We say this all the time but act as if it's some secret, or just a cynical remark, but it's not either of these. As a general rule your boss likes that you can feel their perpetual gaze as you work, even if in practice it means you are working less.
Because of course you aren't working all the time, and of course you are not 100% being productive. Everyone knows this. It is not a secret that even the most productive engineer spends a huge amount of office time doing nothing.
No worker (as I general rule, I know there are exceptions) prefers open offices to either cubicles or real offices (I wonder how many HN have ever had these?). Nobody feels that they work their best when someone is watching them. Everyone knows that part of working in an open office is figuring out how to create the illusion that you are working.
The only reason to have an open office is because the people making the decision for how the office should be, and the people reporting to them, do in fact like to watch you work, because they like the control that they feel when they do this.
Please let's stop pretending that we don't all understand exactly what open offices are about.
Open offices are crazy cheaper, and most retail developers don't build real offices anymore (and or when they renovate a commercial property pull all these walls out).
It is about cost, for anywhere I've worked or any clients I worked for. I haven't ever known a manager that wanted an open office to control or oppress their staff.
This is (mostly) why new occupancy tech exists as well btw -- the "crotch sensors". Not usually for specific employee surveillance, but to map occupancy trends and determine what parts of a space can be hot-desked or otherwise over-assigned to further reduce space requirements.
The way it works is similar to attitudes toward remote work (until a few months ago): barriers help people waste time and get away with stuff.
Control is not all about what an authority can do (which is actually the least efficient form of control), it's also about what other people are prevented from doing, sometimes structurally so, as in the context of office layout and design.
Sure, there must be times when ~everyone is available to talk. But otherwise, just let people work when they're ready to work. And let them self report their work time.
That's why "Busyness" and "Butts in Seat Per Hour" are seen as proxy for productivity. That's also why politics play such a big role.
Until we find a GOOD way to measure productivity, Control and "Busyness" (the illusion of productivity) is unfortunately not going to go away.
I thought to myself: "what if that was the etymology of the word, how ironic".
https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+business
Oh wow.
This conflicts with the much, much stronger profit motive.
Employers can still calculate "profit per worker hour". And it's arguably more accurate when based on reported work time, rather than just days worked.
It is not. It's specifically used because of the utility in the simplest tasks. Factories are designed around throughput and efficiency of workers.
You say that salaried people aren't paid by the hour, but that's arguably a fiction. There's always a defined work day. Some employees end up "working" for inordinate amounts of time. And some employers do push employees to be more productive.
So if the standard is 40 hours per week, I'm just saying that you do the work whenever, not eight continuous hours per day, for five days per week. That decreases control of employees by employers.
Even if the floor space itself is open, that doesn't mean that decently high cubicles (or even floor to ceiling dividers) had to go along with it. How much is it really saving to shave 1-2 feet off cubicles for your six-figure staff? Smart workplaces don't think twice about $400 for a second monitor.
Say occupancy costs (all in) are $60 psf. Now assume occupancy is around 1 employee per 200 sf (inclusive of indirect circulation space). That means occupancy cost per employee is $60 x 200 = $12,000. Now make some assumptions about the total labour cost (salary, bonus, benefits, etc) - say $200k - and look at how little the occupancy costs are relative to that - 6% with these examples.
Jam more people in so you get it down to 1 employee per 150 sf, and you've saved $3,000 per employee, or 1.5% occupancy to labour, which can easily be lost in terms of decreased productivity with people shoulder to shoulder.
Lesson: You need only a very, very small change in productivity to counter any savings in relation to occupancy. And not just in terms of productivity of existing employees, but also the cost of lost productivity due to lower retention, or lost productivity due to more sick days given the closer proximity. This is why I've never understood why companies go anywhere but the best locations with the nicest office space... People really are the major cost and the only asset a company has. Do everything you can to make them love every second at work. The added cost of free food, nicer office, better location, etc is insignificant.
The Open Floorplan operates a lot like that.
But they also lower cube walls, or make them transparent, which goes completely against this theory.
In my experience thrift is the overriding factor. The cost difference between an open office plan and individual offices is staggering. It can be an order-of-magnitude difference, especially if you factor in the additional cost to build individual offices into a typical open floor plan. Few companies choose to put their money there. Many could not afford it at all.
In leadership teams at many companies I've heard very little talk about control in this way, explicit or covert. Open office plans aren't necessary for control. Doors are not a shield from control. People in individual offices can be controlled in similar ways.
I don't like the feeling of being observed all day, either. I think it's damaging to some/many people's ability to work. It can turn into an artificial hegemony; it certainly can be used for control. But so can many things, from salary to coffee supplies to bullying. Control will always find a way to control. Open offices are about the money.
