Don't think they're any worse than any other layout, most implementations are just lazy. There needs to be sane guidelines (no music overhead playing, relatively quiet, move discussions into a closed room) or obviously it won't work. I prefer it over cubicles.
Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
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Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never really worked in a cubicle (once had a mid tower PC and dual monitors acting as partitions to the front and left) but wouldn't an advantage of an open plan office over a cubicle be that you can see your manager walking towards you from a mile off and be able to quickly look like you're working.
These issues sound a lot like managers not trusting employees to get work done, which sounds like a bigger issue.
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Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. I remember watching "Office Space" circa 2000 and it looked pretty soul crushing, and working in pre-FAANG big tech around 2006, it felt very mechanical and depressing. I get your gripes, but I think some is also rosy retrospection.
It was dull, gray, and lacking in character but it sure beats sitting elbow to elbow cafeteria style trying to get work done.
I used to work for a global 500 company that had cube farms at some locations, and others on an open plan.
I'm not gonna lie, the cube farms were an awful eyesore. But I still really enjoyed the occasional weeks I'd spend visiting those offices, and would have jumped at the chance to move to one. The people were quite a bit more outgoing and social, and yet the space still managed to be quieter. Noise level and character were generally comparable to those of my college's library.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. I remember watching "Office Space" circa 2000 and it looked pretty soul crushing, and working in pre-FAANG big tech around 2006, it felt very mechanical and depressing. I get your gripes, but I think some is also rosy retrospection.
It was dull, gray, and lacking in character but it sure beats sitting elbow to elbow cafeteria style trying to get work done.
I do sit next to others but do have full sized desk, two large monitors and with a pair of good headphones I think it works pretty well.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand you're joking about Agile, but the previous holy path was waterfall, which was a hideously expensive way to get to failure.
Except that Waterfall was never really advocated: https://davesquared.net/2008/01/contentious-myth-of-waterfal... It was conceived as a straw man which was being dissed so vigorously that people started believing it was real.
thank you. I try not to post just to vehemently agree, but this is a pretty egregious case of revisionism.
we were just so blind back then that we thought we could predict the future. When faced with direct evidence that things weren't going according to plan, or that the commercial landscape had changed, we stubbornly went back to our Gantt charts and insisted that it just couldn't be so.
so we just never got anything done..until some genius decided we had to meet every morning and schedule everything in 2 week intervals.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#96I am a millennial (born in '88) and I would LOVE to have a cubicle. My first job was at Cisco in San Jose, California which had cubicles. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the corporate environment with cubicles. I loved my cubicle. Like you said: just enough privacy to get things done. People would come by only if absolutely necessary otherwise they would mind their own business. Having cubicles also preven…
I think people's experiences and what they consider cubicles vary widely. When I started, I had a true cubicle with a standing 'U' shaped desk around the cube perimeter, which could've housed two employees. The cubicles had tall walls (7ft) so there was some actual privacy. those were Cubicle Nirvana, but for density reasons have seen two iterations of smaller, and smaller cubes. 'drive-by' type meetings were easy to accommodate without disrupting others.
Currently, our cubicles are a honey-comb type arrangement. (think pods of three cubicles on one side, two on the other) There is no privacy, and rows behind you leave 18" of space to the employee behind you. Gone are the tall walls for working while standing. Edges of the cubicles do not stand proud of the desks, so it's not much to work with.
We've seemingly taken the worst of both worlds when it comes to cubicle AND open office concepts. I wouldn't even know what to call it, other than awful.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#97I am a millennial (born in '88) and I would LOVE to have a cubicle. My first job was at Cisco in San Jose, California which had cubicles. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the corporate environment with cubicles. I loved my cubicle. Like you said: just enough privacy to get things done. People would come by only if absolutely necessary otherwise they would mind their own business. Having cubicles also preven…
Your post reminded me of how my own perception has changed.
I remember when I graduated college I interviewed and got a job and went to work at this company that in hindsight, had these awesome large high end cubicles, with wooden U shaped desks and tall partitions. Yet, I remember walking to my cubicle and feeling a pang of sadness. I could see this huge cubicle farm and I was being guided to my own "little" cubicle to go and sit in. Felt like a hamster in a cage - a small cog in a huge machine. Which I guess I was. All the managers had offices along the outsides of the farm, facing the windows.
But now that my expectations have been lowered further... I'd take that cubicle setup over an open plan office any day.
If space is at such a premium, the solution is to encourage more remote work. At this point, the industry, with its years of experience in outsourcing, offshoring and working with distributed teams has proven that remote work is an excellent and efficient model. At the very least, it should be far more mainstream than it is.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#98IBM did some productivity study in the 70s. Top productivity was 2 people in an office.
I had one of those IBM offices back in the day. Great for IT productivity.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#99I was reading "Bloomberg by Bloomberg" over the weekend and I thought his opinion on the topic was relevant since I believe Bloomberg was one of the first major workplaces that placed everyone in tight open-office type environments. My understanding of his opinion on the topic was: yes there are distractions but you also learn new things. Fundamentally I think there is considerable misunderstanding between people who…
> but you also learn new things
I don't buy it. Most people are trying to get shit done so are wearing headphones and for the people that aren't, you only overhear people who happen to be within earshot radius from where you're sitting and only if you're somewhat paying attention or not otherwise distracted, and of that stuff you do overhear, how much is actually relevant or useful? In my personal experience, the amount of times I overheard something in the work space (as opposed in a social space area like the break room) that was useful or relevant to me has been far, far less than the amount of useful stuff I've encountered in places that had a "be vocal on slack" culture.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#100So I worked in a legacy industry and they co-located a couple of teams near our biggest client. They decided to put in place an open office concept for the engineers and support staff, and gave the VPs and sales guys private offices.
Especially when we first moved into the office the VPs loved to take the customers on a tour and stand at the top of the space and tell them how great this open office was. I was in a bad mood one time when this happened and the VP asked me if I agreed (with the customer) and I said, "it is perfect for what it was built for, it was built to show our customers how many resources we have and to imply that we have no walls separating our BUs from working together." He was not happy, but also had no lines of responsibility to me or my business segment.
And like all open offices it was loud so everyone put on headphones and we had zero cross-BU interaction and very low inter-BU interaction. At one point corporate tried to push a no headphones rule because it looked bad when they brought in customers and it did not land well in the cube dwellers. A compromise was reached to not allow headphones when customers leadership visits where planned, about once a month.
My biggest problem with the design was that they guy in the desk that faced me spent around 80% of his time on conference calls. Now he wasn't loud at all, almost never said anything on these calls, but he would sit silently with his headset on staring directly at me the whole time. Now he wasn't looking at me, just looking forward but it was really disconcerting.
What I always find funny about the whole concept is that the open cube was really first imagined by Taylor as he tried to apply physical labor efficiencies into the office world. You would have everyone in an open office with the manager slighly raised up behind everyone so he could monitor them to ensure everyone was working at peak efficiency. Plus the modern leader of open offices, a company I forgot the name of in Colorado implemented and pushed open offices into the modern world, and then killed the practice internally in less than 2 years.