Slashdot Mirror
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."
just for being antisocial? I think that we now know why Bill Joy left! Some of the best geeks I know are antisocial miscreants who given a project and deadline will outperform 5 of their peers but who do NOT want to have to deal with others on a minute by minute basis, they can basically handle weekly update meetings and the like but they would HATE to be in them all the time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Treating employees increasingly like cattle doesn't serve to help workplace productivity at all. The culture went from people having their nice productive office, to sharing an office with 2-4 other people (in the same 15'x15' room), to cubicles, and now to not even having a workspace? How can that be productive when you don't even know where you're going to be working for the day?
Yes, I think this is a Good Thing (tm). I experienced that working in a shared room, improves creativity. It happens quite a lot to me that I'm stuck at a problem, and after discussing it with a colleage we find a solution together. Now, I think that if you're working in a cubicle, you'll have less contact with your colleages due to the wall borders, and therefor will lack some sort of shared creativity.
Of course, there's the risk of workers losing productivity, but I think we have to face it: we're there to work, not for fun talks.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
"Freedom" from cubicles means freedom to work under constant observation of the overseers.
Use part of it for your business and claim it as a tax deduction
Some of the best geeks I know are antisocial miscreants
Then I certainly wouldn't want to spend any of -my- time with them, let alone share the workplace with them.
I don't care how productive or geekily intelligent someone is. If they can't communicate effectively or deal with other people, they have no place in most workforces.
A team of 5 interesting, friendly people will ALWAYS outperform a lone social outcast barricaded in his single office.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
until i realised that all i need is a headphone and some music to ignore others...
I hate working in the open. We have an open-plan office because internal walls (and indeed, dividers) are expensive. Nobody has a cubicle. The CEO has his own office.
The noise and interruptions are hurrendous. I am working from home two days a week now because it's impossible to get things done at work.
The general noise level from the other areas is unacceptable. I know we are also guilty of making a racket, I'm not saying we're perfect.
But when I'm in the guts of the server side, and we have a very complicated core server component, I don't want to be interrupted every five minutes by laughter, walk-ups, casual questions from co-workers. Team player bullshit or not, I'm there to engineer a fast, reliable, robust component. When I'm interrupted a lot, my defect rate (number of tickets at 'Defect' level entered against me per release symbol) goes up. Really up. A lot of people wear headphones to block out noise, but there's evidence to suggest that if the brain's cultural centers are engaged, engineers don't make creative leaps. I think this is true.
Plus, as you may know, creative work is usually performed in the psychological state of 'flow', which is intensely focussed concentration. It takes 20 minutes of hard concentration to get into 'flow' and then you can be snapped back out of it instantly by a question or a ringing phone.
I would LOVE to have an office. I would even share it with two other engineers, provided I could pick them.
Hell, I would love to have a cubicle, actually.
The ergonomics of offices and the human aspects are well discussed in Peopleware, but if you don't think you can make change in your organisation, don't read it because you'll be left depressed at how offices are *supposed* to be run.
Who said anything about anti-social ?
Some of us like to be able to concentrate in order to get work done, and find it difficult to switch off from everyone around us. It's just too easy to get distracted by all the conversations around you, joining in when you feel like it.
Seems to me that anti-social people might have fewer problems being distracted.
It's just the latest management fashion. Instead of senior managers using intelligence and common sense to work out for themselves what is a good, productive environment, they just follow the latest fashion that everyone else is talking about.
Give them another five years, and the fashion will be back to individual work areas, with some separation from others, so people can be "more productive".
... the way using nothing but Microsoft software "promotes choice."
I'm incredibly lucky to work at a company where I -- not as a manager, but as a regular ol' code monkey -- have my own office. Cubicles suck. Open space environments suck even worse. I know; I've done both in the past, and never will again if I can help it. The "old paradigm" of the office became the standard for corporate work because, guess what, it works. Just about every change since then has served to increase worker stress and decrease productivity.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My ADD doesn't affect my ability to write software - I'm a damn good programmer. It affects my ability to filter out noisy distractions and movements in my peripheral vision.
If an factory worker were required to work on a slippery floor, he could legitimately complain that the environment limited his productivity, not his own inherent disability.
And as for paraplegics, If Cambridge (or is it Oxford?) didn't supply wheelchair ramps, would it make sense to fire Stephen Hawking? In fact, how about people that can't work in the rain? Should the building have a roof just to accommodate them?
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I work at home, and have off and on for a long time.
I hate it!
I do have a dedicated "office" room, but the space isn't the issue... it's that there are no people around. Or if there are, they are here to socialize.
