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Cubicle Etiquette?
zrgn asks: "Our team is moving to an open office type environment in a couple of weeks. The problem is that most of them have never worked in that type of setting before and thus may not know the do's and don'ts associated with a cube farm. I have two questions: what types of cubicle etiquette things have Slashdot readers come across that may help us in the new environment? (ie. don't listen to your voice mail on speaker phone); and What are some creative ways to relay 'cubicle rules' to the rest of the team?"
Second, in the interest of improving coordination and communication among all the people who you work nearby, make sure you hit the speaker phone button and turn the volume up, and don't forget to speak REALLY loud (remember those speaker phone microphones can't hear so well). This way everybody can hear your phone conversations since there are no pesky cube walls to block the sound. This will save you the time of having to explain the conversations that you just had will your coworkers that may be directly involved with what you do. Also, people who don't have anything to do with your job will get a chance to know how important and hard working you are.
Third, get some screen reading software. Use this all the time with the volume turned way up. This, like the previous advice will increase the likelihood of your coworkers getting valuable information from what you do, which they previously may not have been aware of.
Fourth, consider the savings of not having to call or email your co-workers! After all they are sitting just 40 feet away! There's no need to get up. Just yell out there names and have your conversation with them from your desk.
Fifth, you will be most comfortable and productive in this environment if you don't worry about hiding certain activities which where previously blocked from view. Go ahead and pick that annoying booger and whip it under the desk, feel free to scratch where it itches. We are all human anyway, and everybody was doing these things before, so to hell with it.
Sixth, buy a second monitor. Make it point the opposite direction of your monitor and mirror its content. Since your screen and the actives you are performing are already in the public view you might as well save the people the hassle of walking behind your monitor to peer over your shoulder. Note that this was not an option before the cube walls where taken down. And your nearby co-workers will appreciate the latest and greatest of your comments that you posted to slashdot. Note this step may not be necessary if followed the third piece of advice.
Hope this helps! Before I did all these things nobody ever noticed me in the office, and so I was often over looked. But now I'm the most talked about employee in my office!
Basicaly just don't do anything that's going to have an unwanted disruptive effect on your coworkers, That doesn't mean that you don't disturb them just make sure that you keep in mind that they can hear you.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
1) the aforementioned listening to voicemail (or any call) on speakerphone. :)
2) Play your music on headphones
3) ditch the amusing new mail sound. Silence is golden.
4) Get your own lighting so everyone can leave the nasty overhead fluorescent lights off and light to their own specifications. better on the eyes, too.
5) To get someone's attention, arc a rubberband over the cubicle wall. Or hand-toss a nerf dart.
6) If you're the nervous twitch type, don't thump your pen on the desk incessantly, or whack your heel against the side of your chair, or whatever irritating thing you do.
7) If you have any brains, get some earplugs or a noise-cancellation headset.
8) Set the temp to a standard 72. Deal with it however you need to. "Space-heaters & deskfans for some, miniature American flags for others!"
9) Talk to the Claw! Don't stand around chatting with someone when it's obvious they're trying to get some work done. Be considerate - cube farms are hard enough to work in without a Chatty Cathy around.
10) PROFIT!
End of Line
I once worked in an office where a developer thought it would be a good idea to return a volley of Nurf darts stuffed with flaming toilet paper... Needless to say management was not to pleased with this decision! So I guess this should be slotted in the "do not do this" section of cube etiquette ;)
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Have food services ditch the beans from the menu.
Seriously. If you are not going to talk to somebody, dont stare at their work area without a reason.
People already feel without privacy without the looking.
If I had my druthers, no food would be allowed in the common cubicle area. If this isn't acceptable, please, no seafood, and no smelly foods, particularly early in the morning.
One coworker of mine would bring a bacon cheeseburger into the cubicle area for breakfast. Noone needs to smell beef and bacon that early in the morning.
