Open plan offices don’t live up to the hype, finds Harvard Business School study
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-should-be-the-final-...
> Open plan offices have taken off because of a desire to increase interaction and collaboration among workers.
This is the reason invoked after the fact. The real motivation is a financial one. You have X sqft of office space, Y people you'd like to fit in. Open plan offices are seen as the most efficicent way to cram a lot of people into a smaller space. Then more loftly reasons are invoked so that the company doesn't look cheap.
But I was on a team where the devs all wanted an open plan, so they weren't motivated by square footage. They specifically requested that all the dividers be taken out, and the Powers That Be didn't really want to because that wound up costing more as they were getting shafted by their contractors for absurdly simple jobs.
And the absolute hatred people on HN have for it is most likely due to the downgrade from personal office to shared space.
In Europe, where personal offices never really happened outside management, Open Office are not working better, but they are the norm that people accept, not a anger inducing topic.
In terms of space, cubicles aren't much different than open-office but there is a cost reduction (cheap Ikea desks vs. desk and walls). I wonder how much is cost, how much is space, and how much is being able to directly see all your peons when managers make these decisions.
Personally, If I weren't about to go remote I'd probably come in one weekend and setup a semi-permanent deer stand as my desk...
Besides, the amount saved per head in real estate terms is tiny compared to other budget concerns in a lot of companies, or even opulent indulgences (I once worked for a company that took all ~300 employees plus up to 5 additional friends or family per person on a 4-day ski trip, with all transportation, lift tickets, rentals, food, hotel and child care paid for by the company). Even for huge headcount firms, the savings is not that significant. And obvious counter-examples like Stack Overflow just immediately refute this line of excuses.
I am so saddened that as a community, engineers and developers have bought these paper thin excuses for abjectly terrible physical work conditions and don’t negotiate harder to prevent it. It’s very clearly not chosen for cost savings. That’s just the excuse because plainly admitting that it’s for status signalling and indulging fashion is not a defensible reason for damaging morale and productivity.
The layout is simple, the back of the shop handles repairs, maintenance, customer orders and such for things like oil changes, and the 'front office' handles your paperwork and such. our owner decided (after a TED talk and one too many martinis at the motel wet bar) we needed to be more open. We tore down dividers and pushed all the desks together and after six months, we'd made nearly everyone insane. invoice printers (impact style) drowned out most of our sales calls. accounts and finance often took their laptops into the garage bays for peace and quiet, which meant laptops littered all over our workbenches during their lunch break. Insurance cited us for having them in the work shop. Some customers...well most...mistook us frequently for a bank, or an adjacent business. our dock/shipping delivery clerk was now hammer-stamping bills of lading right next to one of our senior managers and had to hike back to the docks every 20 minutes (his fitbit tracked 10k steps in 4 hours one day.) The whole thing fell apart when a parts manager accidentally kicked over a waste urea tank fluid container and sent two gallons of rancid liquid into the waiting room carpet.
the spilled urea tank is a particularly interesting element. it seriously seems like this kind of disaster could be used to get other offices to move away from the open plan.
hmmm. what might be the "spilled urea tank" moment in a software startup's office? maybe something related to the CEO's personal information being leaked.
Yeah probably this. The number of people who I observe walking away from their machines without locking the desktop on a daily basis is terrifying from a security standpoint.
However, I think there are two other factors that come into play that are very tough for people to vocalize when they are defending an open office.
1. Open offices are more appealing visually to a wider swath of people. Of course you can make either kind of office pretty, but there's something about humans that just really loves the wide open spaces.
2. Humans are social, we like to interact, even at the expense of productivity.
Personally, I prefer an office-per-team approach, so sort of a middle ground that allows for fast collaboration but doesn't require negotiating with 100 other people on the same floor about noise level, etc.
Wrong. Extroverts like to interact. Not introverts. And the extroverts are usually who are put into positions of power, and think that everyone is like them.
It is sheer hell to work in IT and yet another cattle-class open office.
The one result I've found most surprising from these studies is that open-plan offices tend to reduce face-to-face interactions. Trading short-term productivity against satisfaction is perfectly reasonable, but I worry that in practice the lack of privacy and fear of distracting others mean that open offices aren't even good for socializing.
What I've found very valuable for all the things open offices claim to do is having some shared open area that isn't a workspace. A centralized kitchen area or anything else that recreates the traditional 'watercooler' works for facilitating chance interactions and allowing easy socialization without all the hassle of talking behind coworkers' desks.
Cynically, it looks a bit like the 90s-downsizing-era push for productive spaces killed off watercooler discussion, and open offices are a kludge to bring it back a the pretense of productivity because people are at their desks. In reality, I don't think the connection is so direct, but I'd still prefer we admit that chatting and working are both valuable neither is well-served by putting them in one space.
Open offices will continue to be used as (bad, short-sighted) cost-saving measures while decision-makers continue to pretend they're fun and/or foster collaboration.
That's because 99 times out 100, those decision makers don't subject themselves to the open office. They always get their own quiet nook of the workspace with a door while the workforce gets the joy of learning how noise-cancelling headphones work (or, on the flip side: learn that their favorite brand of headphones aren't doing the job).