I think it's a Good Thing on some very deep level to be around other people while working, at least some of the time. Programming for twelve hours straight without seeing another human being tweaketh the mind in harmful ways.
Since I work for myself, there's not much I can do about it right now. However, as soon as Profit allows, I will rent an office somewhere and arrange for others to share it, even if they aren't working for me.
Oh yeah, and I need a cute secretary...
This Like That - fun with words!
Anything that does not have to be done onsite in the office can be outsourced to India and China and elsewhere.
so eventually it all could go over there, leaving a twisted dried up hulk of an economy behind in the USA. When you take 500,000 high paying jobs and ship them overseas, you may have saved the companies big bucks. but you have also reduced the market for your high price goods by that much.
Do this enough times, and you get a situation like you saw in manufacturing in Detroit. When was the last time you heard stories of the incredible economic opportunities in Detroit (even if things have improved somewhat after 30 - 40 years).
Manufacturing says they are doing this to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Efficient systems are not always robust, because you tend to eliminate redundancies. Redundancies give you your backup capabilities. Efficient systems tend to be more vulnerable.
And so it is with businesses.
But in the meantime, instead of building and maintaining their prize market, they drain it like parasites...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
I agree that ADD is misdiagnosed alot. My son was diagnosed and I have always disagreed. My wife had him put on drugs and it became WORSE! Took him off and he was better. Not cured, but better then he was on the drugs. My wife finally agreed with me. All we had to do to get him to pay attention was remove the thing he was obessing on.....close the blinds, lock the door with a lock high off the ground so he could not reach it....all of a sudden when we told him he needed to stay inside, he did.
On the other hand, with the cube thing, not everyone can work in a cube. Also, management and HR needs to learn how to handle the nuts who can't stand smelling a little gas cuz you ate a burrito for lunch. My dad taught me to suck up and work even if I did not like the person I was working for/with. You are there to work. Not to talk or smell your neighbor. I don't mean you can't have a little fun while working, but when things bother you when you are working, you need to let it slide and do the work.
Gorkman
Yeah, They did this where I work, merged the cubes into bigger cubes. Problem was they didn't stick like employees in the pods (as we called them) they mixed everyone up.
In each of the instances the people who were on the same team didn't have an issue not having walls between them and their teammates.. the issue was always with someone who wasn't on their team, being a busybody and watching them like a hawk and complaining they were too loud, didn't like that they ate lunch at their desk, or other things. This resulted in harassment suits being filed with HR eventually, and led to decreased productivity and a hostile work environment. Chiat Day tried this years ago, they did it to everyone, so the managers took over the conference rooms and turned them into offices, people hoarded the PC's they'd checked out, etc...
The only difference here is they're keeping the offices for the management types, who will likely be unsympathetic to the employees plight. Imagine working on a project, having to come in and check out a new PC each day, install your development tools on it, carry around a file cabinet sized bag to carry your papers, not have a place to lay them out, then have to put them up at the end of the day. When you leave for lunch, you have to pack EVERYTHING up because anyone could throw your stuff away so they could have your space to work.
Giving someone a predefined place to work (a cube) may seem like crap to some employees (those wanting an office) but it's better than the pods with 6 - 8 people in them in half the space of the same amount of cubes, or the programmer pool where the whole floor is just a bunch of desks facing the managers desk.
Anyway, the Management Genuises who came up with the merged cubes where I work are in hot water over the idea now, they brought it back from one of those hobnobbing management conferences where they blow the training budget for their whole section of the company by staying on the club level of the hotel, flying first class, and eating $50.00 - $100.00 meals.
I'm one of those roaming Sun employees now and it actually seems to work quite well. In addition to the JavaCards that lets employees log into a SunRay and work from any Sun building, most of us have laptops that can be plugged into the network - Most Sun locations offer wireless too - when we need to sync code or check corporate email and such, while still allowing us to work on them without having to physically be in a Sun building. I've tried working from home as well as in a public library with free Net access for laptops, both with much success.
My team still meets weekly for lunch discussions but the rest of the time we use IM and email - with the occasional cellphone call - to communicate quite effectively. Today's generation of young University kids grew up on IM so they will have little difficulty adapting to using it over face-to-face contact with co-workers.
...at least in my experience they do.
At some point, a poll was circulated around my company, asking people what the ideal office size was. It was basically only programmers that answered 3 or 4. Everyone else wanted to share with as few people as possible. Artists, designers, whoever.