If only common sense were more common, noone would need rules like this.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
There's nothing like Fish and Chips with lots of malt vinegar. I keep extra bottles in my desk. It's also good on plain potatoe chips.
Garlic has many health benefits and I recommend chewing it raw as often as possible.
Beans are also healthfull.
Also crackers with a healthy hunk of lindberger cheese is a great snack in the mid afternoon.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
My biggest gripe in a cube farm:
Eating.
If you want to eat in your cube, fine. Just keep it within your cube. I don't want to know about it. I don't want to smell your questionable fish-and-garlic-suprise, I don't want to have to wipe your barbeque sauce off my white board, and whatever it is you are eating I don't want to hear you chewing it (or doing what ever that guy in the fly did to consume his food).
And speaking of flies, take your trash to the lunch room as soon as you are done. The janitors will not dig through your pile of printouts to find your week-old pesto pieces, but there are six legged clean-up crews that will.
Thank you.
-- MarkusQ
Also, don't transact personal business on the telephone unless you REALLY want the whole office to know about it. That goes for making appointments, calling friends, the works. Sound carries well, and people tend to talk louder when they're on the phone with people they know well, because they're more comfortable.
Don't listen to music without headphones, don't pop popcorn and bring it to your cubby, and remember that anything you put on your wall may be seen by anyone at anytime.
that said, personalising your cubby can make you feel more comfortable. Even hanging colth on the walls is oke in some places, so get a good set of guidelines put out for what IS acceptable as well as what isn't. Offer, if possible, several types of whiteboards, corkboards, whatever, so that people feel that they can customise it at least a little.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
hell, make em a gift to everyone, its a gift to you as well.
I reside in the Engineering cubes. We like to pretend we're on the Enterprise by tapping our chest and shouting the name of whoever we wanna talk to. Couldn't do that when we had offices.
(Note: I'm not really being sarcastic here.)
"Derp de derp."
Just download some inappropriate audio file and leave it in thier messages. (Gotta love portable MP3 players aye?)
Make sure you use the boss's (or better yet your boss's boss's) phone after hours so the offender will think it's important.
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
I useta take paper airplanes and write "S.C.U.D. Don't worry, it probably wasn't meant for you!" on them. Then, I'd throw them in a random direction from my cube and see how many would come back. Then my boss brought one back. Evidentally, doing something like that more than once is a problem.
Lesson learned: Only fire one SCUD from your cube.
"Derp de derp."
I have one word for you Dilbert
Especially the books
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Produce posters advising staff that an amnesty bin exists for the print pornography and liquor bottles that they might be collecting.
Make sure that you hoard those nice red staplers that will now be in plain view.
So much to do, so little bandwidth.
--
Try Mozilla
Here's a list of rules for behaving in a school computer lab; they should work equally well in a cubicle farm.
People tend to hire, and like to be hired by people who are like them. Thus most people will want the same thing. 3:00 nerf ball fight is expected for some, grounds for dissmissial in others. So customise all the rules you read for your enviorment.]
When you read all the funny posts that others have made, try to figgure out how violating that rule can be useful. In tech support you might want to turn up the speakerphone volumn when a really dumb caller is on for instance, so everyone can share the laugh. (or maybe not? what works for you)
Anyone who doesn't decorate their cube with pictures of the kids/spouse, and their "art" is not human and not someone you want to work with. I mention this because some companies try to enforce a no cube decerations policy. That said, keep it up to standards. (Even if everyone in the office is a nudist don't have nude pictures, customers may visit if nothing else)
Make sure their are whiteboards in every cube. I found that the whiteboard was the most useful thing in my cube, and so did most of the others I knew.
Get a laptop with 802.11. Take it into the bathroom with you and you'll have an office with a door!
Moving to an Open Office environment, eh? I'd start here! http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-questions.html Ohhh, open office.... :P
Keep the cellphones on vibrate and don't leave them on your desk while you go to meetings. Tell your friends and family that you are at work and not call every 10 minutes.