It sure is. It's like the idiotic startup I worked at for 6 months that gave everyone i7 laptops with 32gb ram and 5400rpm 500gb hard drives to save $100/laptop. True fucking story. The dude who ordered them told me it himself.
I think companies will do some stupid shit to save some cash sometimes.
Besides, all this talk about productivity and stuff? It might be true, it might not. It's a lot easier to just add air conditioning to an old warehouse than it is to build out a divided up office. Right? They're not going to spend all that money to see if they're more productive.
However, back when Apple's Infinite Loop buildings were constructed (in the early 1990s) they were mostly full-sized offices. I was told that Apple had done a cost study and determined that hard-walled offices were cheaper than cubicles in the long term because divisions were always incurring costs by re-arranging the cubical walls every few years, and you just don't do that to sheetrock.
One thing that makes open environments manageable for employees is to make the desks movable. At Valve, the desks are on wheels, and the culture is to move next to the people you are working with. Just shut down your computer, unhook power and network wires and wheel your desk over. Those little wheels make a huge difference.
You can't force a research result, so watching that everyone is "busy" just doesn't make sense practically. If the undergrads don't learn how to convert their time into an expected result, they just wasted _their own_ time.
Taking an open office without this sort of research mentality is simply making everyone uncomfortable, and is setting up unrealistic expectations.
If a team is result-oriented, then it doesn't matter if one didn't type N number of lines, or closed X number of tickets in a day. At the end of all, one reports to the team, not just a boss. You trust your team for the result, not for their not reading HN instead of resolving another bug.
No, it was not about 'control' it was just about money.
Your comment is cynical enough that I think you might maybe have a problem.
Your Ops and Accounting people can present Plan A - open, and Plan B - cubicles ... Plan A is always cheaper and the benefits of Plan B are hard to justify.
Now 'others are doing it' ... so it's Plan A.
It's cost, it's that simple.
"Nobody feels that they work their best when someone is watching them."
This is usually not a problem - after 10 minutes, you're working, everyone else is and nobody cares.
"Everyone knows that part of working in an open office is figuring out how to create the illusion that you are working."
If you think this then maybe you're in real trouble!
Yes, it does suck that you 'can't check Facebook' as often, fine, but why would you need to 'create the illusion that you are working ... at work'?
If you need to 'create the illusion that you are working' literally when you are supposed to be working ... then ... this is not good!
"Please let's stop pretending that we don't all understand exactly what open offices are about."
You're mostly on your own here.
I much prefer offices and cubicles, it's much quieter, less distracting, and yes, I feel slightly more comfortable checking Facebook once in a blue moon but that's not really important.
>This is usually not a problem - after 10 minutes, you're working, everyone else is and nobody cares.
This is very cultural. I live in a world where anyone's productivity positively tanks when they're actively watched.
This is what causes car accidents close to police cars
Open offices a much rarer in e.g. Germany. Through then Germany also has more strict labor protection laws wrt. office "safety/healthiness" so it might just not be as profitable to do an open office? (Note that I'm mainly referring to regulations about chairs, desks, light and noise in offices. Which exists but are in practice hardly if at all enforced on small companies. But from time to time in larger ones.)
And yes, we also were in an open office before all being sent home. Though I may be missinterpretting, and you may mean more high level c-suite types. But even then, my impression of them is more busy than anything else.
By shielding the team away from dumb political games, providing technical / architecture / design input, and controlling meetings and direction for meeting. Ex: one of the competent managers I knew could always “win” the argument for our team, I saw them convince an otherwise unshakable team to make changes by themselves (convincing an entire team to make a necessary change).
The best managers I worked with were less about control, they trusted you, and ensured no one got in your way, and they were also skilled at architecture / coding themselves.
I believe that most companies are just cheap-ass bastards that don’t know any better. They do it because everyone else is doing it, and they believe the lies they’ve told themselves about how everyone loves it.
Welcome to the jungle.
I guess I’m the exception then. I had an office to myself with a closeable door once and I HATED it. So quiet and lonely. Everyone around me had closeable offices too so you had to get up and deliberately make an effort for human interaction, or you’d spend all day without seeing another soul.
Occasionally as we would staff up and down I’d end up sharing the office with someone else and that helped tremendously. But when I had the room to myself it was awful.
It drove my so loony that I basically abandoned it and set up a makeshift workspace in the break room where there were always people coming and going. You’d have to put a gun to my head to go back to a traditional office room.