It should be required that whoever makes these decisions should have to dogfood them.
By what mechanism would this occur? I've spent enough time in the military to know human ego will never allow this to happen, it's like asking the fox to put a lock on the hen house, and turn the keys over to the farmer. Outside of exceptional leaders like the ones where lykr0n works-that actually want to be and behave like leaders-very rarely will you see command subjecting themselves to the shit endured by the commanded.
Let's start with CEOs and VPs work elbow by elbow in an open layout and have to buy headphones.
This isn't asking antagonistically, it's a legitimate ask, so I hope you'll understand my tone isn't one of aggression:
How am I over thinking it? The proposed idea is to require leaders sit with their constituents. Leaders are the ones choosing these horrible open office layouts. How do you make them do something that in many cases, as many folks are replying in this thread to the effect of-they do not want to do?
Do you appeal to the board of directors? What does that look like? When one says "this should be required", my immediate thought is, okay how do you implement it, and how do you actually enforce it?
And that's what I'm asking here. I don't think I'm overthinking it, but thinking exactly the question that will need to be answered if that suggestion is to take root anywhere. How do you require the leaders of your company to do something they might not want to do?
But to generalize at a higher level -- "by what mechanism do we force management to be decent?" -- the only one I've discovered is to be willing to leave jobs that have management practices that one doesn't agree with.
Unfortunately that advice doesn't work in the general case -- mobility is relatively easy for developers but we don't make up a large part of the population. I feel like the right answer is some changes in our social structure or economy that makes job mobility much (much) easier. Like a BI/Negative Income Tax, or free education, etc.
So why do they still have huge window offices? They could lead by example and give up those.
My experience was that everyone, including the CEO, was in an open office (40+ person startup, 800+ person growth company). But that it didn't really matter all that much because leadership (senior or not) was barely at their desk anyway.
I do agree that if senior leadership wants an open office plan, they should commit to working in such an environment with their teams.
VPs and line managers are open like the rest of the employees. And they spend a lot of their time in other meeting spaces.
It's all open, including the executive area. The only nod to privacy for the CEO is a corner desk flanked by board rooms on both sides and her admin towards the interior - it's open, albeit semi-protected. Same for the other C-levels.
VP and other non-executive management have the same desks as everybody else, intermixed with their teams.
We do have ample meeting spaces, from drop-in huddle rooms for 2-4 people to normal bookable conference rooms. And we spend a lot of time in them, especially management.
Would private offices work better for the company? I have no idea. But, the current environment doesn't strike me as any worse than the previous HQ, which had high-walled cubes but lacked ample meeting spaces.
Edit - and by "any worse", I mean there are flaws for sure. I'm not arguing open is great. Just no worse than the previous generation of cubes.
It's not human ego: people can be egotistical in any class. It's power.
There would be a lot of resentment if they closed themselves off into their own area like more of the old gaurd typically does.
Or like me learn those chronic ear infections you suffered as a kid can be triggered as an adult by wearing in-ear headphones for a few hours. Open-back headphones like the AKG K7XX don't cause the issue for me, but then again if I crank them enough to drown out that one annoying coworker then everyone around me hears what I'm listening to and it can trigger my tinnitus. Damn. Maybe I need to apply for an office because I have a hearing-related disability. :-)
The reason I mention this anecdote is not to dispute any of the studies... I understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and quantitative evidence. Just a counter-point to the inevitable echo chamber of complaints about open floor plans being inhumane, a money-grab, etc etc.
Having to wait for 5-10 minutes for an answer in Slack breaks the concentration of the person asking the question, _and_ your concentration because you still need to get distracted and answer the question.
Async communication is great in many cases, likely most cases. Sync communication does have important uses, though.
I'm going to argue that their concentration is already broken because there's a problem, needing remediation and help from a colleague on to the point of bothering to ask in the first place. And if you're sitting three feet away from me, I'm sorry but I'd much rather just flip around, ask if you have a minute, answer the question, and drive closer to the desired team outcome.
Change my mind.
The only reason would be actual urgency (not the pretend emergencies that businesses claim, either).
Merely curious.
Saying “I’ll help you later” usually comes with 5-15 minutes of lost productivity while you try to get your concentration back for what you were just doing.
Also, it’s often better to bundle questions together, usually at the end of the day, and document them like with an internal Q&A board, to reduce future needs to interrupt over that same question.
But, to put some number on this, I’d say later in the afternoon, if I’m not busy for a deadline, I’ll jump up and help on all questions.
Between 7 am and lunch, I will not help you unless it’s an absolute emergency. I simply can’t afford to if I am going to do my job. Between lunch and 4pm, say, it’s a crapshoot based on what I’m doing, but generally I would say I respond with “I’ll help you later” to 90% of interrupting questions.
Interestingly, on my year end reviews one of the most consistent pieces of positive feedback I’ve gotten across several different employers, is that I am extremely helpful and generous with explaining things, and that my explanations are usually exceptionally clear and offer insight that quickly clears up confusion and leaves impressive documentation behind for people to reference later.