(if you work with me and leave your cellphone at your cube while in a meeting....I remove the battery after the second call. Yeah, I've pissed two people off, but I have 20 fans.)
Get a braile printer and print books for the blind off of iblio.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
1. Find out who's the highest-ranking pillock to use his/her speakerphone to listen to voicemail.
... Profit!" to this list. Are you amazed at my originality?
2. Have a friend of an appropriate sex call him/her up and give him the following message:
"Darling! Last night was the most amazing experience of my life! Did you really mean it when you said you'd leave your wife/husband/etc and run away with me to Madagascar? I'll be round at [some time about half an hour after he/she usually listens to voicemail] with my suitcase and string bikini! See you soon snooky-wookums!"
3. Watch the results.
4. [Please note how I did not add "3.
: Bat :
I have discovered a truly remarkable
1. No smells
2. No sounds
Our peaceful little IT section got invaded during a rebuild upstairs. 2 women in nearby cubes would call each other, and talk. On speakerphone. Loudly. As my little domain was exactly equidistant from these two harpies....I got both sides of the conversation, in stereo.
Yelling would only get *my* blood pressure up, so I endured until bliss was restored, and they moved back upstairs.
Similarly, a woman of foreign descent would bring in lunch. And cook it in the microwave. And eat it at her cube.
Pseudo kimchee is NOT a pleasant odour.
Again...no smells, no sounds
I think the most important thing is to not take anybody's red Swingline stapler.
I work in a truly 'open office' environment. It's a midwest car manufacturer owned by the Japanese, and they pretty much brought their office 'concepts' over with them.
No cubicles or walls, just quadrants of desks in a huge room. Even the president and senior-level managers have their desks out in the open just like everyone else.
Fortunately, the IT dept. is on a different floor and doesn't have to really share space with other departments, even though we still use the quadrant system. I got lucky in that I have a corner quadrant and my back is to the wall. Also I work with some great people. Working in this kind of office you really get a chance to hone your concentration skills, because there are lots of times where you need to 'turn out' what is going on around you in order to get some actual work done.
All food out in the open in your co-workers' cubicles is fair game
Make sure to place all your computer monitors as close together as possible (ie on the other side of the cube wall). That way when someone presses degauss it will degauss the whole office!
Terry Tate, Office Linebacker
Chris
Pet peeve of mine at my last job:
A coworker had this habit of brining in noisy toys, like the talking Sponge Bob Square Pants, dancing hamsters, etc. He'd routinely set them all off in succession several times a day. It didn't help that he himself had 2 voice levels, loud and bleeding eardrums. Nothing spoils your concentration like having to listen to a hamster sing "Kung Fu Fighting" followed by Sponge Bob's laugh, followed boing various "Boing!" "Crash!" etc sounds.
Others insisted on routinely using speakerphones for conference calls, even when several people in the same area were on the phone. Still others didn't understand the concept of "headphones".
There was also the guy who, when lobbing nerf darts and hitting someone, would scream out "OOOOHHHHHH!!!!" regularly. He'd also try to sing and play a guitar.
Now, if there were a normal office, it might possibly be semi-excusable (assuming you don't mind this stuff, or have a good set of earplugs--I recommend ones with the highest rating you can find, usually they're in the shooting supplies subsection of the sports equipment section of your local Mega-Lo-Mart), but this was a support center, where several people would routinely be on the phone with customers. The last thing THEY want to hear are all those sounds that drove me up a wall.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
DONT leave your cell phones ON at your desk and leave your desk. You may like your ring tone but it will probably bother others.
DONT use a radio without headphones. Background noise is what it will come off as to others, no matter how low it is it will probably annoy others. Some people don't like it. ASK FIRST!
DONT humm or make lots of weird noises, it may annoy those arround you.
DONT use the hands free on your telephone, cause most people WONT want to hear your conversations. You should use a conference room for meetings even phone meetings.
