Reason #6479 of why WFH is a godsend. Never again will I have to suffer a useless VP rearranging the floor for the nth time in their quest to optimize inter-team collaboration.
When possible, tie it back to company strategy or objectives (“it’s important for us to sit closer to our stakeholders”, or “this layout will improve our carbon footprint”).
If it's "we're moving everyone downstairs so we can turn off the heating on the 6th floor" then it does. But yeah, even in that case it's better to skip the bullshit; if you've laid off a bunch of people and you're packing the people who are left into a smaller space to save money, if you tell them that, they'll understand.
That would be a great explanation. Doesn't do squat for the carbon footprint either way tho.
Yeah it does. Heating two half-empty floors will generally have a higher carbon footprint than one full floor one way or another, and especially if you then rent out the other floor you're saving a bunch of emissions (particularly given how much it takes to build new buildings).
The company doesn't actually care about the carbon footprint, of course, which is why it's a bullshit excuse, but it does have that positive effect.
> Morkalork, I've noticed in our team Zoom meetings when you look at something on your second monitor you look to the left. Everyone else has their second monitor on the right and its really distracting to see you go left when everyone else goes right.
> I'm going to need you to move that second monitor over to the right.
The one time I had a Real job I had to suffer through a desk shuffle. I happened to go into the office early one day the next week to get some actual work done. Around 6:30–7am some guy walks up to me while I am programming and asks me a question. It took me 30 or 40 seconds to finish my thoughts and start to think about the question. By that time, he had walked off. His question turned out to be something like “How much has moving the desks around improved the working conditions around here?” Even after he was gone, I couldn’t figure out how to answer that question; to me moving desks around was mostly irrelevant, and I wasn’t even sure if it was possible for a shuffle to make any difference at all. At least not for engineering, where all of our communications can be done through email, bug trackers, version control, etc, etc. Later I learned that he was the CEO (oops!).
On the other hand, they at least had a good reason for the shuffle. They had been subleasing half of the floor to another company. As we were growing, they ended that lease and let every one expand into their place. This left plenty of open space for the new people who were hired that year.