High-performance employees need quieter work spaces
qz.comThe obsession for open plan offices continues to amaze me. Companies that invest huge amounts in staffing and other strategic programmes don't seem to spend much time challenging the default suggestion that 'openness = collaboration'.
This article mentions high performance employees - but most knowledge workers (designers, programmers etc.) that I know all struggle with open plan office environments irrespective of their performance level. If anything, an open plan office is maybe less worrisome to the more executive people I know - their core work processes of communication & meetings are less negatively impacted by the inability to regularly get large blocks of quiet productive space.
Some companies obviously get this need (e.g. FogCreek) but it really feels like sugar consumption or smoking. Once people really interrogate the status quo they are quick to realise how negative it is - but despite this the sub-optimal default approach has an unbelievable amount of momentum.
My condolences to all the 'high performance people' surveyed who are desperately wishing for less disturbed work spaces!
The collaborative nature of my open office environment helps me to generate tons of great ideas that I'll never have the focus to implement.
Why don't you just stay late or come in early, don't you care about the company?!!
You sound like my old boss. I'm a combat vet, and he said to me, before memorial day, "What's a holiday? I don't take holidays. I'm here all the time.."
Pissed me off. Dude is the CEO and partial owner, so it's completely different. If they want to pretend to be Elon Musk and want me to as well, they better at least pay like it to justify the lack of work/life balance. I am a human being whose existence is entirely indepedent of whatever job I currently have. Crazy thought, I know.
I am only a bit salty because having consulted across a wide array of industries and been the miracle worker one man show in some of them, I have seen it everywhere.
Oh, and back on subject, of course at this place I was shoved into an open office with the devs...
As an American who moved to Germany, that mindset was completely removed here. Not only do people tell you to take your vacation time if you don't, they get worried if you are working too much or too hard.
It's a great relief to be here and see a different mindset outside that of the "all work no holiday" cultures you can find in the states.
Honestly I sometimes wonder how much my traveling and experiencing other cultures influenced my perception of this subject. Even in Iraq I feel like the Arab concept of time (flexible guidelines) really rubbed off on me, spent some time in Germany/France as well and loved how slow life could be.
In this day and age I feel like all many people want is retired-style life but then they entangle themselves in debt and job quagmires they don't excape till they are 65. I also highly disagree with the characterization that retirement is sitting around doing nothing. Retirement to me is the chance to pursue your true passions and interests unencumbered by an unrelated need for finances supplied by a wage-slavery job.
Totally agree. Germany has its ups and downs as you know, but I like it more since the approach to life and work life balance is much better. Whether it's the generous social systems or not is more of a political debate, but the focus on "living life" is much greater here, and I enjoy it.
Come on over man. :)
Which is why world dominating tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc were naturally founded in Germany.
I kid, I kiiid... no really that was both sarcastic and joking.
Is the "all work no holiday" necessary for successful tech startups on the order of those?
I don't think those are really relevant to the discussion, because we are talking about lack of incentive. If I was working at space-x and getting the subsequent pay bump, I might consider it worth it. The current problem is outside of the few big guys in SV, the rest of the country is underpaying and overworking IT staff.
You can underpay and underwork, and have low turnover and medium-high return on talent, or you can overpay and overwork, with a high turnover but a high return on talent, but to underpay and overwork is a recipe for hemmoraging talent.
I hope not. I prefer this approach:
1 - have a plan 2 - FOCUS for 8 hours during the workday 3 - go home and play/rest
Seems to me that doing this would create a good company, but it's damned hard to find any examples.
9-5 is office hours. Be ready and willing to respond to any requests. When you get the actual assigned ans scheduled out work done is your problem. Perhaps you should work late, at home, at night, in the morning before "office hours".
Drives me effing nuts! Salaried exempt doesn't mean slave labor. It means the work I do requires thinking and since I am always thinking it makes more sense to just pay me a predetermined amount instead of going hourly and trying to figure out if I should be compensated for the commute to and from the office when some of my greatest ideas and innovations occur. God forbid my idea comes while not on the clock! I might not choose to assign the IP over to you! I still only anticipate implementing ideas and performing tasks for approximately 40 hours per week. You're paying for my brains not my key pushing skills.
I actually have quite a bit of freedom to work from home. But I have three kids six and younger, so it's hard to concentrate there...
You should put that on a bumper sticker and sell them for ten bucks each.
You'd be rich before the end of the day just from the revenue off of HN readers alone!