I work with 3 other people in my office now, and I really like it. I'm REALLY lazy most of the time, so not having to get up to ask someone a question, and just yelling it out to my office suits me just fine. As well, my two immediate team leads are right near me, so if I have a question about a design decision that I'm making, I can clear it with them if it's sketchy. Why would you want to be in an office by yourself? I've had the office to myself before, and it's usually just kinda lonely.
I have had an office, an "open space" desk and a cubicle. I love the office and the cubicle, but I truly hated my desk that was stuck in the middle of the floor. See, programming requires a lot of thinking, especially at the early stage of the development. Whenever I was writing something on a piece of paper or tried to concentrate on thinking, at least one person would stop by and ask something. Then there were certain managers who loved to get a progress report update everytime they went past my desk to get some coffee. Then there was a tech support dude (Level 1) talking on the phone for hours and hours a day.
Most of these people were doing their jobs and I had nothing against them; however, with time the unwanted interraction became a royal pain in the rear. I could cope with the tech support representative because he was was aware of his impact on the "free space" people. Unfortunately that was not true for a couple of women from the sales department...
On my opinion, the best way to improve efficiency is to have a relatively big office with several people whose job is related. I remember sharing an office with a dude from India. We got along pretty well and concentrated on our tasks while helping each other.
I think this move could be very good companies and communications, but for people with ADD/ADHD this is all very bad. An open environment leads to extremes in distractions. People moving about, people talking, speakers blaring (headphones only rule needed), top-level and upper management weenies watching production - all this would drive a person with ADD/ADHD to insanity (and/or unemployment).
As a person that deals with the rollercoaster ride of ADD/ADHD, I would like to see a 'compromise' solution. Keep the top-level management (Pres, VPs, CEO, etc) in offices (just shrink the offices), move the upper-level into cubes, eliminate middle-management, and push groups into group-centric open environments. Groups could move cube partition walls as needed. Leave some 'isolation tank' cubicles (high walls with extra sound dampening) available for people with ADD/ADHD.
As for the wireless 'shared' space - great idea, but where do you put your paper? Forms, documentation, books, etc. all the usual paper that you may need for work needs to be stored somewhere. I suppose you could dream of a paperless office, but I doubt most offices could pull that off effectively. Maybe I'm just 'old school', but my CYA work requires print-outs (since I cannot email these items to a home address). Still, great to see corporations working with wireless.
I can't say I'm surprised at its failure.
Humans may be by and large social creatures, but we are also territorial. We need space to call our own, for all the reasons cited in the Chiat/Day failure--space to store paper files, meet with clients, place to think in quiet.
If I want to confer with my co-workers, I can generally find them, because they have an office. When I'm done conferring and want to think and/or work uninterrupted, I go back to my office. It's a sign to those you work with--I am here to work and am available for consulting, but I'm not open to constant, distracting chatter.
Working in the common area of the engineering building while in college was great for group work and socializing between classes (gotta take a break once in a while), but if you wanted to work uninterrupted, better break out the headphones. I doubt Chiat would have approved of headphones, being a "personal" item.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Never mind the fact that workplace ergonomists consulting with the PHBs are way more into following trends in their own field than in actually noticing what are the needs of employees who will be working in their designer environments. They fail to examine whether certain team members are more productive working in solitary and interacting with others only at the weekly meetings, while others actually are more productive in a common team space. Individualisation is the keyword, but workplace ergonomists fail to understand it.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Do you talk dirty to epileptics, too? "Quit shaking, you sissy!"
Stephen Hawking's job is to "think" and the slashdotter you're mocking seems to be employed to write software, not to chit-chat.
Personally I like to have a social space available, but I'd like some private space for things like reading documentation and thinking/learning.
So what's wrong with providing the anti-social geeks with a room of their own? Would you rather they starved to death?
We take care of people with problems - that's what's makes us human - and it's been my experience that some (not all) of these anti-socials are smarter and can understand things faster than most.
Some of them have adapted to the group life, but they took it slow with baby steps.
Every developer I've ever talked to has indicated that they do their best work when alone. Yeah, you need group meetings periodically, and every once in awhile need to bounce some ideas off a colleague. But when it comes down to finishing up some new module, or finding some tricky bug, focus and the ability to concentrate are key. This will become a lot harder in an "open" environment. So all that money saved in real estate costs will end up being gobbled up by lost productivity.
The other thing is, I bet you any money, managers still have offices. They had them before in cube-land, and they'll have them now. The difference is that the divide between lowly-developer and management will become even more pronounced. This doesn't lead to a very egalitarian work environment, meaning less job satisfaction among employees, which again translates to decreased productivity.
