I worked at a place with open offices and lots of conferenc e rooms, C-levels were notorious for 'permanently occupying' them.
I’ve also worked at a company that considered offering private offices to anybody who wanted them, but the numbers on it suck. For our office sites it was going to cost an extra $20-30,000 annually per employee in floor space. Salary is very important to employees, but the total cost of employing somebody is more important to an employer. If it costs an extra $20-30,000 to employ somebody, that money has to come from somewhere. Most people wouldn’t choose to take a pay cut of that size in return for a private office. The extra money could come from increased productivity, but even if you believe you’d be more productive in a private office, you’re not going to be 15-30% more productive. In this case most people spent 1 or 2 days a week WFH, so to cover the cost the change would more realistically have to increase productivity by upwards of 50%.
I know they’re “notoriously unpopular” but if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. The alternative is to increase the cost of employing you in a way that doesn’t result in any form of compensation, which if you think it through is likely not a very good idea.
15-30% is probably low for quite a few individuals. It could be as much as 2-3x. I have experimented with it and it certainly is for me.
The problem is that on average you may be right, since there are also a lot of people who barely benefit from it.
I’m way more effective at writing complex code in an office. I’m not any more effective at random administrative tasks (due to procrastination tendencies, I might even be less effective at them). I’m modestly more effective at reading emails or design docs, but not integer factors more productive.
I’m a huge supporter of offices and was extremely salty when we got kicked out of them (for cost reasons). It’s why I love remote working now.
I worked with a guy recently who was a notoriously poor communicator. He’d spend 4 days/week WFH, would barely give any updates on what he was doing, and was in general incredibly hard to get a hold of. He did write a lot of code, and most of it was very high quality. But almost none of it was ever used. His excellent code would almost never end up solving the problems we needed it to solve, or provide the functionality we needed it to provide, and nobody ever learned anything from working with him and his very senior-level skill set.
In my experience, people who make extraordinary estimates about how much more productive they’d be if left to work on problems alone are much more likely to be similar to that guy rather than the person you’re describing. This person was a rather extreme case, but I’ve worked with plenty of people like him.
It’s not an extraordinarily claim. You are making assumptions you have no insight into.
> In my experience, people who make extraordinary estimates about how much more productive they’d be if left to work on problems alone are much more likely to be similar to that guy rather than the person you’re describing.
This is an extraordinary claim.
You are making the generalization that the large majority of people who have high productivity gains when working in a private office are poor communicators who don’t contribute usefully.
The extraordinary claim is that your experience has given you access to the large number of people, their productivity, and their work habits to understand this phenomenon objectively.
If you are a researcher who has done field work and published papers in this field, please feel free to link to one.
If not, what you are saying seems like bullshit.
GP states that their experience gives them enough insight into other people’s productivity to make a detailed assessment.
> They do not need a peer reviewed paper to describe their experience.
They aren’t describing their experience. That’s the point. They are adding the words ‘in my experience’ to a generalization that they almost certainly don’t have the experience to make.
What would make their claim plausible would be if they were a researcher.
> That's ridiculous.
No it isn’t.
That’s true.
> Almost everyone I know who has tried time tracking and life logging is shocked at how different their expectations are from the reality (mostly that they do less and work less than they think).
Right, and time tracking and life logging are now widespread practices, so people who do these things can do a pretty good job of estimating their productivity. Also we have things like the Pomodoro method, commit histories, etc. to give indications.
I completely agree that guessing your own productivity difference without doing anything to measure it will not yield good data.
Now look at what the GP is doing - they are using an anecdote of one person’s productivity to make a claim about the productivity of a wide range of people.
My point is that their experience is very unlikely to give them the data and insight needed to make such a generalization because they aren’t measuring anyone’s productivity - they are just using an anecdote.
And then he blames the victim and you fell for it.
In my experience people who make extraordinary claims about how bad the “guru” employee is are just ignoring his actual contributions because he is focused on getting things done rather than shouting “yes sir” to their arbitrary and clueless demands.