:)
I think that, among other reasons for its existence, open offices (especially when coupled with office-having supervisors) are one of many weapons arrayed against programmers to keep them from properly entering the professional (high-middle) class, or even (following Fussell's categories here) high-prole. Middle or (ideally) mid-prole only.
There is a lot of truth to this. Image matters. Not giving a proper office for you to do your work is a slight, implying that you are not that valuable.
Our company is currently relocating to new office, and they want an open office plan in the space. We will pack in tight, and our cube walls will all be 3.5 feet high. We have adjustable standing desks that will coming with us, so when standing we will towering over every one and I already know it's going to be awkward for me.
The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service.
> ...so when standing we will towering over every one...
Because everyone likes to be the CoA.
> The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service.
Time to polish that resume.
The best part is our 5 person IT team will be right next to 25 people who work phones for customer service.
Lemme guess, your company is the type of company that thinks the entirety of IT equals help desk, and therefore will be on the phone all day fielding tickets, so to whoever made this god awful decision, sticking IT right next to CS "just makes sense".
I'm with the other guy here, run.
Hope you have a very big monitor and a good noise canceling headset. Otherwise get ready for a coding/interrupt cycle that will drain all your productivity (unless you start staying late to make up for it). Good luck.
I agree this sounds awful, but if the IT people were properly empowered to solve the problems they overheard being dealt with in customer service (and it wasn't forced on them), you might actually manage to get a nice feedback loop going.
But for every useful information you might overhear, you will listen to 1,000 calls about how Internet Explorer allegedly ate their emails, made their dog sick, and burned their house down.
Be lucky you have cube walls. Many open plans don't even have those!
It makes little difference at 3.5 feet. I've worked in two offices like that; you might as well not have any walls at all because you can still see and talk to everyone around you. I don't see the point in even having such walls, except probably to use as structural support for the desktop surfaces. The only advantage they have is that they don't need legs like a standard fold-up table: those legs take up space under the table and you can bump your legs into them.
3.5 feet is barely higher than a desk (a normal one). That's like leaving your waiter a penny tip.
Yeah, but at least people can't see your junk on "wear a kilt to work" day...
I get that for a startup money is tight. Instead of telling employees:
"You folks really deserve a your own offices but we just can't afford it."
Instead they tell you the big lie; that they are doing it because it "increases collaboration".
If money is really that tight, you can just have people work from home. That's a lot cheaper than renting commercial office space.
Stack 2 walls on top of each other! And laid that with 2 walls you'll be double effective. Then convince everyone needs it. And extend that idea from there!
That's exactly what they are going for - desk height.
Get out!
This whole situation is ridiculous. I am working in a university and I have my own office. Turns out that employees are by far the most expensive part about doing research in computer science, and the cost of giving everyone their own office is easily offset by the (noticable) increase in productivity.
Everyone I know who went on to an industry position is working in an open plan office... and it is not unusual to hear stories about people putting in a few days of home office to get some actual work done.
This is obviously anecdotal, but based on other responses in this thread and elsewhere there is more than enough evidence to justify doing a real study. It is not difficult to measure changes in productivity over time accross a sufficiently large population and the amount of money being spent on engineers means that even a marginal increase in productivity will be worth the cost.
I personally love open floor plans. It is so easy to talk to people and get answers and ideas about projects and the like. I don't see how free flowing collaborating through cubes is possible.
The best permutation of open spaces and privacy that I've seen is a wide open space with quiet rooms and sharable offices. Work in the open space when you want, or work in the quiet room when you need some privacy.
I wish that more companies would adopt this.
The thing is I like to get my workstation ergonomically perfect for my issues (I have back and shoulder issues) and using a generic table with no extra monitors for my quiet intense work sucks. It should be the other way around...everyone gets a private office, but has an option to join the fray in an open office area.
If everyone had an open office, then very few would use the open space area. Also, providing offices for everyone is expensive, and it's harder to collect people sitting in different offices than it is when everyone's in an open space. I'm personally against everyone getting an office, but we'll agree to disagree :)
If everyone had an open office, then very few would use the open space area.
Assume you mean private office. Isn't that a pretty compelling argument that the majority don't see big advantages to open plan?
How expensive is it really? Maybe $15k to setup some walls? Let's sAy $30k as you will lose about 1/3rd the floor space.
That's a one time cost. Amortize that out over a 5 year office lease and it is peanuts compared to the productivity gains and lower turnover.
Also once you go with a private or semi private office you won't want to go back. Any employee from there interviewing at places with open offices will probably think how much they will hate it there.
I know the occasional person will pop up with the "I love hearing other people jibber jabber throughout the day!" But 9 out of 10 people I talk with would rather not.