It’s about communicating smart, not communicating constantly. I defer about 90% of the questions I’m asked, yet people look to me as “the guy who always answers everybody’s questions.”
I'm a bit confused by this. It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away?
Be it via Slack or shoulder tap, you're breaking their concentration regardless. Whatever task they were doing, is now being stopped because of the ask for help.
Maybe I'm looking at this from too high of a vantage point. Help me out here.
>It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away-Slack or shoulder tap, you're breaking their concentration regardless
Not really, because you can disable notifications and check when you have free time. A physical interruption is abrupt and for sure will distract.
If this is how you're about to start discussing this, then I'll just bow out right now.
>It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away?
Because I haven’t said that, at all. I’ll bow out myself.
dvtrn have I misunderstood your posts? Sorry to put words in your mouth if I have.
There's a very simple way to not interrupt someone working: try to catch their eye. If you can't, they're probably busy. Write down your question and move onto another aspect of what you're working on. You might even realize the answer to your own question while working. Maybe you will collect multiple questions, and you can ask them all at once rather than interrupting someone multiple times.
I've certainly had days where I got nothing done because people asked me a question every 10-20 minutes.
S/he is not the one asking for help. He is the one being asked for help. Their attention and focus is the one being interrupted (or at least that's what their first comment said, that they receive numerous requests from help from someone who sits directly behind them via chat). And on that note, I actually find myself taking his or her side on this. They are being asked for help by someone who sits close enough away that they can quickly provide an answer verbally and return to their chores/duties.
That seems more efficient than hammering at the keyboard given the recipient can very likely hear the sound of one's voice with the response to the inquiry for assistance.
Why are so many comments to this problem being presented as if this person is the one who needs their behavior rectified, when they are not the source of the interruption, but the recipient of?
> I'm a bit confused by this. It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away?
> Be it via Slack or shoulder tap, you're breaking their concentration regardless. Whatever task they were doing, is now being stopped because of the ask for help.
I was responding to this. They are now asking from the point of view of the person doing the interrupting. The statement about Slack vs shoulder tap is not true for me, and I would guess it is not true for a lot of people. Someone asking a question via Slack does not break my concentration.
You can still send me a message on Slack, and I’ll respond in a few hours when I can.
But if you speak verbally directly to me at my desk or tap me on the shoulder, then I have to break my concentration, engage in social norms about hearing out your question. Even if I instantly tell you I can’t help right now, I’ll lose 5-15 minutes getting back to concentration every time you do this.
You have a very unusual and incorrect understanding about how much more severely distracting itbis to receive a verbal / shoulder tap interruption for a question than something asynchronous like Slack or email.
Someone downvoted me in another thread about open-offices because I do this. A coworker who sits three feet away often pings me multiple times a day with questions that are much easier answered by turning around, wheeling over pointing to a few things on their screen, explaining how they related and wheeling back over.
They said "I was part of the problem".
Because it's quicker to turn around and have a human conversation with someone sitting a yard away than type, take screenshots, and beam them over the network?
So, while it is making you faster, it is killing focus and productivity of the person you are asking to. Which is fine as long as the other person does not have deadline or other need to produce more.
At the expense of mine by asking me a question, and asking me for help.
Seems rather one-sided, no? A colleague has asked for my help. Their concentration is already broken because there is a problem they need help solving, and probably their work progress is halted because they're unsure what to do about a given problem, and think I am someone who can help them.
I genuinely do not understand the objection to whipping around and offering to help that person solve a problem that prevents them from accomplishing a task, project, assignment or obligation.
I ask for help understanding the conceit here, that the person who turns around and helps their colleague is at fault of 'breaking someone's concentration' when they were asked to provide help to a coworker.
How on earth did you came to that interpretation?
The person who asks question is interrupting the other one. Asking via slack is less intrusive as it gives the colleague the chance to finish whatever the colleague is doing before answering.
Because SO many of the replies to my original inquiry seem-by verbiage-to have taken what I said as an indicator that I was the one causing the interruption, not the one responding to it.
Or, maybe I misunderstood their replies wholesale, and are in fact suggesting that responding to someone who asks for help electronically with ad hoc assistance contributes to the spiraling decline of office productivity by turning to the person sitting 36" away and offering the requested assistance.
We have private offices, but an "open door" policy. I recently noticed that I was pinging my boss several times a day on stuff that could've been handled by email. It dawned on my that my doing this, multiplied by the several other people who do this, was bad for productivity. So I started consciously sending things by email.
Humans are not interrupt-driven real-time systems. We're circa 1965 batch-processing machines. Email is great because it allows you to queue up a set of tasks and work in batches with natural breaks. Interruptions are bad because they break batch processing. Interruptions are also selfish. They prioritize the interuptee's desire to get immediate answers with the interrupted's need to work in batches.
Some people don't mind it--or they think they don't mind it. I used to be one of those people until I started using Pomodoro. Now you interrupt me in the middle of a session, and I'm like >:-@
Now look, I don't disagree with your points about people's ability to handle, triage and effectively respond to interruptions. It's a completely valid argument to make.
