Re:Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study
by bobbiechen on Thursday February 06, 2020 @12:21PM
(#22258004)
>For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off.
I think it's pretty tough to read if it's okay to interrupt when your teammate is wearing headphones (especially if, as you said, everyone wears them most of the day). Sometimes I'm just wearing headphones to listen to some music while doing something easy and tedious, which would be okay to interrupt. But if I'm diving deep into some system to find a mystery bug, then I'd be annoyed if interrupted.
I'm currently working on a project exploring physical interruptions and would appreciate hearing about your (and other HN users') experiences: https://forms.gle/syL1XrLAauxd57hr7
For a "hey there" conversation, most teammates have to get up and walk over to someone else... tap them to shake them out of their focus and get them to take their headphones off.
Don't think any of us resort to email, but then again I'm only on one of many teams. We do use Slack but again I don't know how many private Slack conversations occur. (Most of my team is not located here, so everything is Slack, and most of it is in a team channel.)
I'm not sure I have a solid takeaway, but I can say that I'm much, much more engaged with my remote teammates than my local ones.