I had this setup at my previous company and it was truly fantastic.
Are you allowed to name names?
I don't see why not: Silicon Labs in Austin. All of the company's office space isn't setup like this, but my floor was.
I personally do not love hearing every personal detail from my neighbors when I'm trying to troubleshoot an issue. Nor do I enjoy having a coworker trim his fingernails on a weekly basis in my open are. The idea the open floor plans are good is only for people whom rarely need to deeply concentrate.
Quiet rooms don't help, not everyone has a laptop, nor wants one. You end up with a crappy, un-ergonomic desktop environments. And there are only so many quiet rooms possible. If you use one continually, you get marked as the social deviant.
Shareable offices? How is that any different than the old "hoteling" concept? Sharing an office is going to be first come first served, same as your quiet rooms. No diff.
If managers, directors, and VPs are willing to use this type of setup, I'd be more tolerant. But in our latest update, they all have dedicated offices. They can't mingle with the hoi polloi, having an office is a signal of their power and prestige.
One also has to wonder if a non-trivial percentage of engineers also end up as not high performers as a direct result of being in an open office and not having their own private spaces.
I recommend private offices for engineers so they can get heads down and do their work, but sadly that suggestion tends to get ignored :( .
I've had exactly one experience with an open office space. That was enough to turn me off from any company that has it. It was loud and noisy.
When I had a review, my supervisor told me that people didn't find me approachable because I head my headphones on.
When I mentioned I need a quiet space, he told me to "deal with it". When I questioned him on whether he had worked in an open space, he said he had, because he had been a NOC manager.
Different worlds, I soon left. That was the moment I realized I hated traditional corporate culture. Improved to startup, which I loved, until the "CEO" proved he was incompentent and furloughed us...
The trend towards open plan is a consequence of a bad incentive structure. Most companies put the management of the workplace inside the facilities department, which is viewed as all cost and no benefit. When profit margins are under pressure the facilities department is usually one of the first places senior management goes looking to cut costs. A private office layout averages up to 15 square meters per employee, while open plan moves that down to 9 square meters. This allows facilities to reduce the rented building area by a third, which is a major cost cutting. Of course, the other departments protest against this, but since the senior management sees only the reduction in cost, and does not (want to) see the costs incurred by the move to open plan, they usually approve the move. The big irony is that the facilities department often assigns themselves private offices. They're not idiots after all, and they need to get some real work done.
I can see the conversation now.
"If we build this as an open office, it's cheaper AND better? That's a slam dunk!"
6 years later ...
"Turns out it's only cheaper, not better. Hey, cheaper is better right?"
Penny-wise and pound-foolish. If cheaper means throwing the time of your most expensive resource (engineers) down the drain to save some money on rent and Ikea furniture, then sure.
How is this foolish? This saves the company money, and helps executives get bigger bonuses. This might cause the company some problems in 5 years, but who cares? By then, the executives have already collected their bonuses and left.
> The obsession for open plan offices continues to amaze me.
Well, the decisions about these things are made by upper management (who probably get an office, and sit in meetings all day anyway) and/or facilities (who walk around a lot of the day dealing with various facility issues).
Hmm... so executives/managers aren't as affected by open office plans and also tend to lack empathy... so we get open office plans or maybe, if we're lucky, cube walls.
I know I'm generalizing and not all managers lack empathy, but this seems like a reasonable explanation for the pervasiveness of arrangements that waste resources and hinder higher levels of productivity--maybe they just don't get it.
I could never understand the cost argument since lower productivity means either more employees to do the same thing and/or a shittier product, which can translate into lost sales, more infrastructure, etc. (This might not apply to early stage startups and the like; I'm thinking of established organizations here.)
I am working my way through some material about "Inclusive Neurodiversity", which does question the open office plan. It works well (very well) for some people, and yet not others. How to get everyone working together well?
https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/the-case-for...
http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/cucumber-podcast/cucumber/e/...
How to get everyone working together well?
Do we need to? Sure, many projects need multiple people, but few end up needing the whole organisation. So with a little flexibility on project assignments I feel most organisations can accommodate a range of working styles -- if they want to.
Because the $ in per sqft is easy to measure while the $ in employee productivity is hard to measure.
Rubbish. It is exactly through their ability to "soldier on" in spite of intense and sometimes challenging surroundings that high-performing employees distinguish themselves as such.