So why the transition to an "open" environment if there's going to be a decrease in productivity? Because saving costs on real estate is something that can be immediately quantified and measured by management. "Loss in productivity" is one of those wishy-washy things that can be attributed to half a dozen different things without any real certainty. Took longer to get version 2 out the door than version 1? It was because there were more complicated features to do for version 2, less skilled developers on the team this time around, etc, etc. (Of course, the one reason that would never be suggested -- at least by management -- is management's decision to change to an "open" work environment.) Being able to quantify something and show a short-term benefit on a balance sheet, while being oblivious to consequences that are less easily quanitified and more long-term, is what management types excel at.
The best environment I ever worked in was when I was at IBM and we had shared offices. There would be two developers to an office, one senior, and one more junior. That way the more junior developer could always have someone there to ask a question when he got stuck and the more senior developer was not just relegated to an isolated office to code all the really hard stuff by himself. That was several years ago; unfortunately, from what I've heard, since then IBM has also been moving to cubeland. (On a bright note though, even first-line managers get cubes, so they're "down in the trenches" with the developers, which is a good thing.)
My company relies largely on IM for communication,whether from home or in the office. Most of the programmers don't even have and "office" phone in their workspace. I like it this way, although I find it strange that in the settings I have been placed in with this company in the three years I've been there (cube - very short lived, office with three people, office with two people) we tend to be averse to communicating verbally even with our office mates (the people who share the same room with us).
I've lost count of the times I've asked someone to relay a message because the person I was trying to contact was not at his/her desk only to be told email him or IM him when he gets back. YOU'RE SITTING RIGHT THERE FOR CHRIST SAKE!! Is it really that hard to turn around and say so and so was looking for you?
I think the social effects of IM as a primary communication tool is something we ignore all too much. Programmers, as a geek species in particular, tend to be somewhat solitary people. The added convenience of not having to talk to someone face to face only makes these habits worse IMHO. Sure, it's great for productivity. I get a massive amount of work done just from the benefit of not having to talk to anyone. I can answer and instant message by touch typing without even thinking about it (especially in linux as opposed to finding the window in the start bar in windows which distracts me greatly), but there is more to everyone's heirarchy of needs than just being productive.
Cutting off the sociable ability of being able to physically converse with someone face to face is something we should not let deteriorate without consideration. I can go for hours (at least 4 at most 6) without even using my vocal chords. I, for one, think this is a very dangerous trend.
The english language is in beta. It's evolving but has not yet reached a level of usability.
Now we issue you a badge'' with the option to work anywhere, Vass said. ``It's instant productivity.''
Sure, if you're a paper-pusher.
If you're a software developer or hardware engineer, it takes a certain amount of isolation in order to be productive. Even though I have an office (shared) at work, both of us in there find that we get our best work done after all the interruptions have gone home at 5pm.
Chip H.
I think the real group to blame in situations like this is management. Supervisors and middle management love to be able to keep tabs on their employees so they like to have them grouped together (physically or virtually) so that they can keep an over-head on what is being produced and in what (timely) manner. If management could develop a means of sorting out the social from the introverted then they would have a truly cohesive workforce. I personnaly beleive think-tank work practice is the best because of a tendency for creative criticsm and a more reliable means of levying out ideas that aren't feasable. However, a lot of your loner types have a tendency to put out qualtiy work simply because they AREN'T there to socialize. They have a goal, they have 12 hours to reach it and that is what they do.
If management could simply grasp the concept that their employees are individuals, they could mold the workplace to suit everyone so that issues like this wouldn't occur. If you like working at home, work at home, you work better in a group then so be it, and if your that "hermit" who works best alone though wants the interaction of at least BEING there then that could work as well.
When I was in Special Projects for a while I saw all these situations occur. I had employees come to me complaining that they didn't feel productive at home, that they needed the interaction of fellow employees (at least available) to have criticsm readily available. I also noticed that we in management didn't meet those needs. As a result people felt less cared for and lost affinity with their employer. Once we instituted a means for personal preference to become a factor in our employment and dispersal capacities, we notice a significant increase in productivity.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
Add that to firing people who don't work well in the new system (hm, sounds like an excuse for a targetted RIF if you ask me), and it's an all around lousy way to do business.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Many folks point out that it's going to be difficult to locate someone in these floating offices. That's true. However, all they need to do is develop those cool locator systems like they have on STTNG.
"Computer, where is Creative Director Algers?"
"Creative Director Algers is in the Can."
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.