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Building a Better Office
xjrfx asks: "I'm in charge of setting up a new office for my company. I want to make the place as worker friendly as possible, comfortable enough that long hours don't seem like banishment to a beige hell. I was hoping to get some input from Slashdot regarding past office experiences, good and bad. What amenities/factors cause you to love or hate your office? If you could create your perfect office how would it work?"
"Did you feel schizoid in open offices or claustrophobic in cube farms? Were you ever forced to be in an office when you would have been more productive on the road, or conversely have you ever had to leave the office to focus on the task at hand? What's more important; a foosball table or a fancy furniture system? Do you want the same desk space for your duration of your employment or do you want to move around depending on your projects?
Our office will be 40-45 people (15 engineers, 7 creative types, 15 biz dev/sales, and some support staff and part-timers as well), but I'm open to opinions from people from much larger or smaller offices."
Our office will be 40-45 people (15 engineers, 7 creative types, 15 biz dev/sales, and some support staff and part-timers as well), but I'm open to opinions from people from much larger or smaller offices."
If at all possible, give everyone their own office. I feel 100% more productive now that I don't have to work in a cube.
-- Bryan
Next comes the offices. If you've got programmers, give them the offices, and let the directors and VPs, who are never in their offices anyway, have the cubes. Programmers need peace and quiet, and the ability to hang a "stay the hell away from me" sign on the door.
A past company I worked at had several good sized conference rooms, which is normal.. However, every wall in these rooms was a giant white board. Also, several un-official meeting areas had white-board walls too.. That was dang handy for trying to explain things to people at impromptu meetings. And please, take one Conf. room, and put a couch, TV, and comfy chair or two in. makes meetings much more relaxed and productive.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Windows (the kind you look through to see the outside world) are nice, too...
Eh. Do everyone a favor and HIRE an interior designer. They don't spend 4+ years in university for nothing. There are plenty of design studios out there that specialize in workplaces. Look one up, they will open your eyes too all sorts of things that you would never of thought of.
Many times they will also point out sources for fixtures and whatnot that are much more economical than the places geeks would go. And no graybar is not the place you buy your overhead lights. Oh and they are all current with the workplace safety / egonomic regulations as wekk.
A Gamespy article has a nice quote predicting their downfall: Work should be a practical place to get things done - cubicles are reasonable balance between cost, privacy, and personal space. Having meeting rooms, bathrooms, and a kitchen is also nice. The traditional approaches to work spaces are done because they work well enough.
Aeron chairs??? Those things dig into your legs! OW!
Oh, and cubicles (it's NOT "cubes") offer the illusion of privacy. In fact, they do nothing of the sort. Everyone can spy on you, and everyone's sound bothers you. Big open rooms are a nightmare -- "grand central station" springs to mind. No, give me a separate, enclosed, real, no-foolin' OFFICE of my own every time. With a door I'm allowed to close, too, thank you very much.
One thing you didn't mention: quit it with the fascist network policies. This encompasses everything from logon scripts that overwrite your preferences in the registry to not having access to your own C: drive to "Unacceptable Use Detected" internet intercept screens. HANDS OFF, please. If you don't trust me to do my work, how do you trust me at all?
[Exhales] Sorry. Bit of a rant there.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Don't even think about doing this without reading "Agile Software Development" by Alistair Cockburn . . . even if you aren't doing software development!
In any office, communication efficiency is the most important factor in productivity. My father works at a college, I work in the financial industry, and my brother is a filmmaker. In all these diverse industries, communication is the essense of getting things done effiently (obviously, _just_ getting things done _just_ takes bodies).