That's what control looks like. Arguing that the typical manager is like that man is like arguing that Obama or Trump are dictators. Only people who have never lived under a dictator would say that.
IME with all the managers I've ever had, and with what little managing I've done myself, few people care what you're doing at your desk as long as you're getting your work done on a weekly or monthly basis, and are responsive to your coworkers. Most of the anxiety you feel is imagined, though in no way does that diminish the anxiety. (I hate open office plans, too.) The reasons for open offices are obvious: cost and convenience. Not only cost and convenience for the employer, but also cost and convenience of the building owner and the next tenant.
Put yourself in the shoes of the property manager. If it's a big tech company, organizations are constantly growing and shrinking. If you're a leasing office, you may have to deal with any particular office space turning over every 2 or 3 years, and spending weeks or months trying to find a new tenant, who will have quirky requirements about how many groups they have and how they want to arrange them. At some point you'll just say, "fsck it", tear down all walls, ban new walls, and make management of the physical working space somebody else's problem once and for all. Bonus points if there's pseudo-scientific research circulating that makes your solution seem like a brilliant, pro-worker innovation; but you truly couldn't care one way or another because your fundamental motivations are entirely different, driven by simple economics. Again, you couldn't care less what people are doing; the whole point is taking yourself out of the equation and making it their problem.
You know, I've always envied US salaries but at least stuff like this is illegal in Europe.
Not that we have a shortage of autocratic and incompetent managers/seniors who try to spend the better part of their day micromanaging you and staring over your shoulder, at lest they can't use tech to make this easier for them.
Companies will be competing with an increasing number of "remote first" or "ultra flexible" workplaces. These companies may think they want plexiglass dividers now. But new candidates will have offers between "work from wherever" or a plexiglass labyrinth that looks like a modern supermarket checkout on steroids. Why would a candidate choose the plexiglass open office? If the company had a flexible arrangement between the plexiglass jungle or a chill WFH environment, who would work in the open office? As companies realize that many don't want to live in their city, and many others don't want to go to their office, they're going to have to compete to make their office more enticing if they want a world where people still go to an office.
Of course, this depends on the broad WFH trend coming closer to gaining critical mass.
If only there were some sort of organization that would enable us to do this collectively!
I think workspace design and office ergonomics are a potentially easy win for collective bargaining in the information workforce, especially now-as stated by others this is a unique opportunity and in my opinion the incentives align between worker productivity and public health.
Interested to hear more thoughts.
Edit: oh. This one flag killed too. Never mind.
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Like supporting collective worker action.
I still think they bring an interesting bit of salt and pepper to the discussion: open-workspaces bring out a lot of opinions from workers and employees, and in my opinion are pretty low hanging fruit for a newly collectively-organized white collar workforce in 2020.
Your thoughts?
Also I can't parse most of your message. I think you are so far into your belief in this premise that no one can follow what you are saying; you are making a LOT of assumptions that others aren't.
For instance I have no idea what "newly collectively-organized white collar workforce in 2020" means. or "open-workspaces bring out a lot of opinions from workers and employees"
...thoughts?
Yes. It brings opinions out from people with certain personality traits.
Do you think collective worker action is a valid path to take during this pandemic to improve working conditions as areas consider reopening and lifting quarantine restrictions?
I do, and I agree with others who say this opportunity is a good one to explore some of those options and begin having some of those dialogues to build effective coalitions.
If that’s what you thought I said, then this is on me to phrase myself better in the future.
I'll definitely be hanging as many database model posters as I can fit on my transparent dividers.
So, what they’re doing is making people work harder at being lazy-taking away from productive time!
But it’s easy for managers to fall into a pattern that has them lording over their paiges and feeling good.
it would allow to even more increase density, even beyond open floor office, so it is "better" for a specific corporate definition of "better". The definition that has been driving the density increase during the last 3 decades from private offices to open space. If not for coronavirus, the next density increase would have taken like a decade too. Now we're going to jump straight into it. Into our personal cozy aquariums. Office dress code - goldfish. Or crabby.
Rockstar JavaScript Software Engineer #2293 You have forgotten the cover sheet to your TPS report. A company message was sent by the corporate friendly bot on Friday regarding including cover sheets on the TPS report. We have contacted the corporate friendly bot to email you a new copy of the email. If you fail to place your cover sheet on further TPS reports this will be noted. This has been an automate message from the compliance and reporting bot Carl. We value you as an employee, you are the life blood of Initech!
Funny how the speakers always seemed to be failing in the engineering areas. Simply cannot imagine why :-)
But going from open office to plexiglass dividers seems to be far worse than a cubicle in every conceivable way.