Where I'm having a hard time agreeing with the seeming majority here: is that when I'm interrupted in something I'm doing, by someone who sits two feet away, whipping around and saying "here's how you do that, it goes here, and does this" makes me the problem person (I use problem in the most delicate of ways, I hope the meaning is taken well and in good faith), when it was my work time and efficiency that was interrupted by someone seeking guidance.
If it's in a group channel, makes a bit more sense. When it's a direct message, well then here we are.
But I'll mull this over.
But as a team leader, when my people send me 1-on-1 messages to ask for help, I do what I can to make sure they get that help. For me, it's more effective to be there with them in person within reason (in this case: sitting right next to me is 'within reason') to render that aid, when requested.
Why not walk to a common area, book a conference room for 5 minutes, or just respond in Slack?
It seems like 8 people getting to have quiet conditions ought to be worth more than some minor convenience of not needing to walk away to a different area to answer vocally.
But a desk side "hey how do I x?" or "Hey is this the right way to do this?", it's probably infinitely more productive to work on the issue at our respective desks, get the solution needed, and go back to work.
These responses I'm reading in this thread are becoming more and more astonishing as they genuinely appear-to me-that many developers would be better served working at home where they can enjoy complete and total silence. You are in a shared space, there are going to be people talking and discussing their jobs. It's what they're even there for in the first place.
Of course this within reason, having to share a space with a customer support team where people are constantly on the phones chatting and providing support-sure-I completely get why that would be grating.
We seem to have moved beyond that and are now picking apart the very nature of working with and supporting your colleagues when they come to you for assistance, the idea that something as innocuous as a senior developer helping a junior developer being a problematic and prima facie distraction that must be snuffed out and I find that attitude completely untenable.
Mitigating distractions and minimizing them where possible and reasonable is an admirable goal. But taking a long step back and looking at this thread: It seems many are taking the approach that the workplace ought to function like a library where no sounds are uttered but the clacking of keys and clicking of mice and I'm not sure I agree even minimally.
> “as they genuinely appear-to me-that many developers would be better served working at home where they can enjoy complete and total silence.”
Fully private offices are better, with a high degree of respect to not interrupt your colleagues. Working from home, as you suggest, is certainly much much better than working in an open-plan office though.
> “We seem to have moved beyond that and are now picking apart the very nature of working with and supporting your colleagues when they come to you for assistance, the idea that something as innocuous as a senior developer helping a junior developer being a problematic and prima facie distraction that must be snuffed out and I find that attitude completely untenable“
It’s hardly untenable. It’s a basic part of the job. What you glibly call “a senior developer helping a junior developer” is not that.
When I think of helping junior developers, something I do all the time, I think of using Slack or email to schedule a meeting to answer their questions at some point that’s convenient for us both, in a conference room where we won’t bother other people.
The culture of “just quickly answer my question right now” is horrible, productivity-killing nonsense, but here you’re acting like it’s the only possible way to work.
According to whom? I've been a developer near 14 years now and have worked in siloed offices, cubicles, open office spaces, and my last job was 100% remote for two years. From what authority do you claim to draw the assertion that this is the case?
Anecdote is no replacement for quantitative sample sizes, but this statement seems too absolute to hold any validity without qualifying by whose standards you are suggesting that it has been known for a-as you put it-"long, long time".
What you glibly call “a senior developer helping a junior developer” is not that.
Glib? I'm sorry friend, but no. Absolutely not. Taking two minutes to help someone new on the job find answers periodically throughout the day, and wheeling my chair 180 degrees to render aid as the senior developer is not glib.
What's "glib" is this idea that I am somehow disrupting the workforce, and destroying productivity by preferring to talk to the person who literally sits three feet away from them to help solve a problem than smacking away at my keyboard to answer a question that takes the better part of 180 seconds were I to verbalize "Here's the solution you're looking for and how it fits in to the larger scheme of this feature we're working on". I've been on the other end of that, it felt cold and impersonal as a newbie, and I strive to be the kind of team leader I wanted when I was that junior developer.
The culture of “just quickly answer my question right now” is horrible, productivity-killing nonsense, but here you’re acting like it’s the only possible way to work.
Answering a question quickly is productivity-killing? Then how are you defining productivity, friend? If it's a question that has a short, sufficient and ultimately resolute answer that gets my junior developers the support and response they need to solve the challenges we face as a team, elongating that answer out to a long essay-diatribe is more killing to the productivity. If by that point we need more time, then-as I said in another comment-it absolutely is valid and worthwhile to say "Let's schedule some time to get into a conference room and whiteboard through the problem". Go look above this comment chain, I said as much pretty clearly.
And speaking of clearly? I really appreciate that you took this position and completely ignored the fact that I went through great effort to indicate that I prefer to speak directly to someone "within reason" and went as far as to suggest that when the person is sitting mere inches away from me, that is a scenario that I personally consider "within reason". That alone should have been a pretty clear indicator to you that no, I actually do NOT think that it's the only possible way to work, just a very effective one given the proximity to my cohort. I had hoped that the context clues would reveal themselves clearly, evidently and plainly. I see now that they did not.