Now for some personal preferences: I like to have a personal private space for photos, plants, doodling. I like to be able to arrange the space as I like, including the furniture. I like to have privacy in the space so that I can veg when I need a mental health break, or so that I can concentrate when I'm in a bad mood and don't want to deal with people. However, I also really enjoy working in an open area with other talented people. The open area must have lots of whiteboards, good network access (802.11g is good enough), lots of stationary supplies, large work surfaces, and ideally a good relevent reference library handy (easiest to populate this with suggestions from the people working there). Much as I like some natural light, too much can ruin work in the morning or evening when the Sun shines directly into a space - one way to solve this is to orient most windows to the North. A good number of real air-cleaning plants is a good investment too since humans are naturally in a better mood when exposed to nature.
Hope that helps.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
But let's just cover a couple big ones:
You spend about half your waking life in an office, and therefore you shoudl expect some level of privacy and a decent standard of living. The biggest infraction against this that many modern offices make is the "cube farm".
Cubicles are a great economical alternative to traditional offices, but you must give people ample room to breath, and ample privacy. 2 foot by 4 foot cubes with waist/desk-high walls is BAD. 6-8 feet on a side and walls that are neck to head high on the average employee is GOOD.
Additionally, it helps to provide ample privacy rooms. These are small conference rooms (actual rooms with doors and (possibly translucent glass) walls. They don't get booked for meetings, they're designed for impromptu use. When someone needs to make a telephone call that's personal in nature, or a couple people can see their discussion is getting a bit heated for cubeland and needs to be hashed out in private, or small impromptu team meetings, etc. This keeps distracting drama-rama out of the cube area, keeps people's privacy better protected, and prevents the distracting small team meetings in the cube-hallways that annoy everyone nearby trying to work.
Good quality white-noise generators help a little bit on the privacy and distraction fronts as well. Just enough to drown the distant din, but don't turn them up so loud that people can't willfully talk to the guy in the next cube over.
Lighting. Your employees use computer monitors. This means you don't want the outdoor light coming in through windows causing glare on their monitors, and you don't want nasty flourescent lights wreaking havoc in the eyestrain dept (hint: flashing light + flashing computer image = fried eyes). There are flourescents out there that are better than average for this, but the ultimate is anything that doesn't have a flashing frequency like flourescents do.
Hmm this comment is getting long, I'll be back later.
11*43+456^2
I'd quit the minute they let you bring a dog in the building. Hate the animals, can't stand them. I freeze up if they get within a few feet of me. Work would be a living hell. The reason you're NOT allowed to bring animals is that despite how much you love your pet, nobody else there like the fucker. And we don't want the distraction and hassle of dealing with it when you lose control of the dumb animal. So leave your dog at home, I'll do you the same courtesy and leave my pet guinea pigs.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
...to everyone when you don't have to spend 30-60 minutes each way each day to cram your way through freeways with insufficient automobile bandwidth.
Just imagine if everyone who could work at home did work at home. The few who did have to commute would fly along on a nigh-empty freeway.
And all the fuel saved...and the environmental improvement...and the lessened dependence on foreign petroleum...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
One office - one person. You need your own creative space where your door can close, because IT people walking around with 2-way radios and electrical contractors in the hall and people from QA babbling in some foreign language and assholes from sales who can only use a phone hands-free with the door open and the general buzz of the coffee area and the spinning up noise that the laser printer makes will all distract you fairly effectively.
Gymnasium. Fit, relaxed people think better, it's a fact.
Car parking. Enough of it, close enough to the building.
Free sodas, water and perhaps pastries one day a week say "we value you" loud and clear. Fast internet connection is just not optional. Aeron chairs are perhaps too expensive, but if one person gets one then everyone should.
Apart from all that see "Peopleware" by De Marco & Lister, for good coverage of things that management often don't consider until the padlocks are on the front door and everything is being sold at auction.
Hmmm, a bit over the top. One of the office workers here brings in her dog. It just sits under the desk and disturbs no one. Of course the dog's owner is blind.....
Bringing one's dog to work is fine.. until you hire somebody who is either deathly afraid of dogs, or is merely alergic to them.
