How to Build Culture Through Office Design | Hacker News Reader

How to Build Culture Through Office Design

bureauwork.com

51 pointsaashaysanghvi26 comments

> Culture is the only long-term competitive advantage an organization can bring to bear,

wut.

these guys are trying to sell office furniture. but let's pretend for a second that this article _isn't_ in bad faith:

I have yet to meet an office layout designed for a cultural principles that delivers anything but a hollow approximation of the desired outcome. "Collaborative spaces" in every company I've seen feel fake as hell. It's usually difficult to be undistracted and private, alone or with your group.

Short of a large, glass-walled, soundproof conference room dedicated to one team, I have found no "manufactured" environment that reliably elicits excellent work.

I'm pretty sure the best office design for culture is "here's a big room. you decide who comes in here. here's some budget for furnishings" and then you figure it out as you go and let the trajectory of the work dictate the trajectory of the space.

---

separate from culturally shaped space, i do find designing for general happiness to be worthwhile and effective. Plants, views, lighting, etc. But that's not cultural IMO.

I wish it was soundproof.

Many hard surfaces make for lots of echoes and a very loud office.

Plants can be cultural signifiers. Do they exist? Are they on exhibit or part of the background? Are they uniformly distributed? Are they banned? Are they supplied by the office management? Are they the property of individuals?

I would rather have people focused on getting work done than analyzing the plant distribution in the office.

Leave my Amazon Basics bonzai tree out of this.

> Short of a large, glass-walled, soundproof conference room dedicated to one team, I have found no "manufactured" environment that reliably elicits excellent work.

An old team of mine got relegated to one of those, minus the glass walls. It had been a video recording studio in a previous life.

It was indeed great for team culture!

It had ceiling tracks for lights, we hung a disco ball from it. And a bunch of other stuff, because hey, ceiling tracks!

> "here's a big room. you decide who comes in here. here's some budget for furnishings" and then you figure it out as you go and let the trajectory of the work dictate the trajectory of the space.

Yup! We purchased our own (glass) desks, assembled them as a team. Did a lot of customization to the space, which no one else could see/hear so the space was actually our own.

Culture is very important. I used to work for a series of startups in open office environments where you're working on Jira tickets close to 100% of your day. Now, I'm working for a large company with bigger and more private desks with more downtime. It's expected that you watch programming talks and do research, and you're given more time to do that. It's a very nice change. Instead of only plowing away on endless bug fixes, we're improving our skills and getting better.

Although I like a flat org structure I never felt fully comfortable sharing an open office plan space with my boss nearby. I felt it was hard to have autonomy with them always within earshot and sometimes interjecting.

Sharing an open office with anyone is horrible and yeah having your boss right next to you is even worse. People don't/shouldn't need that much literal supervision.

If I could “downvote” that site for its obscene margin widths on mobile, I would.

Dear god it's actually one word per line in some places

Lucky you. I don't even get one word per line:

  Culture
  is the
  only
  long-
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  competi
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  advanta
  ge an
  organiza
  tion can
  ...
  and
  executio
  n are
  supporti
  ng
  players
  ...
  and new
  challeng
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  ...

I’m glad someone else pointed this out haha

I’m all for content marketing like this but if your competency is creating culture through design at least make sure the reading experience isn’t painful

They don’t have the right culture for margin widths - perhaps they need better furniture.

> Open layouts with integrated common spaces foster a sense of connection, fluidity and creativity among your team members

Wrong: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

TFA should be called: "How to oppress your employees into doing exactly what you want"

Unsubstantiated assumption: "doing exactly what you want" is oppression.

> doing exactly what you want

spending more time maintaining the appearance of doing exactly what you seem to want than producing any actual tangible value, actually.

What kind of furniture, I mean culture, produces a readable web experience on mobile?

What is interesting is that most of Schein's book was based on Steve Jobs (the original draft was almost all Steve, but got rewritten to emphasize Steve much less and other executives much more when Steve complained that the book was just about him. But even when using other executives for his examples, Schein was usually talking about Steve.) And at the time of that book we did none of the things in the article. Really, the book is excellent, but hard to interpret well. If I hadn't been working there at the time I would probably be misinterpreting it too.

Advertisement.

Offices with actual doors are better for work that requires concentration without interruptions.

open plan offices don’t live up to the hype–in fact, the idea that they promote interaction is dead wrong.

This should be repeated a thousand times. Open office hinders real collaboration.

Crap. Open office cargo cult.

A freaking office with a freaking wood door. For everyone. Not difficult.

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