And on top of this, remember that the other way your best performers distinguish themselves is in the fact that they most definitely are not complainers. So if any of your employees start yapping about your proposed move to an open plan environment (or even have the temerity to suggest that if you are going to have an open plan environment, people at least "try to keep down their voice down a bit"), then congratulations -- you've just identified an employee that's definitely not right for your organization, and will likely because more trouble and distraction for your team down the road -- for as long as you keep them on board, that is.†
† Of course I'm being facetious. But this but a slightly cheeky paraphrase of the exact logic I've actually had used on me, to my face, to justify not just the hyperdense, pack-em-in-like-it's-veal-slaughtering-pen office plans which are apparently a peak popularity, these days -- but a whole range of obnoxious environmental factors --- e.g. loud TVs, loud muzack (or any TV or muzack in "the pen", for that matter); or just loud, gratuitously chatty co-workers -- in plenty of environments I've had the misfortune of being stuck in. Until I realized I just wasn't "a fit" for these places, that is.
You got me. I was reading and thinking, "This person just couldn't be more wrong." Nicely done.
Yet another of the many ways a company will say "shut up and make me a shit-ton of money" without really realizing it... although sometimes they do realize it. They also like to say "don't force me to actually manage people and projects properly... I don't know how."
I guess that I fall into this characterization. Over my 36-year career, I've sat in solo offices with doors, shared offices, cubicles with progressively shorter walls, and wall-less high-density desk arrays. I've easily been twice as productive with a door as I am in a noisy environment -- all the other arrangements suck if there is even one inconsiderate human in the space making a phone call, moving a pound of mucus from one sinus cavity to another, playing desk bongos along with their headphones, or any of the thousand other ways that normal humans can be distracting.
Good headphones help, if only to take control over my own distraction, but honestly this is a management problem. If you want me to be extremely productive, and my productivity is a function of my ability to concentrate, then please just allow me to concentrate.
My career sounds similar to yours, just not quite as long, and as someone who's been introduced to an "open office" just this week (and we're not talking low-walled cubicles, but no-walled desks) I hate it, and it's definitely affecting my productivity. Maybe I'll get used to it, but the only improvement I can see is that other teams we work closely with are nearby... but this has nothing to do with an open office and everything to do with the arrangement of teams relative to each other. I've been hiding in the machine room. I may find myself doing that a lot more.
I do wonder why I have to purchase good headphones and wear them to combat this problem?
What are the long term impacts of wearing headphones? bacteria growth and hearing loss? Can't be good for my health long term.
Flow is a state of concentration, breaking flow take a longtime to get back in, shouting questions across the room is a context switch and not an asynchronous choice for me if I'm in the middle of something important.
The one inconsiderate person is the worst. The person unaware that their constant sniffing of mucus is awful. Usually the least intelligent person in the office IMO.
Usually the loudest and most obnoxious member of every team I've worked for seems to have the most production problems....coincidence?
>What are the long term impacts of wearing headphones? bacteria growth and hearing loss? Can't be good for my health long term.
For the hearing loss, not necessarily. Get some good noise-canceling headphones that completely cover and enclose the ears, and then either play no music at all or something quiet, at very low volume. With the noise-canceling on and the noise-isolation from the muffs themselves, you'll find you don't need very much volume to hear the music extremely well (human hearing is logarithmic).
However, even the best headphones do have a little weight, which is on your head, and there's always going to be a comfort factor. Wearing them 8 hours straight, day in and day out, may be too much.
>The person unaware that their constant sniffing of mucus is awful.
How are they supposed to help that? It's not their fault that they're sick; people get sick sometimes. It's management's fault for providing you a workspace where there's no privacy at all, so you're forced to see and hear every little thing from your cow-orkers like that. And you can't guarantee that you'll never have a workplace without an annoying or less-intelligent coworker; again it's management's fault for not setting up a work environment that mitigates that factor by giving you some privacy and isolation.
You may find it hard to find audiophile headphones that suppress voices adequately. I had better results with ear muffs from the local hardware store intended for leaf-blowers. Get the biggest, ugliest ones you can find.
I have some of these that I use for lawn work, which are designed for shooting guns. They isolate sound pretty well, but they're also not terribly comfortable. They're OK for driving around on my lawn mower for 30 minutes, but there's no way in hell I'd wear them for 8 hours.
Good idea, especially if they are big enough to fit over Bluetooth earphones (e.g. AirPods).
>in the space making a phone call, moving a pound of mucus from one sinus cavity to another, playing desk bongos along with their headphones, or any of the thousand other ways that normal humans can be distracting.