Oh yeah, and all of the really stupid pet owners who can't control their animal, nor clean up after them, doesn't help your case. Usually ends up being part of the lease agreement.
Which is really too bad, because that would be nice.
Gentoo Sucks
What he said. User-controllable lights are a must. Ask people about their light preferences, and group your people accordingly.
If you work with papers on your desk all day, or a telephone and a Rolodex, you're probably a "light person". If you say things like "I hate a dark office! I can't work in a cave!", you're a light person.
(Light Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC under the desk with 21" monitor with fingerprints all over the screen, the contrast and brightness both cranked all the way up, but running at 640x480x60Hz, and that's just fine with him because all he uses his computer for is PowerPoint slides)
If you work with a CRT all day, and use IM and email, you're probably a "dark person". You can't work in a lit room, you need to see your screen. If you say things like "Fuck, I hate the glare! I can't see a goddamn thing in here!", you're a dark person.
(Dark Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC with the cover off and assorted computer guts splayed all over the desk, and a 21" monitor that gets a daily spritzing of Windex every morning and has the on-screen adjustments have been perfectly tweaked for razor-sharp convergence at 1600x1200, because every fucking pixel counts - not just when using Photoshop or paging through reams of code, but when fragging his cubemates at 5:01 pm!)
Group the dark people together and the light people together. Don't believe the bullshit from light people about how a "dark office" makes people sick and unproductive. Don't believe the bullshit from dark people about how a "light office" makes it impossible to read the screen. Just acknowledge that these two types of people are different, and provide adequate space for both.
I like being in the same room with others on the same project.
The "everyone in the same room" philosophy works wonders. At our office, it's one big room. Everyone has identical desks and nearly identical computers - the boss sits among us (if you were to walk in, you'd have no idea which was the boss's desk). No cubicle walls. It makes for a very egalitarian work dynamic - without cubicles or offices, everyone's equal. Communication is a snap, we can just talk across the room with each other. If we absolutely have to see what's on each other's screen, simply walk across the room.
What's best is it basically eliminates the need for company meetings. If everyone works in the same large space, I've found that everyone's on the same page on projects. There's no need to organize everyone into one central place like a boardroom for a meeting, because everyone works in the same shared space to begin with.
Of course, we're a small company (about ten people), but my boss has always said that if we grew to be 100 people, he'd like to have the office set up the same way.
I've worked in a cubicle setting, an office setting, and a one-big-open-room setting, and the latter is by far the best at buliding co-worker comraderie.
In a small company, it's reasonable to say "either trust me, or get rid of me". I used to work in a 5-developers-and-a-secretary company that was like that, and nobody abused the trust.
In a larger company (the one I'm in now has about 2000 employees), you have to assume that there WILL be employees who will be stupid, who will be malicious, etc., etc., so you probably NEED to have some central control.
And that is one of the reasons why I GREATLY prefer working for small companies.
A what if most your work force doesn't code?
I think an office has to reflect the work being done so it can better facilitate productivity.
I think there are some universals:
1. Climate (too hot or too cold and it distracts people)
2. Navigation - people have to get around, to other workers, to printers, the mail room etc
3. Lighting - avoid eye strain
4. Infrastructure - whether telephones, computers whatever, make sure people don't have to work to gets things hooked up
5. Layout - avoid short cube walls, the noise from conversations and telephone calls will irritate the most easy going easily
It doesn't have to break the bank, just put thought into things and keep your options open in case a decision back fires it won't take months to correct. I also recommend varying carpet and paint to break up the sight lines.
+1!
We just moved offices into something a bit nicer, and since it's only the three from the dev team in here we can have the lights off and the only light either sneaks in from the door that connects us to the rest of the building, or the nice big window that lets some of that "natural light" stuff in.
Of course, if you have a dark office you have to deal with the crap of people constantly wandering into the office with witty comments like...
