk. (I was a trader for a year.) That's because 5 seconds means a lot on the markets. If millions of dollars can be lost per second, you can't afford the Bell Labs culture.
However, on-the-desk quants and IT are genuinely respected for their sacrifice. Sure, they have to be highly available from 9:20 to 4:10, but the rest of the time is completely their own (usually for research; they tend to work 11-hour days not because anyone is making them, but because they love the work). They're paid very well for that intense 7 hours, and no one would subject them to the humiliation of "Agile" micromanagement. Quants have traders come by to ask about trading strategies at high levels, but they don't deal with PMs and "story points" and arguments about whether what they worked on over the past week was "in the backlog" or not. Quants have something much closer to an open allocation environment than most software engineers, and if they can't hack the stress (and not everyone can, especially for years on end) of being on the desk, they're usually moved to off-the-desk roles and the change isn't stigmatized.
(Some will come in and say that quants are second-class citizens in hedge funds and, if one looks at 95th-percentile compensation, that appears to be true. Quants hit a ceiling around $500k-1.5M, which is 1% of what the best traders make, but they're respected. On the other hand, non-managing programmers are third-class citizens in most Valley startups, and they aren't making any money either.)
Open-plan offices make sense on trading desks, just as "Agile" makes sense for a small consulting firm on the make-or-break project that'll take it into the big leagues (under which it's reasonable to ask the tech staff to truly "sprint", because delivering the project will result in a quantum leap in client relations, quality of work, and compensation). The problem is that management tends to take these processes that conditionally result in high performance (for a short while) and attempt to implement the costly, negative and painful aspects (e.g. open-plan offices and Scrum) while failing to deliver the upside (e.g. quant-level bonuses, genuine equity rather than 0.05% bullshit) that makes talented people willing to tolerate the pain.
The office depicted in this article looks almost exactly like the office I used to work in before I moved to a smaller place a year ago. It was a nightmare for those who are sometimes loosely (and perhaps erroneously) categorized as type-A personalities:
I want to focus on one thing and do it as perfectly as possible before moving onto the next thing; I hate multitasking unless the situation calls for it; I have highly (and perhaps unnecessarily) attuned peripheral vision and hearing. The chatter was impossible to tune out -- especially design discussions taking place two workstations over. People who did 'soft' jobs kept suggesting that I listen to music to drown out the chatter without realizing that mine is not the sort of work that can be done while music is playing.
People walking about in the background behind my screen would distract me from the complicated problem displayed on it. It was difficult to have private chats with people -- the moment I asked to see someone in one of the glass cubicles, everyone (including the person called) would assume that person was in trouble.
My current office layout is very 'residential' -- smaller rooms, wooden furniture, doors and windows, no sterile white partitions and ceilings etc. Needless to say, I haven't had any problems concentrating.
What's funny is that I actually have no idea what a non-open office would look like. I've worked for 15 years and have never even walked in an office that wasn't open. How do you give each person an office without using like 5x the space as a cubicle farm? That's the real reason that companies like open offices - because they can jam a lot more people in the same space. Someone who is ok with a 6x6 cubicle would feel trapped in a 6x6 office.
I worked in office space in NYC a few years ago that was $80/sqft. 6x6 cube is $3k/year. Using your assumption that an office is 5x bigger (not sure if that's accurate or not), you're looking at around $15k/year for an office.
So the delta is $12k/year, equivalent to 160-240 hours/year or 8-16% of a salary. IMO, with many developers you'll regain productivity far in excess of that by shelling out for an office.
The reasons companies eschew offices has more to do with taxes and lack of giving a hoot than cost.
Four employees in one 10x10 office works pretty well if you flex time and remote work so heavily that for all intents and purposes its a private office most of the time. In theory all four people might be sitting in there around lunchtime or adjacent to staff meeting time, but not most of the time.
That is 100 sq ft per 4 employees whereas giving each employee a tiny 6x6 cube (although I live in a 8x8) would be 144 sq ft per 4 employees, so if you go with offices you actually use less space than cubicles and if you are flex timing it the employees feel it is much more spacious.
I currently work in a team of 4 flex timers each with 8x8 cubes, in a sea of cubes, and I'd much rather have a nice 10x10 with a door for the 4 of us. We'd save a huge amount of real estate this way and get more work done.