I'm going to go ahead and take this time to leave the thread entirely, this debate stopped being fruitful a long time ago and I'm frustrated with myself that I spent as much time replying to it as I have.
Please do, if nothing else, have a wonderful weekend :) I'm sorry we disagree so strongly on this.
Note that this was written in 1987. And cites even earlier works on the topic. By now there’s been an explosion of research on this topic.
> “Glib? I'm sorry friend, but no. Absolutely not.“
Uhh, yes. You are being glib by making a certain phrase (“senior developer helping a junior developer”) have a twisted meaning (that it can only mean a real-time, interruptive audio interaction, rather than scheduled time to help). That’s glib because the short phrase “senior developer helping a junior developer” unpackages into a bunch of complicated factors that need to be considered, and a very important one is to not presume that an interruptive question is worth disrupting someone else’s work over in the moment. You glibly try to side-step this by acting like disrupting someone to ask for help is the primary option and that it’s de facto a good thing to encourage this type of disruptiveness by giving instant gratification with an immediate answer, but it’s not! Glib absolutely is the right way to describe how you are trying to sidestep the real, material meaning of what it is to help out a junior developer (which generally has nothing to do with answering their real-time audio questions in the moment they ask).
> “Answering a question quickly is productivity-killing? Then how are you defining productivity, friend?”
Yes, stopping what I am already working on in order to answer your question will kill my productivity by a lot in order to help your productivity only a little.
This is pretty simple stuff. Why are you unsure about it?
> “went as far as to suggest that when the person is sitting mere inches away from me, that is a scenario that I personally consider "within reason".”
But this is a harmful attitude on your part. It makes no difference if the person is sitting inches away from you. Why would you think physical proximity has any effect in this? What matters is whether the other person is deeply concentrating on something that they judge to be highly important to maintain focus on. Your point of view seems to be about your convenience and not the damage it would do the people who are distupted around you.
Your vitriolic reaction is very frustrating to process because you still do not seem to engage with the basic aspect of this whole topic, which is that if a question pops into your mind that affects you, that does not mean it is worth wasting someone else’s time over if they are busy. That is one of the fundamental problems of open plan offices that encourage ad hoc verbal communication, which is incompatible with modes of working that require extended concentration time for most hours of most days (e.g. almost all of software engineering).
[0]: < https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Proje... >
And yet AGAIN my initial post is misconstrued completely and entirely because people I guess just don't know how to read today.
I am not the person interrupting my coworkers. I am the one being interrupted and asked to help a junior dev. Read my darn post. Read it. READ IT. I am not interrupting my coworkers. I am a senior dev being asked for help. I am the one being interrupted. I am being asked to assist someone. Stop accusing me of breaking my coworkers flow. That is not what I said. That is not what I offered. That was not my post. That was not the position I argued. Those were not my words.
It's actually getting VERY frustrating having responses levied at me as if I am the person disrupting my coworkers, and not the person who is having his own workflow and concentration broken, and repeatedly having responses thrown at me as if I am the root cause of my coworkers not being productive.
/throws up hands
The portion you quoted does not use the word “you” to specifically refer to you personally, but to the general phenomenon of either being interrupted when someone asks a question or being disrupted when people loudly discuss an answer to the question right where everyone is trying to work, instead of moving to a separate common area like the cafeteria or a conference room, or scheduling a meeting to go over it later when it won’t disrupt people.
I think that valuing your uninterrupted time over the team and the product shipping is the truly selfish mindset.
edit> markdown
I struggled mightily to find a tactful way of putting this to words, but this states it nicely.
My focus in responding to a teammate asking for help isn't on my time, or at least, it's less about my time and more about the objective behind what motivated a teammate to ask for help in the first place: shipping the feature/product.
If it helps clarify ambiguity or confusion for me to wheel over to this person and verbalize the solution they're looking for and work out the blocker with them by sitting right next to them for 5 minutes when they ask for my help, and we get the best possible outcome as a team, that's what I'm going to do.
Excellently said, snowman.
Being the guy who helps everyone else get stuff done often goes unrecognized in any meaningful way.
Valid, but irrelevant, I feel. I am a senior on my team, a junior asks for help. It might not be necessarily moral or even ethical to give them the time of day the second they ask for it, but it is a professional courtesy that I don't go looking to receive superlatives and accolades for.
If a contributor to the team has a question that affects their ability to contribute, that person should get the help they need. I happen to be sitting close enough to them that we can discuss the solution quietly enough so as not to be a distraction, and I do so.
What came from this were all sorts of wild extrapolations and suppositions that doing this created an otherworldly distraction to the rest of the workforce; and it is that mindset that I'm challenging. Not that people don't deserve a distraction free workspace, but to what ends we're willing to go to avoid that distraction while also operating in a manner that helps coworkers succeed, and enables colleagues to be accessible to one another.
