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Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

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Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#141

Post by KVFinn »

I'm certainly an open-office hater, it drives me absolutely batty. Open office with frequent phone calls throughout the day by your neighbors? I'd quit.

I do like small open offices when working closely with people on a team. But everyone in that office has to be working on the same project. This is the scenario where it can be great. Even in this case, though, there are some periods where you need to step away to a silo to do your own thing for awhile in my experience.

I have heard of some mythical working environments with both public and private working areas that allow people to move as they will. I guess this would be the optimal solution.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#142

Post by davesims »

geoka9 wrote: post #72
davesims wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. What people complain about is not necessarily an indication of what's not working . My last two gigs have been open-plan, and I prefer it much more than closed-cube spaces. If your team is working as it should, and is in close proximity to project/product management, with a good process and a healthy level of trust between the stakeholders and between the various engineers, then in my experience…

> high-functioning teams tend to thrive on the cross-talk and constant communication that open plan creates organically. I wonder how programmers in such environments can get in the "zone" and stay in it for extended periods of time, if they are being "constantly communicated with".

I'm ADD to the core, and I find it actually easier to zone out and code with a low-level background noise, "coffee-shop" style. Large spikes in noise are a problem, and also non-relevant conversations that pull everyone's attention off-task, but on the open teams I've been on, in general this has been the exception not the rule.

My experience at large tables has been that good coders and PMs will actually IM a developer when they need to ask a question -- I do this all the time even when I'm sitting 2 feet from the guy I need to talk to: "let me know when you have a sec to talk about X", etc.

Again, that's evidence of a team that's generally on-task and communicating well -- a cultural quality that is itself harder to find than not.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#143

Post by greenyoda »

jonwingfield wrote: post #18

I tend to enjoy the open plan. Our team has currently voluntarily moved to an open space within an otherwise cubicle-dominated workplace to facilitate better communication within the team. I can see issues with this layout when multiple teams are involved or team sizes are large, but I really like it for our small team (and I'd like to think the rest of the team would agree). I also feel like there definitely needs t…

"Maybe it depends on the team and the personality types in it?"

That's exactly the case. Different people have different preferences. And if you have an inflexible work environment of a particular type, your company is losing access to all the talented people who hate that particular environment -- you're, in effect, making something like the ability to work in a noisy space a more important hiring criterion than the ability to write good code. (Maybe this is one of the reasons that companies feel there's a shortage of developers?)

The best approach might be to offer a choice to employees rather than having rigid policies like "everybody has to collaborate on a minute-by-minute basis in an open space", or "managers get offices and everyone else gets cubicles". Giving employees control over their individual working environments would go a long way toward making them feel valued by the company, even more than giving them free food.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#144

Post by mahyarm »

jonwingfield wrote: post #18

I tend to enjoy the open plan. Our team has currently voluntarily moved to an open space within an otherwise cubicle-dominated workplace to facilitate better communication within the team. I can see issues with this layout when multiple teams are involved or team sizes are large, but I really like it for our small team (and I'd like to think the rest of the team would agree). I also feel like there definitely needs t…

That is not open plan, that is a team room. It's extremely distracting when 10 people are having a conversation around you, half the time with passionate, loud voices.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#145

Post by greenyoda »

jon_black wrote: post #116

I wrote an article on my blog in January to the same effect: http://jonblack.org/2013/01/29/open-plan-offices-are-a-night... . The funny thing is, in spite of all the signs, our office are knocking walls down to make rooms bigger!

Thanks, that five-minute TED talk in your article was very interesting.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#146

Post by kabdib »

rhizome wrote: post #120
mcphilip wrote: post #14

I really struggle to get in the 'zone' where I can do the creative aspects of software engineering (e.g. researching graph databases like neo4j and determining if our startup can benefit from it) when I'm in an open environment. I have been diagnosed with ADD for the past 8 years, but am working towards a medication free approach to dealing with it. Open spaces really hurt my productivity because my mind naturally tr…

Pretty much my worst working experience was in an open plan office (the boss had their own office, natch), where the boss would walk into the room, "Hey guys...", everybody takes their headphones off and looks up, and he starts talking about something that is relevant to two, maybe two and a half, people. This would happen about once per hour. Policy against headphones, is that a thing? Shudder.