Most of this stuff is not "inconsiderate"; it's just how humans are. People need to make or take phone calls sometimes; how else are you supposed to schedule doctors' appointments and do other life tasks, unless you have a personal secretary (which these companies no longer provide us)? People get sick and need to blow their noses. People get bored and need music (the presence of music in all human cultures, from the dawn of civilization, shows it to be pretty close to a primal need).
The fundamental problem is that humans are not biologically designed to be packed into seated arrangements for hours on end, working quietly without distracting each other. We invented "rooms" for largely this reason, and having separate homes instead of living in one giant communal space, because when we pack ourselves into denser arrangements, we still value having some privacy from one another.
Responsible adults can go use a phone room, blow their noses, and not tap their fingers on their desktops. It's not that hard to be considerate.
Phone rooms don't work. I can't predict the future, so I have no way of knowing exactly what time an incoming phone call will occur. Maybe you can do that, but most of us can't.
Blowing noses? Isn't that what you're complaining about? Or just sniffling? If someone's sick with a cold, they're going to be doing a lot of both. It's not like you can blow your nose once and be good for the rest of the day; if it was like that, then you wouldn't have coworkers sniffling all day long. People get sick. Deal with it.
As for tapping fingers, how's that any more annoying that key clicks, foot tapping, or constant movement? People do all those things too. The fact is, people move. They cannot sit perfectly still and use the minimum necessary motion. Deal with it.
You're asking for people to be super-human. That isn't reasonable or possible. People are what they are, so you need an environment which accounts for that. If you don't have that, then it's management's fault, not the peoples' fault for just being what they are.
Honestly, you sound like someone complaining about cats licking their butts and dogs drooling.
>Phone rooms don't work. I can't predict the future, so I have no way of knowing exactly what time an incoming phone call will occur. Maybe you can do that, but most of us can't.
You can predict that you will be talking on the phone if you are making a call (such as scheduling a doctor appointment). You can walk to a phone room when you receive a call.
>You can walk to a phone room when you receive a call.
By then, it's too late: you're now disrupted by the noisy phone ringer, and the start of the conversation.
And what if the phone room is occupied? If the company is really cheap with space, they probably didn't put enough private rooms in to satisfy demand.
Article has been removed. The original source (https://hackernoon.com/58-of-high-performance-employees-say-...) appears to be a PR piece.
From the original one:
"→ Are you a high-performance employee? Please help me better understand you by contributing to a 30-second anonymous survey. Thank you! http://bit.ly/high-performance-survey ←"
This can only be a joke...
Not much discussion of the anonymous survey - are these "High Performing Employees" Self selecting?
My gut says quiet spaces are a boon to productivity - but why not prove it instead of a research methodology with holes so large I could drive a truck through them.
Who's going to pay for the research to prove your idea that quiet spaces improve productivity? Especially when all the current consultants are hyping open-offices, which aligns nicely with managers/executives who want to save money on floor space and cubicle furniture so they can get bigger bonuses?
> Self selecting?
Yes, probably. http://bit.ly/high-performance-survey
Though some of those questions might be input as weights/qualifying factors in the results.
I made the mistake of thinking "open plan" meant low-walled cubes. Because I've been working longer than this fad existed. I think we had even used the term back then. I didn't get why people were suddenly whining about them.
Then I saw a real "open plan" office.
Holy shit. Why aren't workers violently revolting?
Being able to yell across the room while sitting down is more efficient than having to stand up first. Efficient collaberating.
This is a good metric. It's also the only metric we track. Science!
/s
What you are referring to is a "cube farm." Businesses have somehow discovered how to make working conditions worse.
Don't forget not having to stand up to wave your hand in my peripheral vision to get my attention for something that the commit messages that introduced the change would have told you about.
I might be a little salty about that one.
Ironically, part of the reason for the ascendancy of the open plan, was the popular negative reaction against cubicles. Cubicles were so Dilbert, so 80s/90s IBM/Microsoft/Intel, so "Office Space." OK, maybe they didn't capture the imagination of every special unique snowflake who would've rather been extreme kite-para-heli-wind-surf-skiing. But at least it was a wall. At least it was a space.
The best method (for maximum sustained productivity) I've experienced is 2 developers to an office. For me, it's actually best if the developers aren't on the same team so they won't often interrupt each other. Either way is better than a cube farm and certainly open office. It's significantly cheaper than an office per developer, but nearly as good.
It's great to collaborate and all, but that should be done at a scheduled time in a scheduled place.
The negatives of open space is why libraries have a STFU rule.
I've had that arrangement before too, and it wasn't bad.
Because workers have seen their rights and their station in life vastly eroded over the past 30-40 years.