Maybe it's a product of my compartmentalized mindset, I'm able to work through someone a few feet away talking about work things when asked about work things. It's when people have loud, echoing conversations about things not really relevant to the tasks at hand that I will HAPPILY concede to anyone who argues that those discussions should be taken elsewhere-like a break room or cafeteria if your office is equipped with one.
But two developers sitting next to each other, talking their way through a data validation issue, unless they're discussing it so loudly that it is legitimately obnoxious for two people whose faces are inches away from each other?
I'm not so sure this is such a work-shattering distraction as the implication seems to be from a majority of folks here-to the point where I'm inclined to call shenanigans and histrionics on the folks who can't function sans complete, utter total silence. The open office can die, in my opinion, but so does the idea that any instance of two people talking about work is just as, or close to being as unacceptable to the point of-as someone suggested-booking a conference room to have a 2 minute discussion when asked "How do I do x?".
I can deal with a nearby conversation and ignore it, although frankly it can be very distracting when it's about technical topics near my own work. Two or three at once is rarer but very irritating when it gets started up. Headphones are great for that, but when I'm suffering from tinnitus they no longer work. What's wrong with walking to a common space away from the work area when you want to have a 2 minute discussion with a coworker? If it's not worth the walk, maybe it isn't worth the discussion.
There's nothing strange about people having trouble in an open office space, all I would ask for is some empathy. I have internalized some of the lessons of my own problems by trying to resist the temptation to ping or otherwise disturb coworkers by non-email means unless it's absolutely necessary. A good deal of the kinds of questions I'm asked or I hear asked (maybe as many as half of them? and I would include my own questions here) could be solved by thinking or researching just a little more in solitude before reaching out.
I've also created improvised physical barriers around my desk to block visual distractions. As a result my current workspace is OK for getting things done, but it doesn't change the fact (for me) that open offices are bad by default and need personal and spatial modification to become acceptable, as compared to the mythical office with a door which would be good for getting things done by default. It's not about being incapable of function without "utter total silence", it's about being made slightly miserable every day on average.
If you stop valuing your own uninterrupted “flow” opportunities, the product suffers, because the work cannot be completed that way.
In this sense you’ve got it backwards. You claim that looking out for your own experience of uninterrupted work is somehow suboptimal or selfish or bad, but it’s not. It’s actually the most customer-focused or product-focused, unselfish way to think.
Believing that you are entitled to turn around in your chair and interrupt the workflow of a teammate at your own whimsical discretion, now that is very selfish and does not place the customer, product or team ahead of yourself.
If you’re interrupting people all day, you’re selfishly prioritizing only what’s convenient for you, and discounting all the damage and delay to shipping the product that your interruptions are creating.
There is a game-theoretic angle to it. The problem is that interrupting someone costs the team, but creates no cost for the interrupter. Individual interrupters have no incentive to try and balance the global cost to the team of their interruption versus their potential idleness.
You are.
> Because it's quicker to turn around and have a human conversation with someone sitting a yard away than type, take screenshots, and beam them over the network?
No. Because, if everybody does that the office gets loud and distracting and also nothing gets documented and people have to waste time asking and answering the same questions again and again.
In fact, I think many in this profession do exactly that: issue is brought up, solutions are discussed either via chat or ad hoc, a solution is found, and documentation is created around those discussions.
Nor do I think this is an issue of asking the same questions repeatedly when it could have been answered once.
What is presented here is a simple enough scenario where someone asks for help, and I do what is in my means to render aid. Adding additional variables or considerations to the equation that weren't proffered as elements of the initial problem isn't an entirely helpful tactic to the discussion.
It means that if you need 30 seconds to save, commit, and pull the relevant branch (or 50 minutes for an urgent bugfix), the other person doesn't have to hover awkwardly or walk away. And it means that if you don't know the answer and have to check something, you can do that before talking to them. And then, yes, you can talk in person. Because that still really is the best answer a lot of the time.
I think I understand their complaint, because depending on how an open plan office is laid out this might be efficient for 2 people and distracting for 10 around them, but I don't think that's inevitable. Even with open plan, it's possible to have relatively low interference and seat people who talk often close together. (Companies seating by rank or function instead of need for contact are, obviously, doing it wrong.)
For all the complaints about Slack as a distraction, my experience has been that it's a huge boon relative to what it replaces. It's pretty well understood that in-person and phone contact mean "answer now" and email means "answer in some hours" or even "tomorrow morning". Channel messages as "someone answer in 10-60 minutes" and DMs as "answer in a few minutes barring a crisis" are a huge improvement in terms of focus.
So, it's an all-day, unpredictable meeting?
It's cheap.
It's not because XP, pair programming, quick feedback or any other ponies/unicorns, it's because you can cram more people in a smaller place.
Oh, and also control. Managers at least have the illusion of direct control or even better, they have a Stasi-like informant network in case someone "misbehaves".
Anyway, what you discribe still has a price for your team. You not only break the persons concentration who is asked, instead of giving them the choice to answer when they have free time to concentrate on something new, you also break rise the chance of breaking the concentration of everyone else who is not involved.
