I think, I saw in an earlier article, and after repeating the calculation myself, that just a 1 or 2% increase in productivity would save you so much salary it’s criminal not to invest in a decent working space.
Open offices have a ton of variation and they can be nice, but can also suck. It's all about the implementation.
And I actually like it a lot. I don't want to sit in a separate room all day, I enjoy being around people and to interact from time to time.
A shared space is fine with <5 people, can become problematic at 5-10 people and the frequently 20+ large floor spaces are just unworkable without noise cancelling headphones.
I worked in london in an open plan office maybe 40ft wide and getting on 200 ft long. That's open plan.
It's fine except for the noise. It's always the noise as the problem, all else is ok.
(edit: not a single company, a collection of small and medium businesses)
And the utter lack of privacy. Want to tell your colleague that Alex is a dick? Better do it in another building, or the entire office will hear it.
The other problem is people trying to do Skype or other conferencing calls while wearing closed-can headphones. Their own speech level rises two notches when they can't hear their own voice. Try it for yourself and see.
Open office seems to be designed for people who like to yell at each other or who isolate themselves completely via headphones. I have almost never seen any meaningful collaboration in large open office. It always happens in smaller more intimate spaces.
If you compare an open space office with a walled office that 3x the size, of course the bigger office will win out. An open office 3x the size would also be a big improvement.
Raytheon, for all its other faults, was at least largely honest about why they were shrinking cube sizes and experimenting with open floor plans. There was some half-hearted mentions of increased collaboration, but they pretty much said it was a space issue.
Ultimately, when they moved into this building, they spent quite a bit more than they needed to for the entire floor, knowing they expected to grow. Now they're cramming people in too closely and will probably have to move to a larger building in the future. In the meantime, however...
So yeah, it's a space issue first and foremost, and a money issue only secondarily.
>When we hire people as we've been doing, we can either fit them into the existing space somehow, or... move the entire office?
Yes. Exactly.
My office did it with 0 days down time combining 3 separate locations spread out around a city downtown. We labeled our stuff on Friday, a company was contracted to make sure on Monday our stuff would be in a new office, and it was.
It's a money issue through and through, until the lost productivity is greater than the cost to move, more people get crammed in. Simple as that.
No, that's silly. You lease a building bigger than you need today, and then when you fill it up you either pause hiring or start cramming people in until your lease is up and you can move.
Or, I guess you can set money on fire and break lease after lease after lease, but I think there's no way around the fact that this is a space issue first and foremost, with money providing a way to mitigate/solve space issues.
We moved into a building bigger than our current size yes... so?
You don't fill up overnight.
Do you hire people on a coin flip? Or make up open positions when it tickles someone's fancy?
We were hiring at an incredible rate, but never got to the point of being actively detrimental to our space because once that was barely in sight, we started to move.
But having money afforded that option.
Hence, it's always money, not space.
I've mentioned lease terms as one major counter-example. It is not enough to lease "larger than you need right now," but given 12-month standard lease terms, you must lease "larger than you will need one year from now," which isn't a factor of money alone.
There is literally no situation where any moderately competent company is forced to cram people closer than normal except to save money. Even "normal" is defined by money.
Heck, even an incompetent company can pay a competent company figure it out for them.
finding the space, contracts, fit outs - it's not a one-day task
Unless there is literally no real estate within your location, it's always money.
It's not even a money issue in general, it's what money is untouchable, vs what money can be freely cut into.
Working conditions for regular employees? Sure, brand it as "increased collaboration" and cut that sucker down to the bone.
Number of yachts per CxO? Nope, can't touch that.
But isn't that how you sell anything politically? Take some real or alleged positive aspect, blow it up out of all proportion, be loud and keep the pressure up, ram the agenda down all throats as deeply as it goes.
Of course, WeWork being a company with one product, they try to sell it to everyone, even the people who it doesn't work for. That's a valid criticism of WeWork, but not really a valid criticism of open offices.
Your post is a valid criticism of forcing introverts to work in open offices, but it isn't a valid criticism of letting extroverts work in open offices.
What do you attribute to your increase in productivity in an open floor plan?
The same way everyone measures productivity: subjectively. With software development, measuring productivity objectively is very much an unsolved problem (which is one of the major problems with studies on productivity of different floor plans, incidentally).
> What do you attribute to your increase in productivity in an open floor plan?
1. Generally feeling happier, more energized, and more focused (I'm an extrovert). When I work alone I find myself getting restless, irritable, and distracted.
2. Collaboration. Catching mistakes, soliciting creative ideas, getting information when I don't know something. But really #1 is a much bigger factor for me.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying an open office is right for everyone. If an open office isn't right for you, then you should be able to work in a private space. I'm just asking that you offer me the same courtesy. There's no reason we have to force everyone to work in the same style of office, when everyone has different working styles.
Logistically it seems unlikely open offices will go away, software heavy business can’t just spread their workforce over 3x the space, especially in dense urban areas. Better to come up with novel solutions for deep work, like dedicated open area library/dark dungeon rooms.
Yeah, that's not an open office.
The article even mentions how they're "sold to workers as a boon to collaboration — liberated from barriers, stuffed in like sardines, people would chat more and, supposedly, come up with lots of brilliant new ideas". Thankfully the author also quickly refuted that. Yet the insanity remains, and people (often times the Agile evangelist types companies hire) continue to try to convince developers that open offices are good.
I could buy into it if the rational is it's far cheaper to fit more employees in less space. That's a fine reason. It sucks to work in, but I can at least hear that without rolling my eyes and dismissing everything else that person says as incredulous.