You can of course fit far more than 4 employees in a 10x10 office if you ultra-flex time it. More than two decades ago I was baby sitting a large IBM financial mainframe network (SDLC, source route bridging, that kind of thing) and we had like ten people assigned to a 10x10 but due to 24x5 coverage, not to mention remote work, we never had more than two people in the office at a time.
I've never in my life so far, worked a job where everyone works precisely 9-5 M-F so I can see where non-flex time lifestyles might be more difficult. I would have a serious problem tolerating rush hour driving twice a day, five times a week, but thats another matter.
The place I work at had just recently (a couple years ago) moved from an older office with 6 ft cubical walls, to an open office with the short cubical walls. You can see over the top of them when sitting down, but they also have a frosted glass piece (1 ft high) stuck on top to maintain privacy (but still let light through).
Big thing I notice -- in the old office, it was pretty noisy, as it was all too easy for people to think they had privacy when they were in a high-walled cubical. The new office is a bit quieter, as people tend to talk in hushed voices more, since they can see everyone around them that would otherwise hear them.
Interesting article. My favorite sentence is this though, "Open offices may seem better suited to younger workers, many of whom have been multitasking for the majority of their short careers."
Despite what I want to believe and what I have been told (all companies only want to hire multitaskers!), multitasking is neither productive nor really possible. You can really only do one project at a time.
What they call "multi-tasking" is actually an inability to stay focused on one task due to a combination of procrastination and sheer boredom. So if you keep switching between writing a sales report, reading incoming email and conversing with your neighbor, congratulations, you may not be getting anything done, but you are multi-tasking!
Open-offices are downright dangerous. We had an Indian colleague who had tuberculoses. After it was diagnosed, every employee had to get an examination. One colleague got infected. Worst of all, the management handled the matter rather unserious and kept jamming everyone in the same office (including the infected colleague!) Gladly, I worked remotely for that company.
You're right, it's not relevant at all, it may only evoke bad sentiments. I'll edit it.
Edit: forgot I can't edit it -.-
Remembered why it was relevant: Since tuberculoses is still a problem in India, they already assumed that he may have tuberculoses before the diagnosis (he was coughing heavily and had signs of an ulcer). But not only did they keep him working, he was still in a tightly packed office with all the others.
That was the worst part for my: Nothing happened afterwards! The infected colleague even worked remotely when she (it was a female colleague) was sick. Probably in fear for her position.
The whole story was very WTF-worthy and obviously, I don't work with them any longer.
I am thoroughly disillusioned with open offices. Headphones are a paper-thin barrier against being interrupted while in the midst of thinking; a good, solid, closed door might do the job better.
there is also this small minority that can't stand headphones, especially if there's any sound coming out of them. being part of such a minority in an open space environment in one of my previous jobs wasn't fun. at all. what did i do when i needed to concentrate? just schedule a meeting with myself and use the meeting room for work when i need concentration. or just do the easy things and avoid complicated stuff. it's the bug count they cared about, not the essence. then only good thing about that is that I would return home mentally fresh, and could concentrated very well on my personal projects.
Sounds like you just need some better noise-isolating headphones. If you're like me and basically listen to music for 8+ hours/day, spending $200 or more on good headphones is more of a necessity than an indulgence.
And you need not listen to distracting music; prerecorded white noise works well for a lot of people.
Open-plan offices are a cost-effective panopticon: cheap, effective way to ensure that not only the boss, but other co-workers are aware of where you are and -- more or less -- what you're doing. The "other co-workers" bit is crucial because even if the boss can't find Dave himself he can ask anyone in the space "hey, have you seen Dave" and be led to a meaningful answer.
Companies will get rid of open-plan offices when they stop being such gift-wrapped boons to middle management, and not a second before. If you don't like it, adjust or exercise your right to be fired. This is America.
First, the answer to "Hey, Have you seen Dave?" should be "In his cubicle/office". If a coworker (or worse yet, the boss) does not know this, then there is a different problem. But yes, it does work well for management-by-surveillance. Whether that's a good thing is yet another different problem.
Second, not all readers of HN are American. Nor do they subscribe to the same political/ethical/social beliefs. The article was about whether open offices are productive or not, not whether we should or should not have them.
There is tangentially a correct aspect to it, in that playing geolocation and SPOF games are non-productive so they fit well with an open office.