But seriously, if I ran a company and set up the office that way, and a bunch of people came up to me and said "Hey man, this office layout is bullshit", I'd say OK and get on the phone and order some cubes. It really shouldn't be a big deal.
But you spent a lot of money last year on consultants that hyped you up on the creative and innovative energy that open plans bring and your CFO made a nice spreadsheet on how much you save on office furniture versus the cost of a new yacht. Who are you going to believe, your sunk cost friends or your ongoing cost employees that should be much more grateful to even have a job in this economy?~
Cubicles take up more space per employee than a typical open office plan. You won't be able to fit the cubes in there.
Also, cubicle furniture is extremely expensive, so your manager or the company executives will not look kindly at this purchase request. Expect a poor review.
The source for the claim in the title is:
>My latest anonymous survey shows that 58% of HPEs need more private spaces for problem solving, and 54% of HPEs find their office environment “too distracting.”
Seems kinda weak.
Why do we think that we need only one kind of workspace that meets all of our criteria? Can't we have an office with a variety of different workspaces that we can move between as our needs change?
I would argue that changing your work environment constantly is a key ingredient on maintaining an energy level-
https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2017/03/20/mindful-softwar...
-supporting exactly what you are saying. This notion that we each have a static workspace seems archaic, and an ideal world is one where people work in varied situations according to need: Sometimes privacy and quiet is ideal, and sometimes noise and chaos is invigorating. As much as the private office/anti-open plan thing appears on here, it's amazing how often tech workers love working in cafes, libraries, or accelerators that are like open plan offices to a few magnitudes.
Same reason companies only hire 10X employees. It is spelled n.a.r.r.o.w.m.i.n.d.e.d.n.e.s.s.
Can't we have an office with a variety of different workspaces that we can move between as our needs change?
This would require companies to invest in their people beyond "Here's your paycheck, here's your healthcare, be glad we're giving you this much". Granted, some companies do-and some probably do come with a variety of workspaces. I used to work at one, but I don't know how many people would answer in the affirmative if polled how commonplace they expect that sort of workplace to be.
Healthcare? Hell, we just had our dental insurance dropped. Healthcare is now a $10k OOPM at rates 3x what they were 10 years ago.
The open office plan could work with tall, fabric cubicles. My place now uses short, glass & aluminum ones. Not to mention people chit chat too much. I'm an EE and have to think about complex stuff; I can't think with the chit-chat; breaks my squelch.
Fortunately I have a lab I can retreat to. Thinking about moving in there permanently.
Those fabric cubicles absorb a lot of sound. I miss them.
Cubicles where original marketed as "Action Offices" there is a book on the history of them called Cubed: A secret history of the workplace.
The creator of them came to regret his creation as they where subverted in a direction he never expected.
I've often wondered what a modern cubicle if designed today would look like, we've done wonders in computer modeling and such since even sound dampening designs would be much easier.
A desk with a single wall in the front, behind where your displays would sit, and a frosted glass pane demarcating rows. "We're not an open design", but you don't exactly have anything remotely resembling a private workspace either.
I used to have a private cubicle, around 2000-2004. I didn't like it too much at the time. I really miss it now. Life was better back then.
For a long time people could spend their whole career at one company - now not so much, do you think we may be swinging back to that?
From a business perspective its better to keep your high performers as long as you can - pay them what they are worth since someone else will any ways.
I've been at the same place for 21 years, though each year I swear I'm going to quit. I could be here another 21 until I'm 67.
> We need to understand high-performance employees based on what they are tasked with and their core principles, not how much they produce, or even worse on standardized personality traits.
So high performance employees are whoever thinks they're important enough to be one?
I am assuming it isn't people stacking shelves in a supermarket.
I miss that, i worked evenings when the recession had just hit. plenty of room to think while you stack shelves on autopilot.
There's no mention of the bare fact that:
* Cubicles are 'furniture' and therefore receive advantageous tax treatment (accelerated depreciation, increasing profits),
* Walls, not so much.Sure, but there's no reason you can't use this approach to create fully private spaces. In fact, most of the cube manufacturers have a fully-enclosed product line, also. [0] Of course, twice the wall height will always ~= twice the price.
0. https://www.steelcase.com/products/walls-work-walls/privacy-...
Just build floor to ceiling thick walled cubicle, getting the benefits of both sides.
And then you're in a dungeon with no natural sunlight. Glass helps, but it still feels like a prison.
Imagine how many more "high-performance"[0] employees you'd have if it were quiet.
[0] Really? That's what they're called now?
Also:
"This article was published inadvertently."