DONT surf porno sites, other may be offended, also watch what you do surf, as others may be offended. Yes many places have no web surfing rules, but most places are pretty laxed about it.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Don't let them steal your red stapler.
Especially if any of your co-workers have been working from home.
a) Pants. Use them, Love them.
b) Although therapeutic, screaming obscenities at the printer will not make it work. Baseball bats are for that.
c) Nerf is much less "sparky-flamey" than water guns.
d) No, not everyone likes Kraftwerk and Devo. (Although they should)
e) Paper Boxes can be used strategically to expand your cubicle space
f) Remember, that fellow you "0wnzor3d" at Quake with the wall hack is within striking distance
g) Removing the flourescents to achieve that "dank cave" feel is much less appreciated in a group setting
At least I have the satisfaction of knowing as soon as we figure out who is doing that, they're fired.
Help us build a better map!
* Think before you act. If it would annoy *you*, chances are
it may annoy the guy nextdoor, also.
* Keep the noise down. If you must have sound from your PC or
stereo, get headphones. If you need to carry on a conversation,
go to the person, rather than yelling across the room.
* Don't do anything you see done in a Dilbert cartoon.
* Shower or bathe at least once a week whether you need it or not.
There may be a handful of other things peculiar to the environment,
but I'm certain that you can get 95% of the way there with basic
everyday common sense.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The #2 rule
I hate private offices, I hate cubes. I LOVE an open office.
The office is for work. - period! So you don't have decor other than small desk pics of the family.
Have facilities for privacy - meeting rooms, planning areas, large desks and boards - but in other places. Everybody doesn't use them all the time, so you can share.
Get a place to eat where everybody can sit together. Close for lunch, take no calls.
NO speakerphones.
No personal music.
No food at all around desks.
Don't hire smokers, they waste too much time and cost too much to take care of. Spend money on child care instead.
If you can't say it sitting next to me, you don't need to say it at work.
You will continue to work, learn, and be more productive by communicating directly. Feedback will be imediate and people will not have a chance to bitch in private. You won't make phone calls to people five feet away.
If you can't be happy working in close proximity to people who should be your friends, you should seriously consider suicide. People who push using impersonal and isolating enviornments should be euthanized. Software can facilitate isolation if used with craft and guile so don't demand that everyone use the office calendaring system for all interpersonal communications. Don't worry, you won't miss a meeting. It just won't happen.
By all means, don't insist that everyone have creative ideas at appropriate times and places.
It would be like going to a foreign country for most people under 40 or so. You find out that people actually live there.
Oh yeah. NEVER spend less than two to three hunderd dollars on a chair. Spend lots of money on a good cleaning staff and good food. Get some decent art. Make sure everybody wears nice fitting clothes if you have to buy them with the money everybody saved on kitch and those gobo-like little wall thingies.
If the boss sets himself apart in an ostentatious way, quit fast. A little is OK. Gold bathroom fixtures are a give-away as is a conference room from a movie set.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Everyone can see what you hang up. So put up things that everyone will enjoy viewing. If your going to put up porn, make sure it's high quality porn hand picked from your collection and printed with a good printer on photo paper. Make sure to have a variety of male+2xfemale, 2xfemale, and 1xfemale action so there is something for those of all sexual preferences to view and nobody is offended.
Just shoot 'em. They are the whiners. People have done something about it. We call it a law. The point is that there is no alternative. Smoking is bad for everybody. Why put up with it? It's not that everybody can be replaced either. Self-destructive behavior is just bad. Sorry - off topic.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
I'd have to say that the best piece of advice I could give is to be very careful when starting conversations with the people beside you. They may not stop talking and there's no polite way to get out of the conversation as you can't excuse yourself to your desk...
I've gotten stuck in a conversation with one guy who unfailingly tried to sell me his laserdisc player and in another with a guy who tried to inspire me to invent a heating/cooling system in one big machine (as opposed to separate AC and heating units we have now).