If you need to talk to Dave, first of all Dave being a SPOF is a bug or management failure to be worked around. Secondly geolocating Dave is almost certainly non-productive. If you need to converse with Dave you call/text his phone to maximize productivity.
This is an insightful observation about the core values of open office vs alternatives... an open office simply isn't interested in productive activity. Its interested in non-productive activity, which has been proven over and over in scientific studies.
Its unpleasant, perhaps even inhumane for a large segment of the population, and unproductive for everyone but in a cause and effect relationship the bug is in the core values of the organization, that productivity doesn't matter. Its not that they don't know its non-productive, its that they don't care that its non-productive.
Also note you can't fix that core value epic fail by merely generating a new, technically superior architectural fad. You merely end up with an organization that's non-productive that has really nice private offices.
In that way its kind of like a HOA... I don't want the weirdos and dirtbags to be hidden, I want to be able to glance at a companies office and tell instantly if they have screwed up values, so in a weird way I want failing companies to implement open offices, so I can identify them and avoid them.
> Its unpleasant, perhaps even inhumane for a large segment of the population, and unproductive for everyone but in a cause and effect relationship the bug is in the core values of the organization, that productivity doesn't matter. Its not that they don't know its non-productive, its that they don't care that its non-productive.
No the problem is that most management activity, including program management, project management and the like is fundamentally unproductive. People who don't know what they're doing (ie. middle managers, project managers and program managers) can't productively contribute to real efforts.
The problem is the people judging whether this is true or not are exactly those middle managers/project managers and program managers.
Once management infects a company, it always just keeps increasing in my experience. A European bank I worked at had 3 project/program managers or architects per developer. You were lucky to get 2 hours of actual work in on a day. They were actually working to expand, not the developer team, but the management team.
Can we stop pretending open offices are about anything more than spending a minimum on an office construction? Let's face it: it's much cheaper to convert an empty warehouse space into a office space than to buy or build a traditional one.
They're also for management or sales to walk potential clients through while waving a hand through the air like a magician opening a curtain, before they take the client back to their nice, quiet corner offices. Also interior design showcases for hipster cred.
I can't believe we're still having this debate, how many years has it been?
You can't simply take a closed-office environment and just knock the walls down, pass out headphones and cram everyone in one room.
You need to change the work culture so that open offices work. You have to adapt things like pair programming and remove things like phones and email. Put everyone on a certain project at the same table. Switch partners out.
You can't have people who sit by themselves, don't communicate and don't work together in an open office environment. You're nuts if you think that's going to work.
It's clear that both open and closed office plans have their advantages and disadvantages. Ditto hot desking.
I'm surprised that no hybrid solution to this problem exists, or at least one that's taken hold. The best solution we currently have seems to be giving everyone a private office and augmenting it with really good team collaboration software. In most cases however, this does not eliminate the need for direct human collaboration, which is partly why open office plans exist in the first place.
It seems you could accomplish a hybrid approach by somehow giving each employee the ability to toggle the privacy of their workspace on or off. How you would accomplish that remains an interesting question. Some ideas that come to mind:
a) Have two physical workspaces for the employee: one private, one open.
b) Some sort of The Jetsons-esque enclosure around the workspace that can be toggled. Might use technologies such as electronic smart glass (for privacy) and/or active noise cancellation.
c) Have two floors and lifts under each desk. Want privacy? Just ascend or descend into it. It could even support hot desking on both floors, provided the proper visual cues and safety features existed. The cool part about this approach is it could in theory make moving your desk much easier.
d) In the future it could just be a matter of telling your standard ocular and cochlear implants to filter your peripheral vision and hearing accordingly.
Anyone here not ever work in an open-office since professional employment? I was going to say that I had never had an office, including my stints in food service and construction...and I had never even had a real cubicle, i.e. partitions where I couldn't see the person across from me.
But that's not true...I had about a year in the "dungeon" when I was moved to my newspaper's online multimedia team, in a windowless basement...by then I already had the habit of surfing the Internet, but I did manage to learn enough PHP and MySQL to build a crime-mapping site and do other data projects, and even do things like get Drupal working (which ended up not being very useful, but still, my first web framework).
