Go away from open plan offices. I'm really baffled that that wasn't one of the solutions in the article. Red and Green coloured cubes? Lights? Ugly attempts to mask the symptoms, rather than fix the real problem: Open plan offices suck for productivity.
> With the vast majority of us now working in open concept offices — some studies have said that 70% of US workers work in this kind of environment — companies are being forced to come up with novel ways to ensure we stay productive and don’t find ourselves driven delirious from the noise and chaos.
They are being forced. Who chose the open office concept in the first place!?
About 10 years ago at a different employer, we planned a trip to a customer's office but I woke up late and missed the car by literally 5 minutes. We were in an open office plan where we faced each other...sales was also in the same room sitting right next to me. Since I missed the trip, I was the only person in the office for the rest of the week. Holy-cow did I get stuff done. My productivity shot through the roof and I swear in a few days I did probably 1 - 1.5 months of work. I told the owner about this and listed the things I did while they were away. He said something along these lines: "800 bucks per month to rent an office for you is nothing compared to your salary." A couple weeks later we all had our own offices. That should be an easy message for management. Don't nickle and dime the small stuff that greatly increases ROI.
I miss having competent management around.
I always figured zoning laws usually discourage heavy development, so companies are heavily incentivized to use open-plan offices to save on rent.
Here's a listing for 3 offices for 900 sq. feet for $63.33/year, or $55,197/year. Each office might be something like 10% of your fully loaded cost, so a company with at 10 employees is spending an entire employee on rent. https://42floors.com/us/ca/san-francisco/235-montgomery-st?l... .
You could cram them into a box and they would whine, but it might be worth it if you can get an entire extra employee out of it.
Though, there are 3 8-hour shifts in a single 24-hour day, so I'm surprised they don't stagger scheduled times for employees so they can share the same space. I myself usually like starting work at 4 or 5 AM, since there are fewer people around. There's probably way too much social inertia for that in general, compared to spending a few thousand $ on some cubicle walls.
If you can afford more than 10 employees, you're probably quite profitable and the margin on well-run software companies is pretty high, so maybe they don't care about rent at that point.
For startups — budgets. If closed offices were the same price I doubt we'd hear so much discussion about the benefits of open offices while turning one's head the other way when it comes to the downsides.
You're forgetting the mentality you're dealing with: as far as they're concerned, if you're not productive, regardless of the environment, the problem is you. Never them.
That's sounds kind of coo.