The nice thing about open office plans is that executives aren’t the only people who get to enjoy natural light.
Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
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Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#212One of the biggest things I miss not being in a cubicle is that I no longer have my own whiteboard. Without whiteboard space, you hamstring a developers ability to think and to communicate with others.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#213The interaction will take place if it is scripted in a dialog.
Open-plan offices are useful in movies and dramas that have office settings or scenes.
It makes these scenes more dynamic, since several characters can see each other across the room and interact directly, and lots of "extras" can be shown in a single camera angle.
I have a feeling that such scenes may have driven some of the open office initiatives in actual workplaces. ("It was so cool in that movie ...").
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#214The 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…
I am curious as what type of work did you do at that job. "I could catch errors others were making as they were going" sounds as something I would not be able to do as a developer.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#215Couldn't agree more. I have a problem where I can't concentrate on anything if there are people talking around me. I have to put on my headphones and put on some soft music but sometimes even that is not enough. I don't know if this is a problem with me or many people, but I need silence to think clearly. It is also the reason why I fail interviews where the company is interviewing many people in parallel in the same room. How the hell is anyone supposed to solve a problem with people constantly murmuring all around you?
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> yes there are distractions but you also learn new things I've found that, in open plan offices, attempting to mentor or be mentored on something is a great way to earn dirty looks from anyone who's unfortunate enough to be sitting nearby. If you do it often, people will start griping about you behind your back. Mini meeting rooms can work, when you can find them, for about a year. After that, the company will respo…
The reason you can't hang out in them is because there are never enough rooms... which is really the root of the problem.
Yep.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that the square footage you need for an open plan office plus a sufficient amount of meeting space ends up being greater than the square footage you need for a more traditional style of office. The last open plan office I worked at was probably 1/3 meeting spaces, and it still didn't feel like enough.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#217The 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…
Another anecdata: I'm in an open office right now, and the area that I'm in could ostensibly be considered to be a "cove", with about 6 people. I hate it. I'm not on the same calls, so people being in calls messes with my flow. They're not on my same calls, so I either have to move to a hot and sticky phone booth, or leave the building entirely (I've taken a few calls in my car) since I work on projects that aren't ready for the office rumor mill.
I really miss my cubicle. I could stand up and have a conversation, or sit down and be in relative peace. The sound and visual isolation offered by those fabric walls can't be overstated.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#218The 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…
One of my offices, after vocal complaints about the open office plan, did a quick survey.
Roughly 50% were fine with the open office plan. (this office was mainly devs, HR, recruiting, and data scientists) As someone that is drained by social interactions (I _like_ them, but afterwards I'm drained, not energized), that is easily distracted by movement, and who can't hear conversations in the background without instinctively trying to focus on what is being said, open offices are hell for me.
I was utterly mystified by the "other" 50%. How do you just "choose" what to focus on? That's like controlling a reflex. I knew there were extraverts, but SO MANY?!
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#219Now that we've established open office spaces are bad, where can I find more examples of what a good office space should look like?
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#220I'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 w…
> For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird.
This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes off his headphones and looks up at the person.
It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change. Apparently humans in group spaces just really, really, really want to verbally speak to other humans in those spaces and there's no amount of "hey guys I'm really trying to work here could you keep it down" that doesn't come across as rude or condescending.
I guess part of it for me is there seems to be no escaping from the noise of life any more. At least at work I used to have an office with a door that I could close for a couple of hours of solitude and heads-down real work. Now, after the building redesign, there are 950 people in the building and a pittance of conference rooms and phone rooms and "team rooms" (little conference rooms supposedly shared between just two or three teams sitting in larger "pod rooms" but, in practice, squatted in by one or two people all day). I've spent twenty minutes walking around my building and the adjacent one just trying to find somewhere to do a phone screen for an interview candidate.
Combine that with the rest of the world getting louder[0] and it's becoming a little frustrating.
0 - Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.