121–130 of 165 posts
Yeah, cutting costs and Taylorian big brotherism. Effectively companies trade productivity for higher transparency and cheaper office space. What happened to the need to actually maximize productivity? To give the benefit of doubt it is plausible people might confuse open plan offices with team rooms.
It has gone away since governemnts started supporting specific companies all around.
This article is a classic case of "link journalism". Not a single study she linked to is conclusive and applicable to all situations. The studies merely suggest that there may be drawbacks to open offices. Additionally, she mentions the camaraderie among teammates masking lost productivity. Who's to say that this doesn't contribute to the overall well being of the office? Even if it does mean some near-term productiv…
"Near-term productivity"? What can that mean? If you are in an open office all day, every day, the it means "all productivity" is lost.
Were I working from home or out of that persons earshot, I would have dug around for potentially hours or days before finding my solution.
Were I heads down writing code a lot (I don't do that very often these days), I'd head over to the private (no-noise-policy) work rooms nearby.
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I think it's pretty easy. Can you honestly say you get more work done in a day with constant interruptions and distractions? Not only output is affected but the quality of the work completed. I might get the same volume of work out the door but if Im distracted I promise there are bit and pieces that have careless errors in it, which leads to re-work. This is something that you can easily ask your employees if they'd…
I'm not sure anyone really disputes the negative impact on individual productivity. The argument (other than reduced costs of course) is that open plans improve collaboration and therefore overall productivity. Personally I'm skeptical in most cases but measuring aggregate productivity is difficult given that it's really hard to make comparisons given all the other factors that come into play. (And the fact that "pro…
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I think it's pretty easy. Can you honestly say you get more work done in a day with constant interruptions and distractions? Not only output is affected but the quality of the work completed. I might get the same volume of work out the door but if Im distracted I promise there are bit and pieces that have careless errors in it, which leads to re-work. This is something that you can easily ask your employees if they'd…
Even if people got more and better work done in private offices, maybe the increased communication in open offices is causing people to work on more important things, which could be worth the tradeoff. (I don't think it is, but such an effect is not something you'd notice with introspection.) Plus, are private offices really the alternative for most people working in open offices? I think the cubicle is a much more l…
I wonder if open offices spread illness faster than other layouts? (I say this has I'm listening to half my office coughing their lungs up with a cold)
Nobody likes the feeling that someone is watching over your shoulder. Not at work, not at home, nowhere.
Not everybody hates it. If you have the same interests as your manager, you won't worry or be reprimanded for posting on your faovourite knitting forum for 15 minutes of each day or answering an im from your friend who lives halfway across the globe. Some people really feel like they're doing nothing wrong and have nothing to hide and if you feel that way you're probably right.
This has been known to be a productivity killer for years, but I still haven't seen significant moves being made to change it. From a management standpoint I know an open layout allows you to pack a lot more people into the same space, so perhaps the costs outweigh the benefits for many businesses?
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Your advice is on the same level as "eat healthy" and "exercise more". It's nice, we should all do it, however for some people it never happens. And here's the problem - some people just cannot be respectful of other people's time or flow and also you can find a lot of variation between communication styles (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous) or noise tolerance of people. For example, some people only want to work fro…
I'm bothered by people who prioritize synchronous communication over asynchronous. On a recent project, I worked with someone who was remote. Every time I sent an e-mail, he picked up the telephone. Then he took a long time to get to the point, and couldn't ever seem to disengage cleanly. Open floor plans would probably work great for people like that. I prefer to not be pre-empted from my current task, and to have a…
Amen. My voicemail greeting for my work phone is "Hi, you've reached the voicemail box of Jack Maney. Instead of leaving me a voicemail, please leave me an email. Thank you."
At some point, open-offices will be the only thing that the majority of software developers know. If you've never experienced the productivity that comes from being able to think without interruption, you won't know what you are missing. At that point, the trend will probably be irreversible. For me personally, this trend isn't all bad: When I work someplace with this setup it's kind of nice to "hang out with my frie…
I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "routine, mechanical tasks". Filing forms, coding html, translating a small specifications into Java code, any kind of a "drone work" - repetitive tasks with a little or no variation - could be done in an open space with the best benefits/costs ratio for an empl…
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Staring at code 8 hours a day.. Maybe that's the problem. As someone who's had to run programming groups and do the programming work, I will say open floor plans are the worst idea ever. If you need/want to get into the zone on a project and actually make progress, the open floor plan will keep you from doing that as much as possible. For breaks, the last thing I would be doing is going on facebook or checking email…
>Your job sounds horrible if people can just walk up any time for any reason. I think this speaks more to what you think about your coworkers than actually weighing in on open floor plans.