The company I work for occupies a chunk of spare rooms in a law office. I have my own 100 sqft. office, natural light, decent view. It is really convenient. I can have remote people come in and work with me for the day when necessary, there is plenty of room. Never having to listen to other people talk on the phone is beautiful. I can stretch my legs without it turning into a parade. Impossible for someone to surprise me or loom over me. I think my ideal office is Don Draper's in Mad Men Season 1, this is the closest I've come. Not looking forward to leaving this arrangement, especially since my earning power is effectively proportional to my ability to concentrate.
It is amazing, how a so old wisdom (I read it many years from now in a book called "Peopleware" from 1987! could be ignored so many decades (by people, who claim to be reasonable).
But it just seems that some ideas, because they are economical interesting, stick so much, that management people come up every 6 month with an other idea or excuse, why the dead horse must be ridden again (and not buried).
It makes management feel better if they can constantly spy on the people they employ because they have zero trust in them.
And of course this immediately leads to the situation that the workers are out to exploit the company merely to rebel against this situation. Or at least, that's the attitude it brings out in me.
I have worked in cubes, private offices, shared offices, and open offices. For productivity and thinking, I found the physical barriers were proportional to the thinking. For communication, in any of these, company IM worked quite well most of the time, and when it failed, face to face worked out.
I strongly advocate for private or team-member-shared offices at any chance I get. It's just that much better.
I work in such open office arrangement. The worse is when the two guys across your desk have their phones on a conference call on speaker phone and the echo of both come through as they speak, utterly distracting, I might as well just pack and go home.
Couldn't agree more. Open offices, while fancy looking, sport apalling usability. After moving into ours we had super issues with the team adapting to the noises and layout. Things got better only after most of the people started using headphones.
Separate office with a closed door = productivity boon.
Would love it if my company would get us each an office. We have the money for it. I feel like since we've expanded and I moved out of the 2 person office I shared with one of the front end devs (I'm back end) and into the 5 person back end space, my productivity has plummeted.
[There's] a very long and well-established literature in psychology that getting groups of people together is no way to come up with ideas. Creativity is not a team sport. What you're looking for is somebody's individual, intellectual trunk to make new connections and come up with something new.
Let's imagine billions of neurons in my head communicating with stuff they've been talking about all their lives together: there's a high probability that occasionally they'll come up with something new. Let's now think of the line of communication that you and I have got between each other, which is impoverished, because we have to try and translate complex ideas into language, and how many times do you find you've got a good idea, it's almost in symbolic thought inside your head, and you really can't articulate it to someone. And when you do, they get the wrong idea, because really, language can't encapsulate it until it's fully formed. There's no good evidence that I know of that these brainstorming sessions will come up with a solution or a new idea.
What they might do is improve a little bit of team spirit, or show some of the people in the group, "well, if that's the best they can come up with then I'm doing OK". The idea that you can marshal creativity is an error. I'd go a little bit further than this: if there is somebody who's spending 80 hours a week running a creative team, I'd stop them right there and tell them "you don't run a creative team, you allow a creative team to run". That would be the first thing I would jump on. People ask themselves "how do I make a team be creative?" You don't. You allow a team to be creative.
I am ok with open-office if company provides paid sick leave. In Ireland there is at least one week every year, when 70% of company is at home with flu.
Would you really trade your health, physical and mentally for paid sick leave?
I rarely get sick, but then again we're seven people in one office and only one have kids ( kids makes a difference ). Mentally it's different story. I can't begin to count the number of days where I get home stressed out due to the noise of my co-workers and people going in an out of the room to talk to one of my colleagues.
Maybe I'm just special, but for me to completely focus and do my best work, I need an almost eerie silence. That's doesn't mix well with co-workers talking on the phone or a radio playing.
Open offices have been known to be a bad idea since Peopleware, but they are just so cheap to build.
People in open-space are more sick, paid sick leave ensures that employer is not passing his cost savings on me. Non-paid sick leave indicates dysfunctional company and lack of trust (at least in Europe). It is a principle.
Open-space was major reason (together with new born children) why I quit corporate world and started my own business two years ago.
This is another interesting and good article, and I'm glad to see it getting (yet more) mainstream attention. But eventually, I think we should probably look at this as a solved problem and try to figure out what's going on upstream.
In other words, I'm completely convinced that open offices (and cubicle farms, where I work) are harmful. To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?
> To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?
To quote a very cynical and jaded friend of mine, "It increases shareholder value".
