The death of privacy in open-plan offices
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I'm far, far more efficient in my work when I have a bit of privacy, and I can relax and get on with things without thinking my screen is constantly being overlooked by colleagues. The constant feeling of being watched doesn't lead to more efficient work, just pointless stress.
A lot of people have 'strategically-placed' objects on their desks, between their monitors and other staff. Bags, boxes, and so on. No one wants to be in this type of office.
That said, I tend to get over it and browse what I feel like, even if my screen can be seen. Accusations of timewasting have rarely been forthcoming because I'm still very productive.
But soon one junior guy got tired of this, and decided to not even hide it, he just browsed comedic blogs and youtube at will...
Soon other people followed...
Soon the entire office was improductive with lots of people getting their attention drawn to other people youtube videos.
Then the firings started... and then the quittings started in retaliation to the firings. Yay, problem solved, because now there are so few employees that the empty computers are enough to block the vision of each other.
I wonder how they are doing now.
The thing is, their productivity dropped because the open plan office allowed other people to easily distract them. And before that, they were perfectly productive.
Also the quitters, were mostly high-level people (that started as junior coders and ended being managers) that were unhappy with how the most senior managers handled all the stuff.
If the office was not a wide open plan, people would not waste time alt-tabbing a lot (they would read whatever news they want, and then return to work) or distracting other people (ie: tired people that feared opening a news site would open a news site instead of drawing productive people into conversations), or by getting distracted by the junior programmer that decided to watch youtube and screw the alt-tab behavior.
Yes, it is a quite extreme example, a sort of outlier, not all open offices will have a massive loss of employees (either due to firings or quittings) but it is a good example of how the paranoia of being watched, and then the complete lack of it, can totally wreck the workplace.
The other option is to force people to never take a break, which leads to an immense number of other issues and lower productivity.
1. We are very often judged by superficial appearance by others because they have no idea what we do or how we do it. This can include our own managers and influential others.
2. We can appear to be doing absolutely nothing (or worse if on the internet) when we are actually thinking. In this mode, we are often contributing much more value when it appears we are slacking off.
3. Conversely, we can appear to be very busy typing into an IDE when we are just spinning our wheels and getting nowhere. We don't know what to do but feel compelled to act instead of think because people are watching.
Compared to him I appeared to be a slacker, I spent a lot more time thinking, much less time coding, and very little time debugging. And produced a lot more working code per unit of time. But this was in 1984 using PCs with no server, there was no way to objectively measure what I was accomplishing vs. him.
Mind you, the new college buildings at least in UK also have open plan offices for teaching and admin staff. Many of my colleagues do prep work in unoccupied classrooms or work at home or do prep at odd times when the staff room is quiet. This, of course, short circuits the interaction argument for open plan offices.
yep, looking at the number of empty desks in our newly converted (with big pompousness touting increased collaboration and innovation) offices i see the same effect. Personally, i also decreased my office hours and when in the office i usually with headphones on enjoying 80ies metal
Movable glass walls and partitions address most of your other concerns, I think.
Ever since the move over to this open space I have honestly thought about quitting my job. One guy already has left after they moved him from his office with a nice view out the window to sitting facing a corner. I always feel like I'm being watched and that I can't even check my email really quick without being thought of as a slacker. A part of me wants to build a case from research to show my boss how bad this kind of environment really is but I know that nothing will change (even though the last CEO is long gone).
Why, BTW?
The wall made of glass removes this liability. It can still have a phonic isolation.
Currently with feminism all the rage, and sue happy people all the rage, there are lots of good reasons to avoid getting sued.
For example, I know a couple of taxi drivers that refuse to drive women, specially a single woman, because of repeated problems with false rape accusations. (likewise, there are lots of real rape cases with taxi drivers involved).
EDIT: I remembered when my dad worked at a church helping people, and kicked out of his office any women that asked him to lock the door, no matter the reason. Then he explained to me he has a personal rule of never locking himself alone with a woman in a room, unless it is my mom.
I never heard of a single rape case where taxi driver was involved. Taxi driver, refusing to drive women, will loose the license here in 7 seconds.
In London in a year there was 214 reported cases of sexual assault by women that got into a unlicensed cab, and 54 rapes in unlicensed cabs (I did not found stuff about licensed cabs, the location I saw this was specifically talking about the unlicensed ones).
Of course, how much of this is real assaults or fake accusations, is not stated either.
The guy said he never heard of a real rape case, I give him news of one... And I am downvoted, I don't get it.
Don't blame "feminism" for that. False rape/harassment accusations occur and it's very wrong that they do, but they're not a product of feminism.
False rape/harassment accusations are the antithesis of feminism. First of all, that game is old as empire: women using social power and implicit credibility to get other men to use violence or bring social harm on men who displease them. It happened in the antebellum South, which is not exactly known for being a stronghold of feminism. It has probably existed in every society.
Women have a certain social power-- the ability to make men fight over them, to defend their honor, et cetera-- that is decidedly unfeminist in origin. Whether they choose to use it comes down to the individual. If anything, a feminist should be less likely to use that, instead preferring to solve her own problems instead of calling in a man to rough someone up.
Feminism and bad female behavior shouldn't be linked together. Bad behavior is as old as dirt on all sides of any class, gender, or race divide, and it's irrelevant to the real debate. At any rate, feminism is about equality, and abuse of archaic, gendered social powers goes directly against that purpose.