Intel had (and maybe still has) a "no headphones" policy. Even at night, with no one else in the office.

Idiocy.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#147

Post by snuxoll »

monkeynotes wrote: post #130
absconditus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether your coworkers enjoy being interrupted frequently.

When working on a project that needs to be extremely reactive and accomodate functionality at short notice often requires quick, on target communication. If my coworkers aren't able to communicate quickly, and efficiently with myself and the other team members then the project will lose agility. Often we will have tasks that require not being disturbed and in the stand up meetings we flag this.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the POINT of "agile" (seeing as you just used the word) software development to both increase communication AND eliminate distractions by keeping a single line of communication open between the product owner and the development team so things can be filtered out and brought up at appropriate times?

If you need immediate communication, there are other far less distracting methods, such as IM or email, that one can safely ignore until they have managed to lessen their memory load until they've reached a safe point to stop. If you're constantly interrupting your fellow developer while they're in the middle of a high-memory task you are deliberately DESTROYING any "agility" of your project by wasting their time rebuilding their mental state before you interrupted them.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#148

Post by rscale »

lmg643 wrote: post #39
Cushman wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Those who make such a judgement are guilty of performing a cost/benefit study without the benefit of studying the benefit." Sounds like the last forty years of mainstream corporate policy in a nutshell.

Joel Spolsky has written extensively about peopleware: "Ever wonder why everybody at Microsoft gets their own office, with walls and a door that shuts? It's in there. Why do managers give so much leeway to their teams to get things done? That's in there too. Why are there so many jelled SWAT teams at Microsoft that are remarkably productive? Mainly because Bill Gates has built a company full of managers who read Peop…

Facebook's engineering director Jocelyn Goldfein spoke about open office plans during her recent talk at Stanford. She explicitly stated that it decreases her team's productivity, but that it was embraced because it promotes "openness" which is a core value at Facebook.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#149

Post by city41 »

Zigurd wrote: post #138

Microsoft got this right, and I expect they have the metrics to show it's true. Some things have changed, though. Coders don't need a bookshelf when they can get a Safari subscription. Nobody needs a fixed-line phone. For 90% of coding a laptop is fast enough. So I would think that a "hotelling" style arrangement would work now, before, a coder might be holed up with a pile of books, big, heavy CRTs, and desktop comp…

I disagree that Microsoft got this right. I assume you're referring to giving everyone their own office. I worked for MS for 3 years on a team that did that. For sure, having your own office is really nice. But it really stifles communication and creativity.

Even worse, when space is low, the solution is to double people up in offices. That can create really uncomfortable situations that can harm productivity as well, much like suddenly getting a new, unexpected roommate.

Re: Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick

#150

Post by mindcrime »

monkeynotes wrote: post #59
lmg643 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel Spolsky has written extensively about peopleware: "Ever wonder why everybody at Microsoft gets their own office, with walls and a door that shuts? It's in there. Why do managers give so much leeway to their teams to get things done? That's in there too. Why are there so many jelled SWAT teams at Microsoft that are remarkably productive? Mainly because Bill Gates has built a company full of managers who read Peop…

I've tried working in a cubical, an individual office with a door, and open plan offices. By far my favourite is open plan. I like being able to turn to my co-workers and ask quick questions, I like the atmosphere, and if things are too noisy or distracting I just put headphones on and get in the zone.

Conversely open-plan is my least favourite. It appears to be a system designed to maximize interrupts, distractions and context switches, and to minimize productivity, morale and concentration. As far as I'm concerned, "open plan" is the Evil incarnate.

I would never willingly subject a group of knowledge workers to that environment. When we grow Fogbeam to the point that we have employees and actual office space, my intention is to ensure that everybody has a private office, with a door that closes. Or, at least, that everybody is offered such a thing. If some people want to work in a different configuration, I wouldn't want to force them into an office when they don't want it.

My dream configuration has always been "a private office for every individual" and then complemented by several large open area with plenty of couches, chairs, tables, and whiteboards on wheels (and good wi-fi, of course) so that teams, small groups, and individuals can create ad-hoc, temporary configurations that suit them when they need to be co-located, but yet everybody has an office of their own they can retreat to when they need intense focus and privacy.

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