The Open-Office Trap

> If I have my headphones in, I'm busy. If I don't, I can answer questions or talk to my colleagues about something.

This comes up every time people discuss open floor plans. Inevitably someone says that the solution is headphones. Except that a lot of people don't want to wear headphones all the time. I find it uncomfortable, and I also find that music significantly reduces my productivity (unless I'm doing something that doesn't require any meaningful amount of thought). A number of studies have shown the same thing. Listening to music while working decreases mental power.

The article also covered this:

    But the most problematic aspect of the open office may be physical rather 
    than psychological: simple noise. In laboratory settings, noise has been 
    repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick 
    Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that 
    office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even 
    to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office 
    intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity.

> I can't help feeling that younger people such as myself

I don't think you're as much different as you imagine. Young people don't work in drastically different ways than older people.

Private offices surrounding a shared area. It's not really that hard, just more expensive to build.

Take a look at how FogCreek designed their office.

Why does it have to be either/or? Is it really that hard for an employer to offer both?

If each team (of 7-10 people) has a scrum room/war room, plus some number of cubes (4-5) available on an as-needed basis, wouldn't that meet the needs of employee happiness, collaboration, etc?

Need to make a call? Go to a cube. Deadline to meet? Go to a cube. Mid-project, lots of design/analysis occurring? Stay in the open room.

Seems like a no-brainer?

I've written here quite a bit about my basic hatred for open offices. My personal opinion is that open offices are masked in lots of terms about "information flow" and "collaboration" when the reality is that it's about companies being cheap.

I also went to a high school built originally on a completely open plan. At some point they realized teachers shouting over each other didn't work, or the teacher next door giving a lecture while the next set of desks over were taking an exam or whatever, and they put up paper-thin walls to divide the spaces, but still left the doors open. So at least you didn't have to see the classroom next door even if you had to hear them. Absolute, obvious idiocy.

For some reason people have forgotten how to do basic reasoning about work environments and just subscribe to whatever cargo-cult office-space fad of the time without regard to the nature of the work environment. I've even seen spaces with rows of inside sales guys on phones cold calling two desks over from very frustrated developers. Or the worst are the "fish bowl" conference rooms in the middle of the open floor so you can't even have a proper meeting without feeling like you're on stage.

I can echo every single point in the article and the net effect of open offices is that the environments are either library-like tombs where nobody talks to one another for fear of disturbing the peace or they're full of people with headphones on, hiding behind monitors trying to scratch out an ounce of privacy and isolation. It's obvious to anybody who actually works in an open office that they don't succeed in their basic stated task of helping communication.

At one place I worked, people did lots of overseas travel and there were 3 large open-office areas. The number of people out sick at any one time was astronomical. At one point I went 6 solid months of perpetual minor illnesses before I finally decided to just look for a new job. It took me almost two years to really feel recovered physically from the constant assault on my immune system. My fitness levels also took a nose-dive during that time, either from being constantly ill or from stress loads so high that I'd simply come home and lock myself in my home office and not come out till I went to bed.

I think single (or 2 or 3 person) offices do inhibit communication.

The absolute best office configurations I've ever seen are the ones with team rooms that surround a central conference room. Each room sits 6-12 people, has a conference room and the ability to set their own office rules. Sales guys get piled into one bullpen and can make all the calls they want, customer support in another, scrum team 1 in a different one etc. Team leads must work in the team rooms to keep things from degenerating to antics. Teams can collaborate with each other in the central conference room as needed.

These aren't terribly expensive to build out and seem to provide the best possible productivity and combination of semi-privacy, local information sharing and cross-team information sharing. In the long-run the operating costs for facilities end up as a small fraction of salaries anyway. You should do everything possible to maximize your investment in salaries, even if your office space costs are a few percent higher...it'll pay off.

Glass walls don't provide any feeling of privacy, which is one of the complaints employees typically have about open floor plans.

If shared offices are used, I think they should have opaque walls and everyone should be able to position themselves such that they have a wall at their back. This leads to a feeling of privacy. And it actually encourages discussion among those sharing an office, as opposed to the more typical layout of N people staring at the walls with their backs to each other.