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Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

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Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#191

Post by knightofmars »

munificent wrote: post #167
knightofmars wrote: post #143

I realize it's opinion, but I'm amazed that people think cubicles are privacy. I get that you feel more productive and that there is likely a reduction in visual distraction but it's an illusion of privacy, it ends up being a "lesser of two evils" scenario. Providing everyone with an office that has a closing door (while more expensive) has the highest productivity outcome. Fun dive into history, the guy who invented…

I think you may be taking "privacy" a little too literally. A "privacy fence" in your backyard does not literally shield your entire property from observation. But it interrupt sightlines and lower how "social" the space feels . When it comes to focus and productivity, that is often enough.

"When it comes to focus and productivity, that is often enough."

Based on your own personal criteria of what "enough" is. And what you're attempting to optimize for. An office is a place where people are intended to be productive. If _real_ privacy enables people to be the most productive then optimizing for something else (cost) is quite possibly a huge mistake on a long running timeline.

Having been in cubicles, I've overheard enough conversations from co-workers that should have been private related to both business and personal life.

I don't know what your experience is, but having spent years in a "cube farm", I'm intimately aware of the differences between having a cube and an open office. Distractions in a cubicle may be reduced but noise, smells, and other distractions are the facts of life when you have over a certain number of people within a small enough area. I've lived it, it's a half-measure and while it may improve productivity over an open office it's also just a cost-saving measure with the side-effect of having a tax write-off at the end of a day.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#192

Post by arafa »

jackfoxy wrote: post #34

35+ years in the IT workforce here. Yep, dumbest idea ever. The vast majority of my office time was in cubicles, which are pretty good. Usually enough privacy to get things done. I did have a glassed-in private office for about a year at one company. That was productivity heaven. In retrospect I was dumb to leave that company when I did, but they started demolishing offices for cubicles about 2 years later. It is all…

"It is all about efficient use of real estate."

I've been a part of these discussions at very high levels and this is the consistent theme. Short-term, easily quantifiable savings against nebulous, hard to quantify harms. Facilities folks always win and get a pat on the back. Any push back about the open office should, in my opinion, start with addressing this basic incentive. Everything about collaboration, open communication, etc. is just window dressing used to justify the moves.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#193

Post by Davertron »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #72

I've worked in a variety of settings, and my favorite is a small team in a conference room/tiny open office. 3-8 people. People tend to be respectful of each other's concentration at that number of people. And since you're in the same team, most interruptions are likely to be useful to other members of the team. But if we wanted to just bother 1 specific person, we would just use instant message. Our manager worked i…

I guess I'll be the exception here. I'm in a psudeo-open workspace right now which is pretty much what you're talking about except that we're not in a room, it's what the company calls a "pod" with high walls and a single doorway. I would say 90% of all distractions etc. come from inside the pod. Moving us into our own room would make no difference. It does get pretty loud sometimes in the building, but it's mostly white noise and easy (at least for me) to ignore. The only way to work mostly without distractions here is to wear headphones, which generally signals to others that they should leave you alone, but even then people will still just wander over and bother you because you're right there. For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird.

The most productive times I have, hands-down, are when I work from home.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#194

Post by mprovost »

phonon wrote: post #109
brianpayne2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking with a friend who works at a company HQ'd in NYC and he said that the average cost per person/desk was over 60k/yr. It was a lot higher than I was expecting.

No way...a nice sized cubicle is 100 sqft, and Class A rents in Manhattan are under $100/sqft/y. So the actual office space is something like $10,000 or less per year. Of course there is other overhead, but space itself is in that range. So the max savings, in the most expensive market in the US, is under $10k per year.

That size seems high. 100 sqft would be a nice sized office. Cubicles are more like 30 square feet. Douglas Coupland gave cubicles the name "veal fattening pens" in Generation X but they're actually smaller now - calf enclosures are 30-35 sqft. The latest fad with standing desks is even smaller.

https://www.wired.com/2000/05/is-your-cubicle-shrinking-too/

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#195

Post by HammockTester »

bachmeier wrote: post #51
ryandrake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to get the alternate view out there too: I had an office once with a door that closed. As an extrovert it was awful. I felt lonely all day. The only way to get any human contact besides email and text was to leave and go walk the halls or find some common area. I ended up pretty much never using it and instead worked from the break room. From time to time they’d give me an officemate to share the office, but the…

> Just to get the alternate view out there too This always comes up in these discussions. Extroverts say they prefer the open office format because they can talk to others. That's nice and all, but shouldn't you be working rather than satisfying your desire to talk to others? (The same goes for workers not in an open office not playing on HN all day.)

No. That might be the perspective of the employer. Work from an employee perspective is about satisfying your own needs: financial, social, goal-oriented, etc. You obviously need to get some amount of work done to keep your job and meet your own goals, but not necessarily 8 hours of sustained effort per day.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#198

Post by miscPerson »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #185
dualboot wrote: post #137

The other side of this is that a very large percentage of folks in our industry seem to have social anxiety-spectrum issues. Folks without those don't seem to understand how much energy is being burned through just being out in the open and on display for all of your coworkers. It's not something I, personally, have control over. The time I've spent in "open concept" work places, I finish every day frustrated with my…

I've had the opposite experience. I had a job where half the floor plan was cubicals and half was open plan where you had groups of 2-3 people in a sort of cove. I started in the cubicle section. And I hated my job. Every day felt draining to the soul. I felt invisible and isolated and I hated it. I was making no progress in the organization. I'd constantly find excuses to leave my desk just to see another human face…

The second sounds like hub-and-spoke, where you have pods of 2-4 people clustered around common area. (I enjoy that as well.)

Open concept is usually more like 20-40 in a giant pen without any sort of separation or soundproofing between.

Studies suggest hub-and-spoke is good; open concept is high density feedlots applied to white collar work.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#199

Post by UncleMeat »

Androider wrote: post #48
monkeynotes wrote: post #7

I am not sure why employees would message and email more if they can just turn their chair around to chat about something they are working on. Does anyone have experience of this? I have worked in open plan offices since 1999 and I've never experienced productivity problems. If anything I'd expect working in a cube would lead to more time wasted cruising websites since your screen is more obscured. I dunno, I've only…

Simple, when you go visit someone in a private office you can close the door and have a long conversation about your topic and really hash out the details. If you turn around and start blabbering to one of your teammates in an open office plan, everyone within hearing distance will want to murder you. If you're not aware of this, I guarantee everyone within 30 feet of you is already wearing headphones and hates you.…

Private offices aren't cubes. You can still hear conversations with cubicles. And if you have an office with more than one person, the long conversation still disrupts the other people in the office.

Long conversations do deserve private space, but this can be resolved by having ample meeting spaces.

Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study

#200

Post by JohnFen »

montagg wrote: post #16
Mikeb85 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. Real estate is expensive.

I’d be really curious how much of a hit to people’s salary they would be willing to take, or the reduced capabilities of their business, to get an open office environment. I worked with an internal team that created a brand new office for a decently-sized tech company. We had this exact debate: open or closed. We explored closed, or versions of it (see Spotify’s team rooms as a great example of a compromise), but the…

After trying it twice, I'm pretty sure that there is no amount of compensation that would get me to agree to work in an open office space.
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