Also be careful eating. The laserdisc guy used to each plums with the most disgusting noises one can imagine...
Needle Nardle Noo
Assign everyone large, heavy, foam-covered clue sticks so you can play Whack-a-mole with your cube neighbours.
Invite the nearest PHB to play, but take the foam off first.
Cubes suck. There's no such thing as "open" office environments, but there are such things as cheap management and sweatshops. While it is couched in positive business lingo, the move smacks of management pinheads squeezing the employees against a bad job market...
Your team will be more productive for maybe a month, then it will slowly ramp down to being much less productive in 3 months as the novelty wears off. Especially if this decision was made on-high without regard to the employee's opinions on the matter, expect a rapid morale drop...
Adults need privacy and respect... "open" office environments offer neither.
I learned from reading 'Dilbert'.
Seriously, unless the the job/team is really cool, polish your resume, or find out if you can work from home a lot.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Not just any headphones. You need the over-the-ear kind that actually seals over the ears. A lot of headphones produce almost as much second-hand noise as regular speakers.
Headphones that cover the ears provide some benefits:
- They keep the sound inside, reducing the noise that others might hear.
- They block out external noises, so you don't have to turn up the volume as much.
- This also reduces the noise that others might hear.
- It allows you to hear your music more clearly.
- It helps to prevent you from incurring hearing loss (not total loss, but partial loss; a serious and common result of using headphones)
If you intend to use them often, I recommend buying a high-quality pair. Don't consider anything under $40.I worked in an area where several different phones were close to each other. You never knew which one was going off, but then I found out that you can modify the rings on the phones. So some phones go "burrringgah!" and some went "rrrinnngahring!" These were Lucent / Avaya phones, others may have different features.
JWZ may have some ideas
Just remember what they taught you back in elementary school:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Others have posted good lists of what to do and what not to do, but it all boils down to the same thing: if something would annoy you, then it will also annoy others, so don't do it. And remember that not everyone shares your tastes.
I work in a Japanese office; for those of you not familiar with Japanese offices, they basically consist of huge rooms (my office has about 90 people in it) with rows upon rows of desks, and if you're lucky a back wall to your desk. It takes getting used to, but if you can deal with having other people around while you work, it's not that big a deal. It may also serve as an impetus to reduce your Slashdot browsing time. (Or then again, maybe not...)
Run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.
Go home and check out the listings on monster.com.
Life is too short to live in a cubicle.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
What about things like how to get someones attention? Having quiet times, or indicating that you are busy. One of the big problems I will have is that I can't close my door anymore. People can just come right in and bother you. Each time I'm interupted it takes some time to get back into it. There should be a marker on the cube wall or something and people should head it before walzing in and asking questions. Are there clean ways of accomplishing this?
You'll need to rent this http://imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
Nothing to see here; Move along.
prepare to have your testicles removed by the RIAA inquisition.
Free as in mason.
Garlic is bad enough from someone several offices down...I can only imagine what it would be like with someone sitting right next to you- especially if your garlic-chewing cubemate is the type that is prone to garlic-induced flatulence.
some things are a product of ethnic tradition. a co-cuber sucks/slurps food and makes disgusting noises when eating...but only when he eats chinese food. turns out some oriental cultures do this as a sign of respect and expression of enjoying the food that was served. i decided that this was something i would not try to correct in the boy and instead i leave if it is bothering me.
I thought standard room temperature was 70F.
In general, I think it is preferable to err on the side of being too cold because adding more clothing is always an option. Shorts are not acceptable business attire at many offices, so someone that finds 72 a little too hot is just out of luck. I personally have more trouble concentrating when it is hot.
People have posted various lists of things to do/not to do - most of them pretty obvious, IMO. Our office is pretty polite, and most of these things happen without rules needing to be stated. The one thing that does cause problems is ad-hoc meetings. A goes to ask B a question, C walking past or at a nearby desk joins in, they call over D, who also has an input to the problem.