Worse they think this anecdote justifies destroying the productivity of the entire company.
And yet here you are repeating this exact cliche.
It is still not logical.
Do you really think your corporate overlords could get the same productivity from 1/3rd the payroll, but choose not to because they’d rather torture you with an open-plan office?
Who’s more likely to be wrong about this? You, or the majority of businesses in the world?
(Also, I didn’t manage that person I was talking about. Him and I were both managed by the same person, and she was one of the most compassionate and patient managers I’ve ever worked with).
https://www.managers.org.uk/knowledge-and-insights/article/t...
Would it kill you to just do a search?
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=research+productivity+open+pl...
I did suspect that’s the only piece of data that “2-3x” person keeps posting about all over this thread though.
I don't say that you are, and online person could be anyone saying anything (ie. to troll). For educational purposes, test can be tried to learn about oneself: https://www.idrlabs.com/psychopathy/test.php
I scored 1.5% less than average.
This second post is a bit unfairly judged. We all know LoC don't matter. In fact, your point of someone doing irrelevant work is spot on. You know what would help? Actual technical leadership, being included, having a say and a tight feedback loop.
That would require actually seeing people, collaboration and building an organization. Exactly the opposite of the past 20 years tear-down of workplace culture.
Cutting performance by %70 to save %15 in costs is never going to be economical.
They do? That's not been my experience. Is there data on this?
I think a lot of people who rent office space (especially in expensive cities) would agree with you here.
https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/ca/sa...
https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/al/hu... https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/oh/ci...
To put that number into perspective for those used to thinking residential leases, that would mean a 900sqft apartment would rent for $150/mo. Normally commercial leases are slightly more expensive per square foot in literally every market I've ever looked at.
Please, do tell me market in the US where I can rent a 2,000sqft apartment for $333/mo and live in a decent metro area.
The residential prices in my area are MUCH higher. A 1000sqft apartment goes for around $1200/mo.
Salary is arguably more important to an employee than the total cost of employing them is to the employer because for the typical employee their salary is close to 100% of their income, while labor expense is less than that for nearly all corporations.
At one company I was at we had a lack of computer storage for our developers to work. They were constantly deleting work they'd produced in order to make more room. - I won't say the work product to safe the company some face). The employees begged me (the sys-admin) to buy more storage for them, so I planned out a nice storage array that would handle their needs, be reliable, network available, easy for me to manage, backup, etc.
I took it to the CEO and he and the CFO wanted to know how many more work units the developers would produce if we got them this. The CEO went further, saying he didn't care how long it took for developers to develop- they were paid a salary.
I was so flabbergasted that they didn't care about productivity or about employee comfort.
Back to this conversation... 20-30k is a lot of money certainly, but let's look at the full comparison. I don't know how much you pay your knowledge workers, but let's assume a round number of $100k, so then yes, we need them to be 15-30% more productive. I actually do think you can get them to be at least 20% more productive, and then you have some secondary benefits of employees feeling better, etc.
But that's also talking in extremes.. Private offices vs Open-Plan. What about cubicles? Cubicles where you have at least 3 walls are not private offices, but give you more of the benefits of one than open space.
You might find that cubicles cost, say 5-7% in lost floorspace, but that's paltry compared to private offices.
> if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too.
Yes, and many companies are moving to remote work for knowledge workers, and many don't have set work hours, for just this reason. Some people are morning people, but others aren't.
The modern office is designed around a type of person: A morning person, an extrovert, and someone with no kinds of sensory or attention issues.
The other area we considered it to be beneficial (which I forgot to mention), was that we hypothesised it would decrease turnover (and all the costs associated with that). We never got to measure that, so I can’t tell you how much you might reasonably expect it to change things. But our estimates put the number as being rather trivial overall.
I have ADHD, and with it a son of sensitivities to noise, to smells and other things. A person who wears too strong a perfume can effect me in a major way.
