81–90 of 161 posts
Open-offices are downright dangerous. We had an Indian colleague who had tuberculoses. After it was diagnosed, every employee had to get an examination. One colleague got infected. Worst of all, the management handled the matter rather unserious and kept jamming everyone in the same office (including the infected colleague!) Gladly, I worked remotely for that company.
Why is it relevant that he is Indian?
Open-offices are downright dangerous. We had an Indian colleague who had tuberculoses. After it was diagnosed, every employee had to get an examination. One colleague got infected. Worst of all, the management handled the matter rather unserious and kept jamming everyone in the same office (including the infected colleague!) Gladly, I worked remotely for that company.
Why is it relevant that he is Indian?
Edit: forgot I can't edit it -.-
Remembered why it was relevant: Since tuberculoses is still a problem in India, they already assumed that he may have tuberculoses before the diagnosis (he was coughing heavily and had signs of an ulcer). But not only did they keep him working, he was still in a tightly packed office with all the others.
I strongly advocate for private or team-member-shared offices at any chance I get. It's just that much better.
I wonder how dependent all this is on culture and expectations. I've spent my entire career in Japan, and have never not worked in an open office. To my knowledge, non-open offices basically don't exist in Japan. So is every Japanese company just leaving productivity lying on the floor by insisting on open offices? I wonder if there have been studies on switching to closed floor plans in Japan. (Of course traditional…
I worked for about 8 years in Japan. Hell yes they leave productivity lying on the floor, and not just with the open offices.
Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriv…
Anyone here not ever work in an open-office since professional employment? I was going to say that I had never had an office, including my stints in food service and construction...and I had never even had a real cubicle, i.e. partitions where I couldn't see the person across from me. But that's not true...I had about a year in the "dungeon" when I was moved to my newspaper's online multimedia team, in a windowless b…
I threatened to quit if I didn't get moved out the main room with sales (fully expecting to actually have to quit, I was already half out the door).
Boss begrudgingly gave me an office, 3 months later he said it was one of the best idea's he ever had (he was a boss after all).
These days I work for myself (small consulting supported startup) so I have an office at work and an office at home.
In other words, I'm completely convinced that open offices (and cubicle farms, where I work) are harmful. To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform. The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the mac…
We had this for meeting rooms at a previous job. It worked quite poorly, since it took a long time to pull in your profile. Meeting runners learned to get to the thirty-minute meeting ten minutes early so that there was some hope of being able to use the computer for part of the meeting. Also, the Windows profiles we were using didn't include applications, so there was the fun of each person who needed, say, Skype, o…
I don't know what's wrong with corporate enviroments, that Windows profiles take so long to roam. That seems to be true to all of them. Also, corporate IT has an extremely irrational aversion to simply installing the software on all the computers for once. Even when it's free software, or things that everybody uses. That also repeats everywhere.