Yes, studies show that open plan offices, especially badly-designed open plan offices, hurt knowledge worker productivity. The problem is, knowledge worker productivity is not expressed as a nice, neat number on a balance sheet. Facilities cost is. Thus, when a business gets into the mode of increasing profits by decreasing costs, all they see with respect to this topic is that office space expense. Cue the management bullshit stream about "collaboration", switch to open plans, and watch that number drop. The productivity drop tends to lag, however. Since many executive suites can't see forward past the next earnings report, or backwards past the previous, they see a nice increase in margins for a quarter or two, followed by a drop in revenue, schedule slips, or increasing costs in other areas caused by the open plan switch. They then move on to fixing this "new" problem, not realizing they caused it with their previous "fix".
Do we have to have one or the other? Can an office have private/personal work spaces, and communal open social places that can sometimes host real work? I feel often that managers/owners feel they have to force one or the other on their staff, not considering that their people are probably very diverse, and seek differing models from individual to individual.
Inevitably there's a limited amount of floor space; somebody ends up on the wrong side. I'd say, why not have closed offices space entirely, and let the socializers wander from room to room?
At my last job I had a private office, my first. Now I work in the most open office I've had since leaving the Army - my office there was called "The Motor Pool"
I didn't find it as distracting as I thought - but I am someone who can tune out everything when watching TV.
I miss being able to break wind somewhat discreetly though.
>I miss being able to break wind somewhat discreetly though.
"What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain."
Open offices are awesome during a crisis. On the other hand, they really suck when you need to focus on a problem. They work well for young start-ups, as crises tend to be quite frequent, but as a company matures, I think they become more of a liability than an asset.
I find them awful in a crisis; generally there are a few people that can actually fix and work on the crisis and people start hovering behind them trying to drive from the back.
I wonder how dependent all this is on culture and expectations.
I've spent my entire career in Japan, and have never not worked in an open office. To my knowledge, non-open offices basically don't exist in Japan.
So is every Japanese company just leaving productivity lying on the floor by insisting on open offices? I wonder if there have been studies on switching to closed floor plans in Japan.
(Of course traditionally the cultural emphasis has been on consensus, not productivity, so there hasn't been a lot of impetus to experiment. Things are changing, however.)
It is simply a myth, that the Japanese make everything right. This myth arose, because of the success of their industries and the quality engineering movement they coined. But they just don't do everything right. They do of course some things right. How is, that they have stagnating industry for decades now. How is, that they produced Fukushima and showed, how a country can fail in letting one totally incompetent corporation mess everything up. (Fukushima was not the first problem, this corporation produced -- but the bureaucrats did let them continue and problems where pushed under the carpet).
Not sure what the definition of open-office is. In our office, we have gazillion cubicles (the classic valley office). No sound proofing. And people of a team don't sit near each other. This means that you can end up with sales guys around who are constantly on the call and meetings. What's worse is that they keep pitching the same lines over and over again and you have to listen to it. It makes you empathize about a sales person's job but you end up hating your job and never want to step into office.
There is definitely a need for better working environments.
This small table with a wool shell looks nice, and the idea could (with heavy modification) be used to create long benches of private working space where noise and visual distraction is reduced and people are not boxed into cubicles.
Like anything taken to the extreme open offices are bad for you. I personally have worked in an open office and a semi-open office (where your team is in a part enclosure/room with a door). And I much prefer to have a semi-open office rather than a private office.
A private office for me would totally kill any social interaction I have with anyone. A semi-open office keeps it private on the team level.
> A private office for me would totally kill any social interaction I have with anyone.
Perhaps a better working environment would allow your day to be spent more efficiently and leave you with spare time and energy to get an actual social life, instead of requiring your job to double as your social life and end up performing both functions badly?
You are likely to spend more than half of your time awake in your workplace. You might as well try to make it a pleasant place to be. And being sociable at work is hardly likely to exhaust you to the point of preventing an social life outside work.
Do workers prefer spending more than half of their awake time in their workplace in order to make more money, or do they simply not have enough bargaining power to negotiate for a shorter work day?
What's your job? Do you have a greater need to concentrate or to socialize? Not criticising, just asking. I need to be able to go talk to people only sometimes but I need to go to a quiet place and think without interruption more often.