I work an odd schedule that includes 10 hours on Saturday. I could work from home on Saturday, but almost always work from the office as I've got the place to myself (bad weather notwithstanding). It means driving 30 minutes each way, as well as everything else with going out to work. The peace and quiet is priceless as I've got an essentially empty 6 floor building all to myself. Security passes by once or twice during the day. Generally there are no phone calls, no meetings, no messages, no one stopping by to interrupt me. I can go on a think walk and - get this - think.
If instead I work from home on Saturday, I am interrupted each time I leave my "cave" to get a coffee. Sometimes it's my daughter, sometimes my wife. The phone will invariably ring and will either be a spam call or a call for one of them. There is no opportunity for a think walk.
>The phone will invariably ring and will either be a spam call or a call for one of them.
Simple solution: get rid of the phone. Why do you have it anyway? I haven't had a landline phone for probably 10 years now, and I was a little late to that party. This line of yours looks like something out of the 1990s: a phone call for someone else? How quaint! Do these people not have their own phones?
I get page not found?
The link now shows "This article was published inadvertantly"
I like the new version better. Now it sounds like a QZ staff writer who's disgruntled about their noisy open office.
Not sure why, here is the original post: https://hackernoon.com/58-of-high-performance-employees-say-...
One open plan work environment story. One and only. Lasted three months there. Noisy, smelly (kitchen nearby), and the head counters would come by every couple hours to see who was at their seat and who wasn't. You don't have to be uber employee to fail to appreciate the master plan and want out of this type of thing.
My current office has 475mm high dividers. Next year they plan to relocate us to the 'workplace of the future' with barriers that in some instances are sub-300mm. They have 3 setups - a 4x desk each getting a 90 degree partition, a 3x each getting 120 and a 6x flat rectangular thing with no dividers. We will all be expected to hotdesk (what happens to my desktop workstation is anyone's guess?) and will get a single ultra-widescreen attached to a laptop dock (bye productivity gains from 2 monitors). Each of the configurations has less overall desk real estate which is going to be fun when we have to roll out A0 drawings.
I already get constantly distracted and find it hard to work. I'm placed next to a corridor just near where one of 3 entryways from the foyer into the office area is. Previously, I was next to 1 of 2 printers, at a junction to a hallway holding the toilets, which doubled as a spot for people to strike up conversation. I rarely get any extended periods of focus here which is infurating when my job is structural analysis, maths, etc. We are currently given a grand total of 8 meeting rooms per floor (200+ people), most of which are permanently tied up with meetings so you can't even use them for private workspaces. This is something they claim they'll fix in the new office but in reality you will be lucky to get one.
The new place sounds and looks (when I checked out their examples of the desks) like it's going to be a nightmare even worse than this. At least here I can sort of sink into my seat and fall below the dividers, and at least I also get my own space as a desk that I can customise to suit my own needs/ergonomics/etc. and have it feel like it's my own space where I have some miniscule hope of focusing.
I'm already polishing my CV in anticipation of bailing because of it.
>My current office has 475mm high dividers. Next year they plan to relocate us to the 'workplace of the future' with barriers that in some instances are sub-300mm.
>I'm already polishing my CV in anticipation of bailing because of it.
Crap, it looks like this infection has spread to Europe too. :-(
I really wish Europe would stop copying all the stupidest ideas and trends from America.
Don't worry, I'm in Australia.
Also not sure how my original post got downvoted since it's just recollecting my opinions on open-plan offices. Maybe the Open Plan Cabal hates me speaking ill of their utopia. Go figure.
Oh, I saw the millimeters and CV and assumed you were European; sorry!
Anyone from Europe care to comment on whether this plague has spread over there too? From what little I've read, it has.
I think, unfortunately, open-plan offices are just now the reality world-wide. Some cultures always had them (Asia), and now the cultures that had closed offices have moved that way. The US has led the world for a long time with software development, which does coincide with closed offices and then cubicles, so I think we can look forward to being a has-been and other countries becoming the leaders in software due to us adopting open-plan offices. In a couple of decades it'll probably cause a complete economic collapse and probably breakup of the US.
The most obvious and effective sounding way to divide offices is per-team. That way groups of people working on the same thing can talk easily.
My current company has every dev and most managers in the same room. 7 scrum teams, over 60 people in one room. It's madness and I can't fucking stand the noise.
You get written up for talking "excessively" during work hours because 3/4 the company can hear you when you try to collaborate. Peer programming is impossible.
I have no idea why idiotic management consultants are promoting whats basically a sweatshop environment.
