For me the best thing by far are the extremely rare "team open offices" where you put anywhere between 10-20 people inside that all work on the same type of product. Much better than your team of 10-20 people sitting in a room fitting 400 people.
Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
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Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#282The 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 lived with chronic depersonalization and the resultant anxiety which had kept me hamstrung in my one and only job
after a couple personal breakthroughs i finally gained the confidence to earn a promotion to my very modest dream role, only to find out a couple months in that we'd be transferring to open plan
after the move i almost immediately started experiencing esteem-crumbling health issues caused by the constant anxiety, i avoided growth opportunities because i couldn't muster the energy to even volunteer, i failed to cultivate proper relationships with any of my coworkers and before long my destructive fight-or-flight tendencies were back in full force
i tried being completely transparent about my problems in an attempt to save this job id wanted for so long, jumped through hoops like seeing a company appointed therapist, tried and failed to arrange more flexible working situations and so on
eventually i provided enough dirt on file for them to force me to resign, so i'm now unemployed in my 30s with no references i have any confidence in and enough shame and guilt to put me in the ground should my extreme mental fog ever clear again
knowing how deep mental issues can run i'm so sad knowing people are having their careers effectively curtailed by something as stupid as this in an industry that should understand these problems better than any other
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#283For me privacy is key. I get anxious when people are staring at me working.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
>a huge part of craft is communication, and open offices are great for that. Can you explain this to me? How does an open office lead to better communication than cubes or partitioned group work spaces? I'm in an open office. A lot of communication is done via email and IM. When someone comes to my desk to ask a question, collaborate, or just say hey, I typically don't get up. If a group stops by, we'll usually move…
I hear a conversation relevant to me and jump in, a conversation stops being relevant I jump out That simple interaction has added tons of value for me over the last few years of open offices. We have a very simple way to indicate you don't want to be interrupted, headphones or a flag There's also tons of huddle rooms you can go into if you want to hunker down in quiet - Everyone is different, some people feel switch…
>...Everyone is different, some people feel switching from keyboard to mouse is a huge productivity drain and invest a lot in avoiding that transition
And they are likely wrong. People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows. As the article says:
>...As my colleague Jessica Stillman pointed out last week, a new study from Harvard showed that when employees move from a traditional office to an open plan office, it doesn't cause them to interact more socially or more frequently.
>Instead, the opposite happens. They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before. In other words, even if collaboration were a great idea (it's a questionable notion), open plan offices are the worst possible way to make it happen.
>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#285Earlier 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.
Right - I'd expect this in Japan where space really is a premium and the collective work attitude is much different but... why here in the States?!?
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understand this line of reasoning. I have my own office. It's right next to most of my team's offices. My door is open 90% of the time. If someone wants to chat spontaneously, I don't think walking 15 feet is going to stop them.
Wouldn’t you agree it’s much more practical and inviting if you could just turn around a talk? I’d imagine that if I needed to get up, walk up there and knock on my coworker’s door, I’d rather just message him. And a text conversation and face to face one are very different and could lead it to different places.
>Wouldn’t you agree it’s much more practical and inviting if you could just turn around a talk?
No. Even when I visit my less fortunate comrades in the cube farms, I constantly feel guilty for opening my mouth because I know that there are 10 other people in earshot who probably don't have any interest at all in the discussion we're having.
>And a text conversation and face to face one are very different and could lead it to different places.
I agree, which is why I think it's important to make it easy to have face to face conversations by making sure that there's space to do so without disturbing my coworkers.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of "Social anxiety" really doesn't explain it fully IMHO. The concept may even sound like a label of being wimpy, retarded or scared, which is probably not true at all - or can be made true/untrue depending on circumstances! It's more about what kind of loads your brain are optimized for (when feeling "drained" after social exposure for a full day), being exceedingly more sensitive than most, maybe even e…
That's a very narrow view of the world, friend. It's dangerous to presume that you have such a deep and wide perspective that you can instantly diagnose something so thoroughly.
Sorry for thinking and sharing my experience.
Just go back to being socially anxious then!
Nevermind other explanation models or opportunities.
I've updated my comment to attempt to clarify the meaning better, in case that was miscommunicated.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#288What happened to Joel Spolsky’s blog-famous push for private offices in Fog Creek Software, when he moved to StackExchange did they carry that idea on? If open plan offices are so bad for “productivity”, why don’t they get selected out by market forces? Is it Price’s Law, the square root of the number of employees do half the work, and the rest doesn’t matter if they have offices or cattle desks, high or low producti…
I think bad productivity office plans don't get selected out by market forces because almost everyone is doing it. And the small number of companies not doing it are still competing with a much larger number of companies in a situation where luck is a big part of the outcome. So the effect gets drowned out, I'm thinking.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#289Something else to think critically -
1. Open space has a greater chance to skew your peer evaluations. Social aspects ends up being the numero uno factor. With cubicles you know others thru their work. This is not entirely black and white, but I strongly believe there's some truth to it.
2. Deep thinking is difficult if not impossible in open spaces.
I was fortunate enough to start my career in cubicle in a research lab. That was fantastic! I had a dip when I was introduced to open space. Got lucky again with another company that had cubicles. For the last 5 years, it has been open space mayhem.
Re: Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
#290As a millennial who has worked in open plan environments all my career, open plan offices are pretty good, so long as you've got headphones. I've got no problem with people interrupting people of they need me, but otherwise the noise of people chatting about things is completely drowned out by the music. The benefit is that if you've got an issue that you can't solve yourself you literally just have to just walk across the room at most to ask someone, which reduces the friction of doing that and thereby increases the likelihood hood of me doing it, meaning I spend less time blocked on solving a problem that others have solved before.