In one sense this is good - communications between the members of the team has improved. Those interactions might not have happened in closed of offices. But, if you are involved in the project, opinions can get heated and the discussion a bit loud for others in the area. So you must have some separate areas for ad-hoc as well as formal meetings, and you must try to move off to them if the discussion starts getting heated. But don't formalise it too much - if you stop the discussion until you can get a pre-booked room, all spontaneity and inspiration will disappear.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
...I work in a cube farm and I use my Speakerphone for everything! I'm a programmer, and when people call its typically because they have found a bug, or something similar that needs to be addressed in the code. I NEED! both hands when trying to address such a phone call.
So...
1. Shutup and Deal!
2. Encourge companies to realize this and either use high wall cubes(The Walls are 7-8 feet instead of the standard 4 1/2 - 5)...or put programmers in offices...and managers in CUBES!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
>Shower or bathe at least once a week whether you need it or not.
Dude I hope this is a typo... You should shower/bathe every damn day!
I've been in a couple of environments where cube farms have worked well, and a couple where they've caused more problems than solved.
Since you're moving into a new environment, make sure that a couple of things are taken care of. These are more management-oriented, but they're things to think about.
For the general etiquette tips...
eom
I worked at Frontier/Global Crossing, and it was the worst environment I've ever worked. Besides the fucktards who used the speaker phone to check voice mail, and the two women who used speaker phone to talk to each other when they sat 10 feet apart (which I've already mentioned), I also had the following. Note that instead of desks, we had these overgrown shelves that hung off the cube walls.
1. The guy opposite me used to drum on his desk, hard enough to make my monitor shake. When he wasn't drumming on the desk, he was stamping on the floor hard enough that I could feel the shaking through the floor.
2. The woman next to me had a poorly sheilded fan that she put right on the other side of my monitor which on hot days would turn my display into a bad drug trip.
3. She also had frequent visitors who would sit on her "desk", causing my entire desk and monitor to bounce up and down when they sat down or shifted weight. Just leaning forward or back would be an annoyance.
4. When "Little Drummer Boy" left, he was replaced by a guy who spent most of his work day on the phone talking to prospective buyers of his car, or talking to his former neighbours and coworkers back in New Jersey or arranging tee times.
Besides the poor working environment, the whole place was a massive cluster fuck of mismanagement, but that's a story for another time.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
every cube needs a complete drum set
There is a dilbert book which has a specific section on cubicles. It's called "Dilbert Gives You The Business (ISBN 0740703382.)" It is essential reading for situations like this.
Get it. Read it. Seriously.
Were those really boogers on the wall above the urinals on the 3rd floor of the Math building at the University of Waterloo?!?
Put on my headphones and ignore the rest of the universe until lunch.
Then go to slashdot.org
(Posted anonymously so I don't get fired)
No I am not joking - some people don't even take a shower/bath 1x week I am not joking. There was this one lady from another country, and everytime she came into my lab, my eyes would BURN from the stink It would be like this for abt 2-3 weeks before she would wash. BUT! she didn't always wash her clothes and some of the stink residue would still linger even afeter she had "bathed". Secret notes, direct talk and other hints did nothing. My solution was to always stand inthe romm so that she would be right next to the fume hood and most of her odor would be sucked up.
..........FULL STOP.
For the love of god, take it to the bathroom!
It's easily the most annoying thing one can do in their own cube that will make everyone else want to tear their ears off.
specifically "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams," by Tom deMarco and Timothy Lister, and leave them around.
Not that it will do any good. It's too late.
But it does make a number of points, one being that cubicles reduce productivity. (They have some pointed things to say about telephones and paging systems, too).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If you need ideas on what not to do, it might be time to dig up a copy of the movie Office Space. It'll do wonders.