You are partly correct, but feminism brought lots of social changes that affect this.
Also, lots of feminists defend female supremacy and they are very clear on that (most infamously, Valerie Solanas).
I mentioned feminism in particular, because after its rise, rape is a crime that shifted from being almost never prosecuted to be kinda over prosecuted, with cases that involve strangers the "innocent until proven guilty" being thrown away from the window. (while sadly, rape by known people, that is still the majority of the rapes, is still mostly not prosecuted properly).
Unfortunately I don't have time now to grab the exact statistics and research, but there is some evidence that courts tend to be biased toward women, with many avoiding punishing false rape accusations (even when the accused life is destroyed).
Mass panic and mass hysteria always happened in history, feminism changed the subject of the panic and hysteria, not the frequency.
I sincerely don't know if they really think this way or if it is an internet-y thing to say but they behave like normal people in their real lifes.
"If you want a private conversation at work, you're better off having it in a public place - the stairwell or coffee shop - than in the goldfish bowl in the office."
There is a coffee shop in the centre of Birmingham where I now avoid sitting downstairs in the cellar. Too many groups of managers sitting round talking in some detail about what are obviously personnel matters. They have paperwork on the tables as well for heavens sake...
This URL seems to be a copy of the same article - it has a reference to the original BBC link at the bottom:
http://www.newsofthenation.com/2013/07/31/the-death-of-priva...
Edit: The original URL seems to be working again.
Here's a seemingly related article at the BBC:
"The pleasures and perils of the open-plan office"
Anything that requires concentration usually broken quite easily in open plans for me.
When I develop, nobody cares about the wall of characters that mean nothing to them.
As for the risk of my boss sneaking up on me while I'm looking at baby elephants on /r/aww, I'm sure it's happened since I make no attempt to hide it. It's a complete non-event.
The lack of outward signs of power is actually confusing. A person who sits in the vicinity of accounting recently came over and started asking for progress reports from a developer. It took about a week before that developer's manager informed him that the "accountant" was actually the CEO.
Don't get me wrong - I can make criticisms of open office plans, mainly about the distractions and the ease with which one can be interrupted. But the pseudo-marxist critique of power dynamics embedded in this article doesn't ring true for me.
The CEO may sit in open view, but:
1. He can leave any time he wants for a cafe, a conference room, or even take a drive and go home for the day. Open plan isn't horrible for people who can escape it any time they wish. It's the peons who are expected to be there 8 hours per day-- the ones that people will say shit about if they spend an hour or two (no matter how productive) away from the desk-- who are going to get sick.
2. He can do whatever the fuck he wants. If he wants to spend the whole day playing video games, he can. He has nothing to fear from other people seeing his daily activities. If he has stinky farts, the rest of the office will start eating beans and cheese to match the stink of his flatus.
Why do you think a developer can't do these things?
I don't disagree that there are power dynamics and office politics. They are just orthogonal to the seating arrangement.
I've occasionally wondered if it might be better if there were outward signs of power. At the very least, it would give us apolitical developers a visual clue that ignoring or talking down to person X might be something to avoid.
publication date: "July 31, 2013"
and at the footer: "This piece is based on an edited transcript of Lucy Kellaway’s History of Office Life, produced by Russell Finch, of Somethin’ Else, for Radio 4. Episode nine, Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office?, is broadcast at 13:45 BST on 1 August"
So is the radio show to be listen to tomorrow at quarter to two BST? O_O
I think the radio content is available worldwide. (Something weird about UK subjects not needing to pay licence fee to listen to radio?)
Uh, traditional office spaces? Or at the very least, real cubicles?
I guess the under 30 crowd may not be aware, but open offices in the US are a relatively new phenomenon for tech workers. I'm 40 and when I first started working as a programmer, suggesting implementing a modern open-plan office would get you laughed out of the building. Now it is nearly impossible to get away from them, much to my chagrin.
As a UK worker that's always worked open plan, I find cube farms extremely oppressive.
"Hot-desking - the idea that employees don't retain a fixed desk in an office - is a key part of organisations' move towards cheaper, more flexible workplaces. The more employees work from home, the more organisations can shrink their offices to accommodate only the number of people who are in every day."
In addition to the telecommuting angle, I've seen open plan offices like this that also have a limited number of closed rooms where employees can go for a while if they want some privacy, or if they need to work with a colleague for a while. That seems like a good compromise.
One of the things to keep in mind about white-collar sociology is that all of the things that seem like irritating inefficiencies-- the pointless busywork, the loyalty tests, the focus on sacrifice rather than contribution, and the illness-inducing open-back visibility-- are actually designed to make people sick. Why? Because there's literally no other way, in most companies, to figure out who deserves to advance. In the white-collar world, the manager types who run it will never know who's good at his job and who's not, so the only way to test people is to load them up with pointless unpleasantness and see who departs or breaks first.
Not all individual managers actually people to break. In fact, the middle managers generally don't want it, because it makes messes they have to deal with. However, the only way to resolve the contest for limited advancement opportunities is for people to get so fed up or sick that they cannot continue.
That's also why mainstream corporate work will never be able to accommodate depression or anxiety disorders. Those illnesses, especially when they occur in the previously healthy-- burnout and nervous breakdown-- are intrinsic features of the game. It'd be a different sport without them, and the people who've been winning one game for the past few decades aren't about to change the rules.