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Open offices are a dead end

nytimes.com

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Re: Open offices are a dead end

#231

Post by kerkeslager »

msbarnett wrote: post #218
kerkeslager wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got numerous people on this page saying they work better in open offices. Do you have some reason for disbelieving them?

There's a pretty wide gap between "numerous people on this page" and "a significant portion of the population". Given actual productivity studies tend to show a big, big decrease in productivity among workers who have individual or small group offices replaced with open office plans, the "significant portion of the population" claim seems unlikely, since they're apparently not significant enough to move the needle in…

> Given actual productivity studies tend to show a big, big decrease in productivity among workers who have individual or small group offices replaced with open office plans, the "significant portion of the population" claim seems unlikely, since they're apparently not significant enough to move the needle in productivity studies.

That's not how statistics work. If 60% of people see a 20% decrease in productivity in an open office and 40% see a 20% increase, then: .6 x .8 + .4 x 1.2 = .48 + .48 = .96, so you'd expect to see a 4% decrease in productivity.

In fact, people who work in open offices could even be the majority if the effects have different magnitudes. Let's say 70% of people experience a 10% increase in productivity when working in an open office, while the other 30% experience a 50% decrease. .7 x 1.1 + .3 x .5 = .77 + .15 = .92. So you could see an 8% reduction in productivity in an open office, even if 70% saw an increase in productivity.

You would, of course, see an increase in productivity in both scenarios if you let people work in the office spaces that are appropriate for their needs.

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#232

Post by trentnix »

msbarnett wrote: post #224
trentnix wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote situations are also difficult to manage. I'm in management role at a new (to me) company and despite having a virtual meeting with one of my reports virtually every day, I've got a better understanding of the psychology of people that I see around the office casually even though they are in a completely different and unrelated department. Those interactions are unscheduled, have no agenda, and have no goals. A…

> To be Captain Obvious for a moment, it seems much easier for remote employees to hide a lack of productivity, especially in roles where productivity is hard to quantify (like software development). If you can't trust your workers to get work done without surveilling them, you should fire them, and focus on hiring employees you feel capable of truly trusting, not lament your inability to surveil them. An under-discu…

Perhaps I don't have the skills to make such remote discernment as you seem to be able to do. Perhaps I've only had the wrong resources. Or perhaps the projects you're managing have a different sort of complexity and domain knowledge required than the projects I manage. After all, some projects might lend themselves to remote teams than others. Who knows?

There are some scenarios (domain knowledge, budget constraints, lack of office space, etc.) that justify people working remotely, so don't take my original comment as a statement that remote teams never work. Clearly they have, and clearly they do. But even if you're just some sort of management Jedi that I'm not, I think there are inherent flaws in remote teams that aren't solved by just having the right people.

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#233

Post by JohnFen »

I've worked at three places that embraced the open office scheme.

What I've learned from those experiences is that I do not operate well in those environments. So much so that I now know that if a company uses it, there's no point in exploring employment with them as right off the bat I know it's a poor fit for me.

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#234

Post by kerkeslager »

pojzon wrote: post #163
kerkeslager wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is very much up for debate. Let's hypothesize that 60% of people work better in private offices, and 40% work better in open offices. You force everyone to work in a private office, and they perform slightly better than if you force everyone to work in an open office--that perfectly explains the results of the studies. But obviously if this hypothesis is true, then the best solution would be to let the 40%…

How about we let people who want to work from home to work from home and people who need others arpund to work in the office ? Win - Win situation. Unfortunately it seems too hard to understand for the majority of managers.. (most likely because they represent the later)

> How about we let people who want to work from home to work from home and people who need others arpund to work in the office ?

Sounds good to me!

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#235

Post by pwinnski »

BoorishBears wrote: post #185
pwinnski wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Ultimately, any space issue can be solved with enough money, so yes. But space usually isn't easily expanded. My company has the 7th floor of a 10-floor building. When we hire people as we've been doing, we can either fit them into the existing space somehow, or... move the entire office? Rent space on the floor above or below? It isn't as easy as just "spend a bit more money, get a bit more space," so no…

Yes and yes is what I got out of your answer. >When we hire people as we've been doing, we can either fit them into the existing space somehow, or... move the entire office? Yes. Exactly. My office did it with 0 days down time combining 3 separate locations spread out around a city downtown. We labeled our stuff on Friday, a company was contracted to make sure on Monday our stuff would be in a new office, and it was.…

So for every new hire at your company, you pack up on a Friday and unpack on a Monday? Do you only hire on one day a year, or sign week-long leases, rather than year-long leases?

No, that's silly. You lease a building bigger than you need today, and then when you fill it up you either pause hiring or start cramming people in until your lease is up and you can move.

Or, I guess you can set money on fire and break lease after lease after lease, but I think there's no way around the fact that this is a space issue first and foremost, with money providing a way to mitigate/solve space issues.

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#236

Post by kerkeslager »

no_wave wrote: post #208
kerkeslager wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds like a great argument against open offices. I could not handle sitting near two people pair programming the whole day. If they went to a private office to do it that would seem ideal. I don't understand. You can't handle working in an open office, so your solution is to force people who work well in an open office to work in a private office? Why can't you go work in a private office if that works well…

Expecting your neighbor to be ok with two people talking to each other for 7 hours straight is just plain rude regardless of your office preference.

Please read the post you are responding to.

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#237

Post by JohnFen »

m_mueller wrote: post #39
scarface74 wrote: post #16

If I could craft the perfect job for me, the one I work at would be it - an intelligent straightforward manager who will speak his mind bluntly and can take it just as well as he can dish it out. He’s mostly concerned with results not whether you kiss his ring. - small company without a lot of bureaucracy -- I have full access to our entire AWS infrastructure - relatively generous PTO - a decent free family health pl…

Do you own noise cancelling headphones? Mine are worth their weight in gold to me (Sony W-something 1000x Mk2).

For me, wearing noise cancelling headphones increases the amount of stress that an open office causes.

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#238

Post by kerkeslager »

no_wave wrote: post #197
kerkeslager wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got numerous people on this page saying they work better in open offices. Do you have some reason for disbelieving them?

Yes? It's easy to feel productive in an open office. There's activity and buzz and you can accomplish nothing for four hours and still feel like you did something. You can't do that in a more private setting, what you're actually getting done is staring you in the face.

I've always received performance feedback which roughly matched my experience of my productivity.

This comment strikes me as more malicious than is warranted.

Re: Open offices are a dead end

#240

Post by msbarnett »

trentnix wrote: post #232
msbarnett wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be Captain Obvious for a moment, it seems much easier for remote employees to hide a lack of productivity, especially in roles where productivity is hard to quantify (like software development). If you can't trust your workers to get work done without surveilling them, you should fire them, and focus on hiring employees you feel capable of truly trusting, not lament your inability to surveil them. An under-discu…

Perhaps I don't have the skills to make such remote discernment as you seem to be able to do. Perhaps I've only had the wrong resources. Or perhaps the projects you're managing have a different sort of complexity and domain knowledge required than the projects I manage. After all, some projects might lend themselves to remote teams than others. Who knows? There are some scenarios (domain knowledge, budget constraints…

> Perhaps I don't have the skills to make such remote discernment as you seem to be able to do.

If you're a non-software developer managing software developers, that's (in my experience) a profound organizational issue that simply does not work in any situation, open office or remote. If you lack the skills to actually evaluate the work output by your reports, then you're left with piss-poor proxies that are more noise than signal and frequently have no correlation to what productivity actually looks like in the field.

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