We just moved to cubes, and one of the things that drives me nuts is people walking into my cube to talk to someone on the other side of the row. If you need to talk to someone, walk over to the entrance of their cube to do it, don't go into someone else's space or lean over the wall.
You're right about the privacy issue. However those conversations are rare (once a year per person?) and can take place in one of those areas reserved for this sort of thing or in the office of a person who needs to be isolated for some reason. ;-)
Maybe I should have defined open office "my way." I would detest a 40 person area too, whether it has cubbies or is open. 15 or 20 may be the limit, I'm not sure.
Open offices shouldn't be huge, a group that has similar aims is what is important. You can have several loosely linked if you have a large operation. It is a learning issue. Lots of our tactical (?) informaiton is so short lived that efficient use means that it has to be used as quickly as possible. If a person lives in cubeville, he has to have a meeting or write it up. If the group that meets can work in an open format, the person who learns can commmunicate it with a story then and there. It is easier to talk than type.
The point is that the group is constantly communicating and learning from it. I'll grant that it is hard to mediate, but it is worth it. My office (>10 years worth of experience) rated among the highest performing ten percent in the nation according to an industry research monitor.
I'll grant that whether or not I love it is irrelevant to you. But where you work and who you work with are part of the job. You can respect someone you don't like, of course and be able to work with him, but it won't be fun. After a while, there is no reason to put up with people you really don't like.
The lunch issue is just more of the same. Nobody should force people to eat together, just provide for a civilized enviornment.
I really didn't intend to be troll-like. I just don't believe that I should have to agree with a bunch of unhappy people who are bent on a self-destructive path. Cmdr Taco, can I be a happy Troll?
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Not even in the lunchroom! Jeebus, that stuff reeks. There should be a special microwave, outside under an awning where the smokers sit, specifically for popcorn. It should be popped, shaken, opened, aired-out, and half eaten before bringing it indoors.
Waving your smelly popcorn in my airspace is an invitation for me to overindulge on burritos tonight, and tomrrow spend a lot of time inspecting the bulletin board right next to your cubicle.
Ditto on the perfume thing, people don't realize how intensely that stuff smells. I used to know when one particular secretary was in the office because I'd start sneezing in the hallway.
I've seen these little "on the phone!" lights sold in the same catalogs that sell handset kits for desk phones and stuff like that. You could easily use white stencils or white-on-clear labels to make one into a nice little "on air" light for yourself.
Of course, be sure to turn it off once in a while. You don't want to be the boy who cried "do not disturb".
I've worked in a couple of open plan offices
There are a few thins you should take into account:
t
I find it most distracting. I work in a small room with 4 cubes and an AC. I've got a radio but am considerate enough not to play it with others in the room. However, one of my fellow admins has developed a whistling habit. My boss listens to all his voicemail on speaker, and the other guy...well, the other guy is fine, but the whistling thing, and listening to CCR just drives me nuts.
For all the linux geeks out there, try motion. I used to use it for some mundane things, and I can testify that it works very nicely :)
-Cheetah
Direct from Swingline.
or
From Thinkgeek.
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
The "Profit" part would be on the caller's list, I'd imagine. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
1) Be considerate of others.
2) Don't be a wuss. If someone is doing something that is a problem, politely let them know.
3) Don't be thin-skinned. If someone tells you that something you're doing is bothering them, see what you can do to accomodate them.
The only practial suggestion I'd make is that management should try to set up a phone and a flat surface somewhere where people can get a little privacy. Usually a conference room will work fine, unless it's one of those that gets used every hour of the day. Everyone needs to make a private phone call at some point in time, and making it easy for people to just step away from their desk for a few minutes is better then making them leave to find a pay phone or whatever.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
My company still thinks it is productive to have programmers as backup-receptionists, so headphones are out.
I hate this place.
They make bluetooth headsets now, don't they? Encourage your higher-ups to buy you one.
Easily solved: quit. Or better yet, adopt a more interesting telephone etiquette. You can start by always answering "Whaddya want!?!"
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.