- Random small interruptions were the biggest killers of productivity.
- In a cube environment, productivity is already very high. If people need something, they have no problem taking a few steps and asking about it.
- The bigger complaint was the lack of adequate meeting spaces. Managers never perceived this because they had offices to meet in, so they only cared about having a few, very big meeting spaces.
- A space that doesn't have a shutting door is useless to collaborate/meet in.
- Very few people actually care about the size of their cubicles. A lot of people care about the heights of their cubicles and the number of walls.
I wish more organizations were honest about their decisions to move to open-office. If you actually work with and listen to your employees' needs you can actually find more ideal compromises. But if you just start ripping out cubes to save money and tell employees it's going to be great, it's incredibly hostile.
In reality, managers are simply on the constant lookout to squeeze costs down, and worker salaries escape the cut only in some job markets because of very specific circumstances (like a period of history when the need to build software severely outstrips overall production capacity). There is no real master plan to maximize productivity.
So it's close to perfect information on rent vs. some vague and unquantifiable "I can't focus" complaints regarding the noise in a work environment.
If it didn't change soon, I was considering leaving; it did last month, so no real plans to move right now, lol... (I don't mind the $15 / month so long as it goes to a good cause and the vast majority of the employees (400+) are choosing to do it)
400 * 15 * 12 = 72,000 / yr that your employer may be deducting from wages on the backs of their employees... voluntary or not.
Then they get to advertise their generosity and optional dress code.
I hate thinking pessimistically like this, but you get conned enough times... and it's not like they actually need a dress code, if they're comfortable with taking money for people not abiding by it.
I find it a bit bizarre that companies will require dress codes for people that never have to interface with clients. If I'm never viewed from the outside world, how exactly is it hurting anyone for me to wear a T-Shirt? I can't quite tell if it's some kind of bizarre power play, or they genuinely feel like it helps the employees, and I suppose I'll never find out.
Casual is usually jeans / polos / non-offensive t-shirts / sandals (no thong flip flops)
At my company - t-shirts with sports on them (football, hockey, etc...) are allowed. I'm about to test the envelop and see if I can wear a polo from a recent race car event I went to. Racing is a sport, and the polo is nice, but due to the nature of racing, it's covered in company logos - Ferarri, Infinity, etc... The front is not so bad, few logos on either chest. The back is kinda loud.
We'll see...
(to add, no one is customer facing...)
I have good ear-on headphones that isolate me from the sounds of the office most of the day.
I have a comfortable chair, and a large enough desk to never touch my colleagues who sit next to me. I have a pretty minimal amount of personal stuff on the desk: a mug, a phone charging stand; my backpack is under the desk.
I'm pretty much insulated from the rest of the open office I'm sitting in, and have no idea what's happening around unless I choose to take a look. If you want to collaborate, well, come closer and wave your hand so that I noticed you and removed the headphones. Good thing you can notice if I'm sitting at my desk (or went for a coffee) from the other end of the open space.
I did work in smaller, near personal offices. They used to have a somehow poorer window views, and did not offer a lot in the quietness department, because people talking next to you make the same noise in a small office and a large (open-space) office. Only a truly personal office helps here. OTOH a properly sound-insulated personal office would either feel claustrophobic to many people, or have to be rather large. With large, low-density personal offices, walking to someone becomes a lengthier process.
Instead I think that an open(ish) office, a culture of keeping reasonably quiet, and a good set of meeting rooms and phone rooms gives you the best of both worlds: a private space when you need to talk at length, and close proximity when you don't.
Sure would be nice if people would merely wave their hand in front of me. Nope, instead, everyone [0] does one (or both) of two things: come up behind me and tap my shoulder, or come up behind me and shout.
I don't blame them for wanting my attention, but the end result is the same: I physically jump, sometimes yelp, and it takes me many minutes to get back to the same level of productivity I was before the ambush.
Is "ambush" too strong a word? Nope. To my reptile brain, it's exactly what happened: so now it's time to fight or flee.
For me, open offices are evil. It's the place I go to get ambushed.
[0] Even coworkers who know how I will respond. They've said so, apologize, and still do it.
I've seen people putting small rear-view mirrors on desks or screen corners to notice people coming from behind. But here, I think, it would mostly take some talking (repeatedly) to your colleagues, and explaining why tapping or shouting does not work for you, and waving would be a better way.
Next time somebody shouts at you from behind, turn, say quietly "I don't react to shouting; please come and wave your hand quietly to get my attention", then turn back and continue to work.
And to be fair, my characterization of "shouting" is probably an exaggeration, but in the moment it's how my brain interprets the hailing.
Why is it worth mentioning claustrophobia, but not agoraphobia?
Interestingly, both anxieties are much more common in women than men. I wonder if this is another case where a seemingly innocuous decision (like job postings with a large number of required qualifications) is actually turning women away from the industry.
Wouldn't that be nice. Doesn't happen in my office. Maybe because upper management doesn't care.
I seriously think the hearing aids industry is going to explode in the next few decades.
If they are as bad as we think they are, there must be a "closed office," arbitrage play where you can beat other startups with more adult interior design.
