Companies Move Away From Cubicle Culture

Makarand writes "According to this Mercury News article companies are freeing employees from their cubicles to save on corporate real estate costs. By eliminating the need for offices for thousands of employees they are reducing their building needs by thousands of square feet. Employees now work in shared areas or from home or elsewhere outside the traditional cubicle. Those who prove to be unproductive when they have to share space with others risk getting fired. This trend is expected to accelerate as wireless technologies are making workers more mobile and capable of working from anywhere. About 13000 of Sun Microsystems' 35000 employees working in Santa Clara (CA) currently lack offices."

Comments

No, bad - it may violate federal laws

[JetScootr]

I have severe Attention Deficit Disorder, and putting me in such an environment would result in me being one of those "unproductive" employees. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) would prohibit doing this for 3-5% of the adult population of the US. That 3-5% is packed with a disproportionate number of engineers, scientists, etc, since ADHD tends to affect those with above average intelligence more than other groups.

In this situation, cubicle walls can be interpreted as "adaptive technology" which companies are required by law to provide.

Re:Good Thing (tm)

[mayotte]

There was so much chit chat where I work when we moved into these common offices, that I was forced to move to the back corner of a storage room, just so I could concentrate. Several others with the same goal followed me. The article stated that "Executives with several of these firms noted that getting workers to share space fosters a team-oriented atmosphere that increases productivity." My experience was exactly the oposite. These mobile offices killed the sense of community, and now you often site around people you barely know, and can not ask favors of, and do not have the time to do favors for in return. Another little nice benifit is that they give you a tiny amount of locking storage space which you have to walk half way across the building to get to. So when we moved out of our offices, all of the less-critical stuff was thrown out or moved to common-libraries where they quickly wandered away. And as predicted much of that stuff turned out to be very-critical. Also, most of us have had our tools, which are now hard to secure, wander off as well. I sure hope it saved my company a ton on real-estate costs, because it cost us dearly in other ways.

virtual office

[simonaustin]

I work for a company that has no offices at all. It's fairly small, but everyone works from home. We have people working in Sweden, New York, Toronto, and Vienna. We cooresepond and share ideas via secure chat, email and telephone conversations. It is working really well.

I have a dedicated office, but I live in a small city close to Toronto where the real estate costs are much lower, so I end up renting a 3 bedroom townhouse for the price of a 2 bedroom apartment in Toronto. It works out great for me.

Re:Everyone will ignore what is really happening

[phillymjs]

On the other hand, having hotel offices for the person who comes in everyday, works 9-ot-5, ... is dumb. And I doubt many companies would do that.

Renowned advertising firm TBWA Chiat/Day tried it back in 1994. According to a Wired article about it, things didn't go so well.

~Philly

Re:not fond of homw work any more

[xdroop]

While this is better than a cubical the employee is paying for it. Another way to reduce pay in effect?

Daily parking: $10 ($200/month)
Daily fuel costs: 10L == $5 ($100/month)
Reduced driving wear and tear: 90% (so let's say about $100 a month)
Car now lasts 50% longer: let's say $200/month

I don't know about you, but if I could put 15% of my after-tax take-home back in my pocket every month, I'm all for this 'pay cut'.

Just because the company spends something on you as an expense doesn't mean it is a direct benefit.

Sun

[allenw]

"About 13000 of Sun Microsystems' 35000 employees working in Santa Clara (CA) currently lack offices."

There are around 13000 employees worldwide that lack a permanent office. The Santa Clara campus doesn't hold that many people. :) [That line of the article was poorly written, IMHO.]

One of the other problems of the article is that it fails to mention that there is a sizable number of people (who may or may not be iWorking) that report to someone who isn't in their geographic area any. What's the point in going into an office if you're the only one from your team there? [Of my current team, only three are physicially located in the Bay Area... and that does not include my manager.]

I've been working from home for quite a while now. [I was one of the early adopters.] I love it. It is one of the reasons why I like working at Sun. I can run errands, play some video games, whatever during my work day. As long as I get my work done, no one particularly cares.

Re:Those who don't learn the lessons of the past..

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes.

I think that in the context of tech jobs, the key here is "think in quiet". Any decent programmer spends a lot more time thinking than actually coding. And yeah, a lot of that thinking involves looking things up in manuals (and no, damn it, online references are not a substitute for dead trees!), doodling diagrams on convenient pieces of paper, etc.

Programming is not assembly-line work. The more PHB's try to turn it into an assembly line, the more they get crappy, bloated, buggy code.

Re:antisocial

[ScrewMaster]

Seems to me that anti-social people might have fewer problems being distracted.

Actually, I think it is the other way around. The anti-social types (like me) tend to be more easily distracted, more easily bothered by unscheduled interruptions. Most of the messages I've read in this thread seem to indicate that these "anti-social" people have some kind of mental dysfunction. Quite the opposite. Most of the "anti-social" developers I know are very hard workers who simply want to be left alone to work efficiently, and resent being pulled away from that work without good reason. They get labelled "anti-social" by people who really should be sitting at their desks doing their jobs rather than wandering from cubicle to cubicle being "social". Furthermore, if one of those "anti-social" programmers snaps at one of these "social" types because they broke his concentration and cost him a few hours of development time, it's no more than they deserve.

