How workers ended up in cubes – and how they could break free

> it has become increasingly clear that far from offering a clever compromise between the economy of open-plan and the privacy of individual offices, cubicles are in many ways worse than either.

But also say that open office plans are bad:

> And last year Swedish researchers studying the link between office layouts and illness found that people who worked in open-plan offices had the highest risk of becoming ill. The reason, they concluded, was more than just the easier spread of infections. Stress caused by lack of privacy and workers’ inability to control their surroundings played a part, too.

> Open-plan offices are noisier and more interruption-prone. Too much noise causes high blood pressure, sleep problems and difficulty in concentrating. And cubicles’ flimsy walls do little to dampen sound. In studies where sound levels were raised from 39 to 51 decibels—roughly equivalent to moving from an average living room to a road with light traffic—participants were more tired and less motivated.

But I don't really have a lot of trouble with distraction and will just put on headphones if I really need to focus.

I'm comfortable in all of them. I do find myself needing headphones more often in the short cube environment; but, that's not really a big issue to me.

I don't think I would like the open layout. Something about people walking by always being able to see what's on my monitor bothers me; and I'm currently in a situation where my boss could see my monitor if he chose to look up. Still not as bothering as a completely open layout.

So, I don't see anything wrong with cubes.

edit: I should have also mentioned that I wore headphones when I had my own office, too, because walls aren't soundproof, generally.

“Cubicles even make people behave badly. Researchers at Cornell studied 229 employees at eight firms and found that those in cubicles were more prone than those in open-plan offices to have long, loud conversations—sometimes unrelated to work—with colleagues or on the phone.”

The key to making open offices work in a software development environment is fundamentally about having sufficiently low density, and having management giving a shit about basic conflicts.

Could this have something to do with economics as well? There are high returns to working in big concentrated cities. So if rents in city centres are expensive, but people still want to work specifically there, they will compromise instead by paying for less office space. How much more expensive would it be to give everyone an average of 90sqft (8.36m^2) of space?

Not that any of this is good, but to pin this undesirable outcome on a specific cause, I think one would need more precise evidence.

Could you please explain your idea in more detail?

https://goo.gl/maps/I4aON

Unfortunately some of the tail functions of a business have to much power and only pursue their own empire building and the hell with the effect on the other stake holders and indirectly the share price.

With massively impaired productivity.

It sounded like a nicer "fan" ... very consistent. I think for it to be effective, you'd want to direct it to bounce off cube or glass walls between you and the speaker. If it's loud enough, without walls, it might prevent conversation, hindering productivity for co-workers.

What you trade off is absolute sound level for attenuating speech like noises faster than they would naturally. So going from nothing to white noise is going to sound and feel noisier. But you will find that you can't hear people talking across the room as well as you could when it was quieter.

I consider it a net positive. But then again I also wear headphones frequently to listen to music for focus (and to drown out everything).