The problem is that, for most businesses, cash is king. Hard-to-measure productivity improvements will invariably lose to immediate financial rewards.
Not.
Want to make a team? Find a room, move your desks in there and ->poof<- you have a team. Need to sit nearer the two people you're working closely with this week? Just move your desks together for a while, while staying in the same room as the project. Need your own office for a month or two? You can probably find one, or at least find an out-of-the-way corner that is quiet.
I've worked in open-plan spaces where you had assigned seating, and it was fucking miserable. An open plan combined with autonomy and trust works pretty well.
Wow, sounds great.
Additionally, they measured 'interactions', which was a self defined metric that afaict has no grounding in anything.
I'm not sure if one of two Fortune 500 companies, used to working in an office, generalizes to me. So, I'm not sure how much I personally weight the outcome of this study.
I've worked in both offices and open office plans, and there were things I did and didn't like about both. Offices required more formal mind-melding but I had more concentration time during peak business hours. Pit allowed me to feel more camaraderie, but required me to work off hours to get concentrated work done. If it were up to be I'd do 3 days in an office and 2 days in a open pit.
I believe that a good culture and library-like rules can make it work and provide some benefits. It also has some obvious drawbacks (more visual distractions, flu spreading, etc), but I believe the main culprit often is companies having open offices with no “rules” e.g. random people screaming or laughing histerically. People is then forced to isolate themselves with NC-headphones which obviously kills the benefits this layout has.
I suppose a more interesting question is how much a seating plan contributes to revenue, operating margin, and growth.
It is indeed interesting that people report higher ease of collaboration in full private offices. Perhaps the ability to have a conversation in an office means that you don't have to go somewhere to talk and so it works out.
Anyway, given the measures in the study, full open plan with no restrictions come out looking pretty good.
Full disclaimer: I have some and they are awesome.
You know that one quote from Upton Sinclair? "It is difficult to get someone to understand something whose salary depends on them not understanding it"?
Fits this issue like a glove.
People yelling during a sporting event, or just generally horseplaying, ends up being very distracting to me. I'm aware headphones exist, but I typically work better in near-silence, which is borderline impossible with an open office plan.
This is in combination with the fact that I'm pretty sure I've gotten at least one illness from a coworker in the past when he sneezed. It's possible I would have gotten it anyway, but I think it's a non-controversial thing to say that close contact to people can make disease spread more easily.
I think these open offices are here to stay, since the rest of my coworkers (and indeed, a large percentage of the hacker workforce) seem to feel like they work better with them. Still, a guy can dream...or look for a remote job.
I don’t get why anyone believes open-plan offices are chosen to save money. Maybe in the most spartan of bootstrapped startups, sure, but most of the time it’s for optics and status signalling, part of turning the office into a shrine to the executives.
Companies have been studying, measuring and carefully quantifying knowledge worker productivity for a hundred years. The idea that “productivity lost to open spaces is hard to measure, but short term savings is an obvious win on paper” is silly. Companies are not that stupid.
No, open plan offices are deliberately chosen for status and optics, and to some extent to make the environment routinize your fealty as a worker and ingrain into your mind the obvious fact that your productivity isn’t valued; that your economic worth in most of these companies is higher if you function like a decorative piece of furniture.
It's like eco initiatives at hotels. Looking green with respect to housekeeping would be less interesting if it cost them money rather than saved them.
I don't really disagree with your status and optics argument though.
Worse, this office (in Columbus, Ohio), housed almost entirely corporate HR and regional sales staff, almost no engineering presence and no plans to significant change the headcount there.
Someone asked about it over the company’s quarterly web cast town hall meeting, and the CEO replied that they were transforming into an innovation company, that each and every one of us watching was an innovator and that innovators love open spaces.
The staff in Columbus routinely had to handle sensitive calls about HR issues, payroll, medical leave, terminations, etc., and needed private phone call facilities almost all day every day.
So the company paid money (pure loss here since they aren’t renting), to destroy privacy features that were actively needed, solely for optics.
I laughed at this but I guess you meant it seriously?
I can’t tell if you laughed because you’ve never looked into this field of managerial study before and have inadvertently assumed there aren’t useful, heavily relied-upon ways of measuring productivity; or if you laughed because of the dark humor that results when you realize companies are fully aware of how much lost productivity, increased communicable disease based time off, engendering of shallow / superficial face-to-face interactions, increased stress and lowered morale all cost them from open floor plans, and are sadly willing to pay those costs as a premium to get the status & optics effects they want from the look of the office layout.
The efficiency dreams they will develop next and their slogans: "Working in a sleep (al)coffin, to always be well rested. Work like a borg, rest like a swede."
"Working in several layers of hammock, to get the hang off it."
"Working cuddled together in a transparent ballpit room, to grow as a social being."
"Working from your own car, from the parking space. Cause the best office, is where you feel the drive."
There is always a level of dystopia beneath the dystopia of today.
The open office is driving the home office movement. The only thing preventing the home office from triumphing, is the failure to create external meetups - either at home or at another temporary location.