My former fiancee is Autistic and she is affected by light- light that's too bright, things that move in her field of vision, etc. She's doing her Ph.D in computational biology.
My reason for pointing this out is to help shift your thinking from "they don't like" to, imagine someone put a thumbtack on your chair and when you said "Wow this chair is really uncomfortable" they said "We determined that your productivity would need to be 30% higher for us to not have these thumbtacks here and since that's not possible, the tack stays."
It's probably true-ish that the productivity won't be affected that much...
I've met programmers who can power through any distractions, but they're by far not the norm in my experience. Many programmers are neuro-non-typical, either by being ADHD, or Autistic, or something else, and sensory issues and distractions work against them.
The one open plan office I worked at, where I could see other employees at eye level, it was having like tinnitus- the stress was a constant monkey on my back, from 8am until I left at 6pm.
You might be thinking "Well that's just him, or people who are weird like him." but it turns out that other people often benefit from the same accommodations as disabled people, only less so. You can look up the term "curb cuts".
I'm not saying you made the wrong decision, but I do think for people who don't have these experiences, it can be hard to differentiate "don't like" with "is like an unceasing low level pain".
> You might be thinking "Well that's just him, or people who are weird like him." but it turns out that other people often benefit from the same accommodations as disabled people, only less so. You can look up the term "curb cuts".
There’s a couple of people repeating several times ITT that private offices are proven to result in a 2-3x increase in productivity. There is no such study, and they’re most likely talking about the study that you posted in another comment that reports a measurement that is most certainly not productivity.
There is also no academic study of the “cut curb effect”. If you Google it, all you’ll find is a collection of thought leader style blogs that all reference the same few instances of accessibility features primarily implemented to benefit disabled people, that have been found to have a wider benefit for the general population. The outrageous claims about productivity ITT are entirely unfounded, and the fact that non-hearing impaired people also find closed captions useful sometimes doesn’t change that.
In reality this is just one of the topics that the HN user base seems to be passionately irrational about.
Different work environments would certainly facilitate different kinds of needs. For example if you worked in an office that was primarily sales or human interfacing, such as an insurance broker, then you'd certainly see no measurable performance benefits from private offices.
On the other hand, if you were working in an office whose primary product was science research or deep engineering, you might.
Big companies like Google were early proponents of open plan, but have begun reintroducing walls because they've seen the productivity benefits for their employees.
As for 2-3x increases, or even 15-30% increases, I think this belies the fact that so much of what knowledge workers do is challenging to measure.
I've met people who think that a programmer must be producing lines of code, or be typing away, but some of the best development I've seen doesn't involve programming at a computer at all, but writing things down on a whiteboard, time spent thinking, reading, absorbing knowledge and producing high quality solutions.
This makes the job of quantifying output very challenging.
The people who are complaining that you're not producing concrete numbers are simply asking you the wrong question- and you may simply not have the answer.
As to my curb cuts mention, I mentioned something else that I think got lost in the shuffle, which is that so many people who work in technology are neuro-atypical, whether or not they're officially diagnosed.
Ultimately these are business decisions. The CEO I mentioned who said that he didn't care about employee efficiency because the employees were salaried (and thus fixed cost) was making a business decision.
Similarly, you looked at the cost of private offices, which was calculable and contrasted it against output- measured however you felt it was appropriate, and decided it wasn't worth it.
For all I know, maybe employee output itself wasn't even a constraint in your system! If that was the case then slowdowns in employee time would actually be just fine, since they weren't your resource constraint.
Too many people are making assumptions; I just wanted to bring up the issue of neurodiversity playing a role in these decisions and why these may be hidden issues for many employees.
I left the sociopathic world several years ago. I came back, but now everyone is at that stage where they're ready to ditch the sociopathic behaviours of past 20 years. At that stage you go through with it, as there is nothing left to lose.
Someone not familiar with your excellent points aren't competent to make the judgement. We don't care about their preconceived biases and domination techniques.
Also not for the lies that it was about better collaboration, and not just to cut costs, as confirmed above.