The best office I ever worked in was a series of long corridors with many closed offices and two developers to each. It had large meeting rooms at regular intervals, a lunchroom with table football and that was about it.
I've already bought in to the notion that open arrangements may have short-comings.
But in the Bay Area circa 2014 what arrangements are being tried out and seeing advantages? Low cubes, high cubes, fully enclosed offices, bull pens, mini bull pens, periodic re-arrangement, unassigned?
The problem with the open-office / everybody in their own room / some mixture articles and proponents of various solutions is that they all seem to ignore the effect of calcification.
I always wonder when i see reports like this at the amount of cherry picked data in the studies - and also the ability for the journalist to properly interpret it. The problem i have with this piece and so many others is that its just calls out a number of sometimes unrelated "problems", cites some studies with open offices and calls it a day. They fail to really come up with a strong conclusion or offer viable solutions.
As a designer working under an architect and having just completed an open office building for a 150+ employee financial firm[1] - i feel i have a pretty good handle on this subject. There a a couple key anecdotal design criteria that i'd like to address in relation to open offices that the report does not address.
Natural Light - Access to natural light
Artificial light - using the correct lighting for the task with the right output measured in lumens for the particular task.
Ventilation - Natural and sufficient HVAC
Acoustics - Are proper acoustic absorbent materials being used.
Planning - has the space been thought out in a thorough way - is there a meaningful program to which the open office functions in both arrangement, flow and activities.
Psychology - Has there been effort to educate the staff about the new space and general systems in place to govern how it functions.
All of these points above can be easily planned for by hiring and adhering to the advice of design professionals like architects, electrical engineers, hydraulic engineers, acoustic consultants etc. Does this happen? In my experience - the answer is generally - no. Building offices and fitting thee out is an expensive exercise and time and time again i see clients willing to cut corners and forgo professional advice at the sake of saving a few thousand dollars. It may be that the ROI in terms of employee productivity could be significantly diminished due to a insignificant saving during the build phase.
I would agree in some respects that there are limitation to open office layouts - but that its due more to the ill-conceived notion that achieving an open office work environment is as easy throwing some workstation and humans into a cavernous space and expecting it to just work.
Moreover that is why indeed planners are moving away from open office and employing the newer philosophy of ABW (activity based working)[2].
At some point, when an organization loses the purpose for its existence and selecting leadership comes down to office politics alone, the selection process becomes attrition. Since excellence no longer matters (there isn't real work for a person to excel at) the leaders are selected by subjecting people to artificial stresses and seeing who cracks (either a full-scale nervous breakdown, or just a passive loss of interest) first. Those were the weak, the less dedicated, etc.
Open-plan offices make that attrition faster, and provide more insight into who is next to crack up and entertain the crowd with an open-plan-induced panic attack.
That's also why this toxic micromanagement, in the name of "Agile" or "Scrum", that programmers are subjected to will probably never go away. When there's no good way to pick leaders (because the work isn't challenging or interesting) the stress of being watched, hour by hour, is a powerful attritive tool.
When I was younger I could probably handle a weirdo office like this for a year or two. Now? No way. I need some level of quiet, non-social time, etc to be focused and get things done. I imagine environments like this are the equivalent of saying, "We don't hire anyone over 30."
Moreover, "We don't hire anyone over 30" means "We don't hire anyone good".
That's not to say there aren't good people in their 20s. There are quite a few of them. But they want to learn from people who are better than they are. That's the trait of A players: they want to learn from the A+ players. If you don't have anyone over 30, then the good under-30 people you get will quickly leave.
Truly modern offices have hot desks AND are wired for teleconferencing - right in the open areas! That's right, if "open" is good for communication then a 60" screen on the wall with video cameras pointing at you is even better! You can share in the dull roar of collaboration with people on other continents ALL DAY! In the average open space you can fit at least two, maybe three such screens. When you have them installed, get the tradesmen to come during office hours. It costs way more if they come after hours and your employees should get the chance to see drills, saws and nailguns operated by professionals, they may learn something.
We all know there's nothing that stimulates productivity like the sound of productivity, right? So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of hot food - all these things will make employees feel right at home. Using only the most modern materials in the office - lots of glass and steel - will ensure the entire workforce shares the joy. You don't want to be damping the precious sound waves with carpet or plasterboard.
I wish I was joking.