Absolutely awful - whoever brought in this trend of "open office floor plan"! Please go back to having mini offices for everyone or at the very least cubicles with decent sized walls to get some privacy!
Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
311–320 of 838 posts
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#312It's been wild to see the amount of news stories that came out this summer all at the same time – this enormous back-to-office push that's not at all some kind of commercial real-estate PR campaign.
Anyway, one thing that gets thrown around a lot is the 'hallway conversation'. This idea that work is suffering because people aren't getting together spontaneously, or they're lacking the high-fidelity in-person exchanges, etc, etc.
But the funny thing is, over the years I've been in countless in-person intensive sprints. Week long exhaustive affairs where people are all in a room, brainstorming, planning.
Great ideas happen! But, how many of those sprints actually lead to action in the company? Once the herd-followers force everyone back into the panopticon, what then will they blame the lack of innovation on? Or are we simply pretending that prior to the pandemic every company in the world was truly operating at genius level, and it wasn't largely a by-product of a zero-interest-rate phenomenon?
"Sorry – gotta go, someone else needs this room."
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#313Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.
While I agree that in private offices would be amazing, the amount of space this would require seems huge.
Ideally each room would be as big as a two-person conference room, and even that would feel a little claustrophobic after several hours.
Companies can't fit enough of those in as it stands. How would they do it for every employee? The square footage needs would be huge.
Open office floorplans take ~75 sqft per employee. An office would take ~150.
I vaguely remember IBM cubicle farms from visiting their offices as a child. They took up a ton of space, requiring huge office towers. That means lots of elevator trips and conference room needs.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
It won't. The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting. Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees. At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big inve…
To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation. You sort of fractional-reserve your office space. Of course it works only so long as nobody calls an in-person all hands. The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for the…
> To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation.
This doesn’t sound like a stable equilibrium to me; more like a transition to full remote that you do when you’re waiting for your lease to run out. Not even having your own permanent desk sounds like utter hell.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#315when I worked in Germany we had small offices for 2 or 3 people. I thought that was perfect. You could have nice, quiet chats and really work on things together. Open office seems to be something made up by super extroverts who think things get done best in a loud and frantic way where everybody yells at each other. And cubes seem to be made up by people who like to dehumanize workers.
Interestingly the execs who push hardest for WFH are a) almost never at the office and b) have a nice private office with windows.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend th…
I think the boiled frog is a perfect analogy. I grew up always assuming there would be a long commute. I couldn't afford to move out of my parents house for almost a year out of school in my first job (2008 making less than $30k/yr) so I spent 7 or 8 months driving an hour each way. I'm too young to remember but my dad spent the first few years of my life and several before that commuting 2 hours one way. Spending at…
Growing up in NYC, I had three hours of commuting per day from age 14 to 26. Then I switched to work from home (this was before covid). I would never go back.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
>My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office. Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got tha…
" I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office." People should stop saying this. Otherwise it will soon be the standard to take a serious paycut for WFH. .
Not with unemployment where it is. Instead it's more likely that companies will offer more money to software engineers to compensate for a must-commute policy.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite story on this thread is that during the hybrid period, GS CEO threw a fit when out in the Hamptons because some analyst (fairly junior role almost at the bottom) had the balls to go introduce themselves during a workday lunch at a restaurant. He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed…
This example is a stark reminder that the complaints are most often not about details but about class . The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class. It’s always class when one boils it down, imho.
Not everything is a class dynamic. “Analyst at GS hanging out in the Hamptons” doesn’t scream working class.
The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just different levels of power and seniority.
That CEO is just a power-tripping asshole.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend th…
My favorite story on this thread is that during the hybrid period, GS CEO threw a fit when out in the Hamptons because some analyst (fairly junior role almost at the bottom) had the balls to go introduce themselves during a workday lunch at a restaurant. He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed…
Because I was curious, here's what I found on the Goldman CEO story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-03-15/goldma...
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#320People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…
See if I lived five minutes walk from work, I’d want to be in the office even less. Why sit there between meetings if I am five minutes from my home? Why bag a lunch when my kitchen is down the block? I’d probably show face at the obligate meetings then just go home for the day if I could.
I lived 5 minutes away from work for a few years, I could see my office window from my apartment window. Going into the office wasn't a big deal, it was just a 5 minute walk. I really didn't care about going home for lunch because we had a cafeteria and I'd eat lunch or go get snack with my friends and there were probably 20 restaurants within a 10 minute walk so I had better options than a PB&J. It was much more of a social thing than a work thing, why sit in my apartment by myself when I have a half dozen people I enjoy hanging out with 5 minutes away. The only disadvantage was that due to my proximity I was always the go to person in case someone had to physically go to the office, the guy who lived 80 miles away was never asked to pop in on a Saturday to reboot something but I was asked all the time.