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Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

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Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#151

Post by jseban »

vectorjohn wrote: post #74
debt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My lord this is truth. I don't care what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight, what you're doing this weekend, why you're wearing what you're wearing, who got you that thing, when you got in, when you leave, why you hate brad, why you hate brad but love donna, why donna's nice but you'd prefer to be home studying. did you get an extra $30 deducted from your paycheck? doesn't that suck? it only takes me 20 min…

Well, it sounds like you're mostly just an antisocial kind of person. I mean, if you decide to put an arbitrary wall between you and your co-workers where you are simply not allowed to make friends with anyone, that's a pretty sad existence. I mean, this job takes up ~50% of your waking life, and during that time you can't treat anyone around you as a friend? If all your co-workers are such uninteresting people, mayb…

It doesn't have to be about being an anti-social/introverted person or not. I love to have small talk with people about their personal lives, but not while I'm working, simultaneously.

I want to work, and only focus on work, then take a break, go have a coffee in the break room, and chat about whatevers.

The problem with open office plans is that it gets mixed up, and it's really hard to do the context switching when working on hard problems.

It really reminds me of being a first year student at university, when a lot of people prefer to study in groups, while having coffee, and are convinced it's the best way to study.

By the fourth year though, you know that to really do well, you need to withdraw and get into productivity mode, then socialize when studying is done, as a separate activity..

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#152

Post by rotten »

jacoblyles wrote: post #134
abalone wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned headphones. Headphones seem to be an essential part of open plans. Not only do they send a don't-bother-me signal, they also drown out the noise. But that's also a really annoying part of it. I don't want to have to put on headphones all the time.

Protip: get earmuffs. The kind that construction workers use. They're about $20 on Amazon. If you combine them with earbuds, you literally can't hear a conversation right next to you. This is the setup that pro Starcraft tournaments use so that players can't hear the announcers and crowd.

I tried construction worker earmuffs for a while. The biggest problem is that I wear eyeglasses. The arms for my eyeglasses have to go through the soundproofing system to hang on to my face, which leaks sound and makes them kind of useless. I assume construction workers don't wear glasses?

They also squeezed my head which was uncomfortable after 8 - 10 hours.

Lastly, people kept trying to talk to me, which meant I had to pull them off and put them on and pull them off and put them on which was a little maddening.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#153

Post by l33tbro »

lotyrin wrote: post #122
Domenic_S wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight Good Lord, now we're doing social-life standups. Agile really has taken over.

God yes. Particularly when part of the team has no real life outside their job and they get to spend the social-life meeting handwaving around that fact. It's useless and sad. So glad I don't work there anymore.

Heavens. Glad you're out of that dump.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#155

Post by walshemj »

ktsmith wrote: post #100
gametheoretic wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the top post indicates anything, it's the high precedence the psyche places on framing. Switch around your default- and exception cases and see if that helps take your mind off it. It's a real thing. This summer, because my room would get hot at night, I had to leave a fan on. At first, I couldn't sleep with the noise. But now that it's getting colder, I've tried leaving it off, and guess what. Ha. Now I need the…

I have worked in an open office plan and simply can't work with people around me talking. I had to wear my headphones all day every day. I would never accept a job in an open office again.

I got marked down as not a culture fit when at an interview with a digital agency - I pointed out that the camped noisy office environment (all working on laptops no double screens and popper docking stations) would be effecting their efficiency.

The role I was going for was as a technical consultant to improve the quality of the work - go figure

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#156

Post by walshemj »

jacques_chester wrote: post #94
MartinCron wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study in Peopleware was individual coders working on well-defined toy projects. Whatever evidence taken from that may or may not translate to your real-world development organization.

You're right software engineering literature is not as strong as, say, physics -- where you can relatively easily strip out confounding factors. Or medicine, where you can get funding for very large samples. We have to work with the limits of the subject and the research funding. However it seems that there is a growing body of supporting literature coming from other fields that open-plan is usually a decision with u…

of course not it saves building services budget and they dont care a fig for the effect on the business overall.

Some director saved 10% on deskspace costs and got his/her bonus but screwed the productivity of all the staff by 10/15%

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#157

Post by DanielBMarkham »

"...However, a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are quickly outweighed by the disadvantages..."

"...The productivity benefits of teams working together have been used to sell the open plan office for decades. Yet, if you do these evaluations and actually talk to occupants of open plan offices, very few people think that they are productive spaces..."

Note the moving the goalposts here. The survey shows people don't like the noise and interruptions caused by open plan offices. Okay fine, I get that. But the article promises that the benefits are far outweighed by the disadvantages, and then by way of disadvantage tells us that people don't like them that much. There is no data whatsoever on the benefits or drawbacks overall, just opinions from people working in open plan offices.

Is it not possible that open plan offices annoy people and are also more productive? We don't know. This entire article just tells us most people would rather have their own space to work and not be annoyed so much, which most of us should know already, right?

"Things that achieve a goal" and "Things we like doing" are overlapping sets. They are not identical.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#158

Post by mathrat »

mahyarm wrote: post #30
mathrat wrote: post #15

I used to think this. And then I went to work in an open plan office... and discovered I love it! The office is surprisingly quiet, considering there's about 50 people in the open plan. When conversation does spring up, it's often really interesting and worth listening in on. When it's not, I find I have no trouble tuning it out. Other people seem to more trouble, and they bring noise-canceling headphones. Not saying…

This really is organization dependent. Do your managers look over your shoulder and micromanage you? Would they get upset if they see HN in your web browser more than once or twice a day? Do you worry about them 'catching' you? Are you surrounded by 4 dozen people with multiple loud passionate discussions guaranteed to happen per day? Possibly in a language you don't understand most of the time? And whenever they do…

Agreed it's totally organization dependent. Basically fishtoaster said what I wanted to say more clearly than I did. It requires thoughtful management to get right. But I think the same is true of any office environment, open plan or no. I think the article is a bit unfair and essentially saying "badly managed open plan offices are bad."

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#159

Post by ansgri »

jacques_chester wrote: post #96
vectorjohn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it sounds like you're mostly just an antisocial kind of person. I mean, if you decide to put an arbitrary wall between you and your co-workers where you are simply not allowed to make friends with anyone, that's a pretty sad existence. I mean, this job takes up ~50% of your waking life, and during that time you can't treat anyone around you as a friend? If all your co-workers are such uninteresting people, mayb…

First, some people are introverts. They genuinely do not work well under conditions of heavy social interaction. This does not mean that they are "antisocial" or that they are sad; it means that they are more sensitive to some kinds of stimuli and so are more easily distracted and exhausted by it. Such people should be understood and given the distance that allows them to work, not browbeaten into keeping up with the…

More than that, some people are antisocial and/or sad, yet are very good engineers. So employers and colleagues should be really interested in having those around, especially if they don't want to bother you with non-technical things.

Re: Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

#160

Post by ansgri »

zebra wrote: post #14
aspensmonster wrote: post #2

>An open plan workplace, in which enclosed rooms are eschewed in favour of partitioned or non-partitioned desks arranged around a large room, are supposed to promote interaction between workers and boost teamwork. Instead, everyone's too busy maintaining social facades for the entirety of their day, day after day, rather than focusing on their work.

Can you work if you can't hear your thoughts?

You can still see them.
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