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I'm bothered by people who prioritize synchronous communication over asynchronous. On a recent project, I worked with someone who was remote. Every time I sent an e-mail, he picked up the telephone. Then he took a long time to get to the point, and couldn't ever seem to disengage cleanly.

Open floor plans would probably work great for people like that. I prefer to not be pre-empted from my current task, and to have a written record of the things you wanted to tell me, so I can refer to it later. Face-to-face conversations are fine if I'm not already doing something else, but don't force me into one just because you're doing your "manager walk" or can't be arsed to have a specific agenda for the conversation.

If I have a door, I can hang a "do not disturb" sign on it, and lo, I am not disturbed. Otherwise, it may just be closed because the compressor from the fridge in the break area bothers me. I don't mind interruptions, provided they are more important than what I am currently doing, but it seems like open plans lower the threshold for interruption. Some people see that as also lowering the threshold for collaboration. But there are ways to design a space to encourage one without also encouraging the other.

The synchronous vs asynchronous communication argument is on par with a “best programming language” debate. The style of communication is just a tool that should fit the need and the tasks at hand. If you are working on a largely engineering driven project with a thorough spec where "heads down" development can be most effective than email/messages between team members probably will probably be effective. However, when developing on a small-sprint, iterative agile team that style of communication would be a death knell to effective communication.

Not to wave my banner in the holy war, but that's just, like, your opinion, man.

The thing I like most about async is that there must necessarily be a record of everything that was said. When appropriate, the record may be retransmitted.

Things like internal wiki entries, message boards, e-mail chains, instant message groups, and issue-tracker tickets are all asynchronous. If you conduct most of your business with ephemeral synchronous conversations, you're going to end up repeating yourself a lot, and there's going to be a larger "hit by a bus" risk. I consider it to be irresponsible business practice.

There's good reason why human development was very slow during oral tradition, and experienced exponential growth after writing.

Some use of synchronous is always appropriate. But using it instead of asynchronous rather than in addition to it is, in my opinion, pure folly. At best, the synchronous communication is what you use to make your asynchronous communication more efficient.

Another huge benefit: non-native speakers. If all your office processes rely on verbal conversation, it's really critical that everyone speaks perfect English. If the communication is async, that constraint can be relaxed slightly, which can give you a great pool of talent other companies are missing out on.

> I'm bothered by people who prioritize synchronous communication over asynchronous.

Amen. My voicemail greeting for my work phone is "Hi, you've reached the voicemail box of Jack Maney. Instead of leaving me a voicemail, please leave me an email. Thank you."

I don't get it. They're both async.

He's just funnelling people into his preferred method of communicating. They can still leave him a voicemail if they prefer.

Voicemails require an onerous synchronous process to access -- you have to go through your access menus, entering your PIN and some arcane set of numbers before you get to the message you want, and then you have to listen to it at the speed it was left, and press another set of numbers to keep it for future reference or delete it if you don't need to refer to it later (which may not be immediately obvious). If you save the voicemail, it takes longer to access other saved voicemails when you need to refer to them.

It's faster and easier to get an email, click it, and read/skim it, and let it sit in your inbox until you're ready to decide what to do with it.

What voicemail system allows you to "skim" through voicemails (roughly the equivalent of fast-forward and 2x speed playback capabilities) and is as convenient to use as email? Honest question. Because if you can name such a voicemail service, I'm sold!

FYI: Google voice will transcribe your voicemails.

Great. Now please talk the IT people at the Enterprise company at which I work to either a) ditch their voicemail system and go with Google Voice or b) integrate Google Voice into their existing voicemail system.

I have ongoing carpal tunnel problems. I avoid typed communication like the plague (dictating this, which I can't do in my open office).

>And I'm probably labeled as being a jerk, yet I cannot help being one, because contrary to other people, I really, really need to be left alone when focusing on something.

My unsolicited advice on this is to just let yourself be distracted. As much as we may not like it, it's much more important to be liked among your peers than to have high raw productivity. Employment is a popularity contest (at least for popularity among the powerful segment of the corporate structure) and there's really no way around that. If we accept that, our future as employees becomes brighter.

From what I've read about Google, they optimized for flexibility in their space. We tried to do the same, although it became difficult when the company grew faster than the office space (at least until we moved again). Not sure this would be any different in a private offices scenario, though. We had a few people who were less than enthusiastic about the open layout, and we tried to give them the space to break out when needed.

We also communicated our preferences directly. If someone was interrupting us, we would let them know that it was better to send an email or grab us before or after a known distraction (arriving at work, lunch, coffee break, end of day). We tried to schedule meetings on Mondays and Fridays to give us largely uninterrupted time during the week. People respected our preferences and tried to accommodate the "Maker's Schedule."

I'm not sure every company could or should work this way, but I worry that backlash around poor implementations of the open layout will cause us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's up to each company to evaluate the compromises necessary to create a productive workspace, open or otherwise. I worked with great people and the open office concept worked for us.

> We had a few people who were less than enthusiastic about the open layout, and we tried to give them the space to break out when needed.

OK, so I believe that this is a good strategy - the ones that prefer more privacy, should get it, the ones that prefer the open space should get an open space.

> And here's the problem - some people just cannot be respectful of other people's time or flow and also you can find a lot of variation between communication styles (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous) or noise tolerance of people.

Could it be that a solution or mitigation here is to directly address this problem? I think the idea that people are only capable of communicating in a certain way is probably too strict. Maybe it's just my experience but it seems to me that most people (with exceptions of course) don't give or get direct feedback about what type of communication works best for them, more typically they use some passive-aggressive move like brightly colored headphones or just acting annoyed and expect people to get the hint. This probably works to some degree but in a large open space it seems like you need everyone on the same page.