At the company where I currently work, there is a large central area where most of the electrical and mechanical engineers sit. The fellow that managed the software staff had enough clout with the owner (and enough common sense and experience) that when the building went up about seven years ago, the software people got their own room full of cubicles. The rest of the entire plant is subjected to loud music played through the ceiling speakers (honestly, if I have to sit through "Jive Talkin'" or some other incessant pounding rhythm one more time I'm going to go nuts.) Our old software manager understood the need for programmers to concentrate, consequently the speakers were turned off in our room. A year or so ago he quit, and suddenly the speakers went live again because the owner doesn't think his programmers are anything special and that we should all be treated equally, although I've noticed there is no music playing in his office.

As a consequence of this, none of us are as productive as we were previously, and I personally have never been as productive in a corporate environment as I was as an independent developer. I'm sorry to disagree with some of the other, less-well-informed posters, but programming is a job which requires intense concentration and attention to detail. We tend to get irritated when our concentration is broken by well-meaning IDIOTS that want to discuss the latest episode of Star Trek: Enterprise or some other trivial reason. If that makes us "anti-social" so be it, but management that places its software development staff in the way of too many mental roadblocks is simply engineering employee disaffection and a significant loss of productivity. There are many aspects to the software development process that are only dimly grasped, if they are recognized at all, by most forms of management and this is one of them.

A glimpse of your future

[stull13]

I work for one of the global HR outsourcing firms that tracks corporate trends. In most cases we have about a five year waiting period before we actually implement these tends within our own organization, but in some cases (for instance, if there is money to be saved) we are actually one of the first to implement.

A few months ago, one of the PHBs came up with the idea that we can save corporate real estate by moving away from the cubicle model, as mentioned in the article. However, our solution did not encourage mobility and teamroom type environments. Instead, they are now putting two to three people in each cubicle (in the space formerly occupied by one). Rather then do away with cubicles altogether, they are "Maximizing" the space in each cubicle.

This hasn't affected everyone within our organization yet. They have started it with our lowest skilled workers, but the "Success" stories I have heard can only lead me to believe that it wont be long before the rest of us join them. Considering the number of corporations that take HR advice from us, it probably wont be long before the majority of you join them as well.

The moral: It is better to be treated like a cow than like a sardine.

Excellent Point regarding Books

[cquark]

I need my technical books too. While electronic books do exist, physical books have substantial advantages over them which more than make up for the lack of keyword searchability.

1. You often need to read the book and your full screen at the same time. You can buy another monitor, but what if you want to refer to two books? You always have more affordable desk space than screen space.
2. All the books you need aren't available in electronic form. I recently gained access to Safari and some other electronic books, but they cover less than 10% of what's on my bookshelf so they certainly can't replace it.
3. Resolution. Books are printed at around 1500dpi, while screens are generally around 100dpi. Books are easier to read.
4. Paper is an absorptive technology, while screens are projective. Once again, books are easier on your eyes.
5. Books are more portable. They're fairly light and they don't require power. I can confidently carry my book on the plane across the Atlantic without worrying about power adaptors or battery lifetime for my trip.
6. Books don't support DRM software.

As you can see, electronic books are a long way from being an adequate replacement for paper books, though I'm looking forward to digital paper which will alleviate some of the problems with electronic texts, being an absorptive display technology and so not requiring a constant power flow.

Re:Cannot expect one-size-fits-all workplace to wo

[interociter]

I remember reading about this. There are a ton of problems with the virtual office concept. First, graphic artists need hi-def monitors, so they need a defined space to work in. Second, with your team spread out around the building, everyone's going to need a cell phone. Admittedly, Nextels are dead sexy and amazingly useful, but they're also ungodly expensive. This is 2003, we simply can't afford to give every employee a cell phone. Third, despite all the hype about paperless offices, I still have a lot of paper to deal with. If nothing else, I have a lot of books in my office. Unless someone wants to scan them and post the pages as jpgs on some server (hello, lawsuit), I need to have them with me. Fourth, you need an amazing security policy and nobody can be lazy. If all your documents are on a server, that server has to be buttoned down. No more saving files on your local machine if you don't know who's going to have your laptop tomorrow. Admins: be prepared for a non-stop parade of people who can't log in/can't find their stuff/lost that one document that's really important.

Next, there's the human factor. No definable workspace that's "mine" gives the impression that I'm temporary, simply a cog in a machine. Plus, remember high school? Everyone will gravitate to an area and stake out turf. They will consider that space "theirs" and resent any intrusion. Plus, the "cool kids" will undoubtedly stake out the good areas, leaving the less powerful to wander the office aimlessly looking for a place to work.

Shared space sounds like a pure utopian ideal that would never work in the real world. The assumption is that everyone on your team gets along perfectly and never needs time apart. I'm part of a pretty good team, but if we all had to share one big cube, we'd be at each other's throats. What happens when you have to work on something with someone? Two people have a conversation with an unwilling audience of three. Either you whisper or you bother everybody else.

Count me out.