> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company
How do you quantify the loss in productivity and quality that could be associated with a noisy work environment?
How do you quantify the loss in productivity and quality that could be associated with a noisy work environment?
Individual offices are simply not worth it, financially, culturally and physically.
Don't fight the transition to closed-offices too hard, or you'll be remembered for advocating to make engineers' lives difficult.
Have you visited the offices at Google? Yahoo? Facebook? Tesla? Square? Twitter?
They are all bursting at the seams and are fighting on a daily basis with each other to find new space to expand, which is very hard to find here. Same for pretty much all the companies in the Bay Area, actually.
The mere idea of switching these companies from an open floor plan to individual offices will get you laughed at for proposing something completely nonsensical.
Open floor plans are here to stay.
The article links studies, you do not.
Probably you missed the "increasing body of research" mentioned in TFA then...
"According to a study on the cost of interrupted work, a typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes. Even worse, people often take up to 25 minutes to refocus on the original task."
"Researchers have found that the loss of productivity due to noise distraction doubles in open office layouts compared to private offices, and open office noise reduces the ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic."
"In a 2013 study about the privacy-communication trade-off in open offices, 60% of cubicle workers and half of all employees in partitionless offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem."
" A study on the association between sick days and open office plans found that people working in open offices took 62% more sick days than those in private offices. And remember all those interruptions that workers experience in open offices? In a survey in the International Journal of Stress Management, employees who were frequently interrupted reported 9% higher rates of exhaustion."
"Clearly, open office layouts aren’t the hotbeds of creativity designers originally hoped they would be. And with office space at a premium, private offices for everyone isn’t a realistic alternative, nor is it ideal. The ebb and flow of effective collaboration requires several types of spaces. As workplace experts outlined in the Harvard Business Review, employees tend to generate ideas and process information alone or in pairs, then come together in a larger group to build on those ideas, and then disperse again to take the next steps."
https://hbr.org/2013/11/research-cubicles-are-the-absolute-w...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21528171
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-office-interruption...
https://hbr.org/2014/10/balancing-we-and-me-the-best-collabo...
So they're interrupted more frequently that the time it takes to refocus and therefore never complete any task?
No, they just never complete any task while FOCUSED.
They still complete tasks, but distracted, and thus in a sub-par and slower way.
More seriously though, that "every 11 minutes" figure is most likely an average, so there will be intervals much longer than that.