21–30 of 77 posts
I think it comes down to the person, why not offer both choices?
By the way that graph near the end woke my inner 80s teenager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1sLICo-Cxo
This fascinates me. I find open-plan offices really hard to work in. Meanwhile—perhaps surprisingly—my favorite places to work are coffee houses or college libraries. I'm surrounded by strangers, but their anonymous presence starves off the feelings of loneliness that I can get working from home. I think the difference between a public place and an office is that it's really unlikely for any of those strangers outsid…
I have to say I wasn't a fan. There was a lot of background noise, and it was very difficult to have a private conversation. I constantly felt like someone might look over my shoulder (a problem if dealing with sensitive documents), or interrupt work I'd struggled to get focussed into. It was also hard to have private conversations about sensitive topics without having to search for a space away from everyone's desk. Previously we'd just talk about stuff without moving.
My biggest frustration, though, was the fact it was very hard to be anything other than corporately bland in our attitudes. When we were split into floors and rooms, it was much easier to laugh and joke, and I often saw people bring something in to announce someone's birthday and make a fuss of them.
After going open-plan, it seemed the only way to celebrate anything was to interrupt the entire office, which put a large dampener on it.
There's also the issue that if you tend to be introverted, open-plan offices can be exhausting.
[1] Office space is expensive, but not that expensive relative to an engineer's salary. The going rate for class A space in Manhattan is about $70/square foot per year. That puts a 10x10 office (assuming 85% usable space) at about $8,000 per year + build-out + maintenance.
[2] Apple's new spaceship building (in the middle of a faceless suburb) will cost $5 billion and have 2.8 million square feet of space. One World Trade Center (in downtown Manhattan) will cost $3.9 billion and have over 3 million square feet of class A office space. A lower-profile project, the New York Times building in Midtown West, was constructed for $850 million and has 1.5 million square feet.
Apparently Google spent almost $2 billion on a squat 18-story structure in Manhattan with an over-abundance of depressing window-less interior spaces... I'm going to assume it was the difficulty of getting 2.9 million square feet in one place rather than just bad taste.
EDIT: I'm not saying Apple's offices are open plan. I have no idea what Apple's setup is. I'm pointing out that companies are certainly willing to spend a lot of money on these big suburban office parks, multiples of what it would cost to just buy a couple of skyscrapers in SF. Thus, cost does not seem to be the motivating factor (except maybe in a penny-wise pound-foolish sort of way).
Worst in employee satisfaction. What about productivity? All the stats quoted were surveys, not measures of work done.
If you were at the islands, you were working and available to be called over. If you were in your private cubicle, you were to be left alone unless it was really important. From total openness to decent privacy in a few steps. That's as good a balance as I've seen.
The research seems to only deal with employee preference and not much with performance.
I'm surprised there is still so much disagreement on what works best and even more surprised how popular open plans are. Open plans only work for the very few people who either never need to talk to anyone and/or are comfortable with do-not-disturb headphones on.
We are animals. We get physically and psychologically uncomfortable when our vision is restricted and our backs are exposed. It means we are vulnerable to predators. As such, cubicles are pretty much a nightmare.
[1] Christopher Alexander wrote about architecture, but his terminology was adopted by the design patterns movement in computer science, so it's familiar to most programmers. It's one of two building architecture books I recommend to programmers - the other is Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn".
Unsurprisingly, private offices score the best, by a huge margin. Right now, I've got a huge office to myself (separate from a two-person office next to me by an open passageway). It's super quiet because there are bookshelves full of books to absorb any noise, as well as thick 1970-era carpeting. It's the most productive place I've ever worked. I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money,[1]…
A firm is a hierarchy, and this is a form of social control.
This may sound either pedantic or highly-controversial, but what people like and what might be best for the work they are doing are two different things. We do a great disservice to both to confuse the two.
I would like to have a great big office. Better still, I'd like a cabana at the beach, a laptop, and a hammock. What's best for my team or the project I'm on? Different things entirely.
What disturbs me is this idea we see repeated over and over again that if I like it, it must be good. No, that's not true at all. Going to medical school and having a brutal internship are not things you like, but they are things that take you somewhere you want to go. Life is full of things that are unpleasant yet work out for some greater good. We cannot blithely assume that we can follow our instincts on what feels good with every project we engage in. It doesn't work that way.
This may turn out to be one of those things. Or maybe we get our cake and eat it too: what feels good is what's best. But that determination has not been made, and this study doesn't advance the conversation along these lines at all.