The stupidest part of this is that my company just cut the walls down to a few feet. You can clearly see that the dividers between each team used to be full height walls. What a tragedy
I work in a team of 12. The idea of having all of us in one room would result in several homicides. Even with cubicle walls, in the past, homicide has been a course of action contemplated by most of the team.
This idea the groups need to be able to talk easily is just idiotic. We're not in kindergarten sharing what our cats did or why the sky is blue, we're professionals working on complex tasks. Written communication is abundant, whether it's chat/slack/irc/email/remedyforce etc. If anything, we're drowning in communication. Comprehension is the issue.
So screw working side by side in pair programming, or such crap. It's all a part of companies that view employees as a cost center, or a "resource" to be managed, like you would a herd of cattle.
uh well, you still work there don't you? that's why. because it's cheaper and you still need the paycheck.
Username checks out.
Literally, the entire thread in a nutshell. Bravo.
Diversity, mixing departments in the name of collaboration are all at fault here.
Walls just make things better.
No Shit, Sherlock !
I find it very odd that these articles make the front page of HN on an almost daily basis. I'm currently working at home with twin toddlers with chicken pox playing at full volume, yet I'm having little trouble concentrating. Why do techs seem to obsess over this so much?
There are other factors besides just volume. I find it easier to concentrate in a cafe than I do in the office and it's not exactly quiet in the average coffee shop. What people are talking about around you also has an impact. The conversations in a cafe for example just seem to blend together and become a sort of white noise.
The discussions in the office however are sometimes related to what I'm working on. So hearing bits and pieces of them stands out in my mind and can get me thinking about that instead. People in cafes are also very unlikely to come up and tap me on the shoulder and start asking questions about completely unrelated topics.
YMMV of course and some people concentrate just fine in loud places. On the other hand the people that say "I don't mind the open office plan, it doesn't bother me" might just be the people who are disrupting everyone else.
There's another factor to the coffee shops IMO: who the people are.
In an open-plan office, the people around you are usually your coworkers, the people you see every day and know personally. In a coffee shop, they're usually total strangers, people you might see occasionally at that shop at best, and very likely you'll never see them again.
Also, the strangers at the coffee shop don't care what you're looking at on your laptop, or if you're getting any work done. Coworkers might. Also, strangers at a coffee shop are unlikely to interrupt you; coworkers are very likely to. So at the coffee shop, it's entirely possible to be around other humans without being forced to socialize with them, but not at work.
That's because you live with your twin toddlers nearly 24/7, the "activation" of distraction is much different than in an office when any noise might be something you need to pay attention to. When it is just your two toddlers' the distraction threshold is much lower-- after all, isn't the sound of your own children playing a pleasing sound? You're only having to filter for "Is that sound going to require a trip to the first aid kit or more?"
This is much different than the office environment.
Imagine: Someone's else half-duplex conversation with their significant other about what colors to paint the bathroom this weekend or how much fun a guy had at the bar with the girls from the other division or the hen-pecked husband accepting orders for what to bring home from the Pret-a-manger don't even come close. Then there are the custom ring tones and chatter from random cell phones, the rustling of strangers between the cubicles as new employees are given the tour. A random maintenance person wanders around holding a ceiling tile and pack of fluorescent bulbs knocking the step ladder about having another half-duplex conversation about last night's sporting event.
Your kid's "play" don't even come close to this, because you're not working in the traditional office environment, you're working at home.
Heh, you're lucky. I have two toddlers and I cannot stand to hear them cry and I sure as heck can't say 'no' to pleading eyes asking me 'Daddy do you want to play Legos with us?'.
As a result I had to get a desk in a co-working space. Not cheap but I find grown ups bantering loudly far less distracting than my kids asking me to play.
I struggle working from home; my toddler's in a screaming phase. It's only slightly better listening to the PM team doing conference calls, hearing the one-sided conversation about product features.
My team used to be clustered into a corner of the building. Pairs worked quietly, louder teams weren't around to bother us, etc. It wasn't quite as nice as actual offices, but it was pretty close.
A full-on open plan office sounds terrible. Working most days with kiddos playing sounds terrible (when I work from home, I get most of my work done during his nap and after his bedtime). Working in cubes near noisy teams isn't great. Working in cubes secluded from noisy teams is fairly nice. I think I'd like to work in a team office to allow easy collaboration, while keeping away distractions.
It's out of band. The noisy toddlers are not saying something that might be relevant to your job.
Because everyone is different?!
I know of a couple coworkers that do not have trouble concentrating in our open office, while I continually struggle to get deep thought done.