Since the other poster can't be bothered to search to challenge own prejudices, here's another one: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=open+plan+research+sick+leave&t=br...
This one should be of interest (62% more sick leave for open plan): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21528171/
Of course what's discussed here is about impacts on deep knowledge work.
My assertion is that this kind optimizes for less productivity and creativity in others. We all know why, but perhaps this needs more open discussion now.
That you think this is about whether people like some floor plan or not tells me you are speaking from uninformed opinion lacking experience.
As someone with a sensory disorder, I'm literally looking for a new job now to avoid getting dragged back to the office full time. WFH has been a real blessing to me, my morale is far better as I can completely eliminate the horribly harsh lighting and endless churning soundscape of noises that all offices seem to have. Add that to my being very much not a morning person I genuinely think I'll never set foot in an office again, certainly not on the traditional schedule.
Companies will have to adapt or die to the new reality that many people who aren't morning people, aren't extroverts, and/or have sensory disorders find offices shitty environments to spend a third or more of their life in. The future is giving employees a choice of environment that suits their quality-of-life needs I think.
Personally, I worked in a cubicle for most of my career, but when I switched to an office, it took a good year for me to get used to not turning around to look who's behind me when I heard an ambient sound. Not because I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing, but simply because I hate the idea of somebody being behind me (I even sit in restaurants with my back to wall when I can).
> I know they’re “notoriously unpopular” but if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. The alternative is to increase the cost of employing you in a way that doesn’t result in any form of compensation, which if you think it through is likely not a very good idea.
People also hate sitting cramped in an airplane, yet they still fly. But given the choice to drive, they would. Meaning that morale will be low and people will take the first opportunity to find something more comfortable. I understand that it's a balance between cost and morale, but there's a point at which you cannot recover morale by other means.
The proliferation of work-from-home policies is the best thing to come out of the pandemic, in workplaces where it is possible. If you took this survey now, and divided it among wfh and wfo employees, I suspect you would find a big discrepancy.
Long term effects are yet to be seen, and anybody who thinks they know what they’ll be is just guessing.
You need to think about electrical codes, HVAC, accessibility, fire codes (sprinklers, flammability of materials, etc), evacuation planning, etc. In California, there's even a rule that at least half the outlets in an office area must be motion controlled.
Not saying I don't agree with you, just more things to consider about the complexity and, ofc, the cost of doing things like that.
In some cases, %300.
That you are willing to sacrifice %70-%80 of an employee’s productivity to save %15 of their salary shows the problem.
That you don’t realize it is because “management” is no longer drawn from those that do. Instead “management” has become clueless MBAs who can't do either job.
So do managers down to the first-line, everyone in HR, and in many organizations lots of other people.
Most of those people use shared meeting rooms for the purpose.
Finally would note you don’t have a monopoly on executive perspective in this thread. It’s to the credit of others that they can understand why they perhaps should eschew a traditional visual indicator of power disparity that would favor them.
“Confidential information” is presumably a concern because (a) at a certain point broad enough knowledge you’d rather keep internal leaks outside the organization and (b) some of it is about managing internal tensions and focus, so you keep information quiet that could disrupt the directed focus of employees on their roles and business goals
When it comes to (a), it’s easy to see how open office plans can become at least a marginal liability: anything discussed privately in C-levels that has external strategic value is absolutely going to get discussed “on the floor” as execution even appears on the horizon. And if (b) is a concern, why not other impacts on focus and productivity?
I’d guess, personally, that office setup costs are highly legible and therefore easy targets for someone looking for a marginal win. Productivity has more inputs and is less legible which makes it easy to imagine the org can make it up elsewhere (or make up stories about how it was made up elsewhere). Assuming orgs value margins of individual productivity in the first place, of course, and it’s not always clear that’s the case.
Maybe by using office space somewhere that isn't insanely expensive?
I'll tell you, that has about an 80% efficiency drop.
I love my coworkers though, that's why I stayed. And they are revisiting remote work, so I'm hopeful.