"wow, dark in here"
"you guys like the dark or something"
"this must be where the mushrooms live"
"wow, it's dark in here"
et infinitum
I really want a 1,000,000 candle spotlight to point at the door in cases like this. It's fine for the first few times, but after the 50th person who wanders in with a "dark in here isn't it" comment, you really want to kill someone.
Seriously, unless you're trying to maintain some sort of artificial professional distance between you and your underlings (or superiors if you're a secretary), consult with your users. They know if they work in pairs, trios, have cross-functional needs (2 engineers, 1 creative on any given team), or if all 15 engineers work alone and only need to talk with sales every month, while the creative guys are the support for sales.
Start by evalutaing the space you have, and the company needs. Make sure you have some expansion room if you think your company can become healthy inside of 5 years. Make sure you don't have to turn the break room into an office if you hire that 16th engineer. If your company (or division, or branch, or what have you) necessitates customer NDAs -- or might ever, don't go with any kind of open cubicle arrangement. Even if you do lots of intercommunication, enclosed single or double offices provide a degree of privacy that makes the employee feel trusted. Consider making your offices or spaces such that nobody has to sit with his or her backs to the opening (door or otherwise). There are plenty of metrics for productivity that don't involve sneaking up from behind someone. I've seen studies inside of my company that concluded cubicles didn't save the space anticipated once you factored in the space requirements of break out rooms so people could actually have some discussions.
Furniture is less important. Give everybody a whiteboard and handle ergonomic needs as they arise. Consider using LCDs (if color realism isn't necessary) for clarity and space efficiency (energy savings are exaggerated, although measurable). Have some flexible policies regarding people decorating their own spaces, and you're probably set. Some people covet windows, others loathe the day-star entirely.
As with any problem, a customer is involved (this time, your workers). Consult with your customer and make sure you understand the problems they think you'll solve. Listen to their suggestions on how to solve the problems, but make no promises until you've worked something out. Julius Caesar always asked even the lowliest of troops for advice before a battle-- he always had other plans in place, and the troops' advice rarely had any impact at all, but the illusion was that he cared about their opinions. Because they felt like their opinions were valued, they fought harder and won many battles that they should have lost by all accounts. If your workers feel valued, they will work harder for you.
Hire a pro who has done offices you like and even more important: are liked by the people who work there!
It is possible to design GREAT looking offices that win design awards.....that are counterproductive. I refer you all to the wonderful book: "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman for examples.
I once hired "professionals" who designed aworkspac that was both inargueably ugly and difficult to use; it was an expensive mistake but the folks we tried after that did an excellent job with a difficult space. Quality varies.
I have to agree. That was the most amazing office design I have ever seen.
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Key elements from a 'techie' perspective
#1 : Able to see outside, double points if you can see green things outside.
#2 : Sunlight, triple points if you can block it when you want.
#3 : Ability to close the door. Nothing improves productivity like being able to shut out the world.
#4 : More 110v outlets providing clean power than you possibly imagine ever using. Triple points for UPS.
#5 : Cable routing ductwork.
#6 : Room for more than two computers, including network jacks and table space.
#7 : Whiteboards, lots of whiteboard space.
#8 : Bookshelves, lots of bookshelves.
Want some other tips
Find out what the individuals drink. Make it available, free. The wholesale cost of a six pack of soda per day is inconsequential compared to the cost of building and staffing that office.
Real hackers don't want to socialize with other people. Collaborative coding can happen in their offices, but the real producers could give a damn about a foozball table or artwork by famous painters. True hackers don't participate in group activities or group sports.
Caffeine. Lots and lots of caffeine. More caffeine than you think a normal human could possibly consume.
Twin 18" LCD monitors hooked up to a twin-headed video card - will give a coder about 90% more real estate than a single 20" LCD while costing about the same.
Most new computers come with a $6 keyboard and a $3 mouse. Throw away both, get him a high quality rig.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I, and I'm sure many others, would agree that flourescent lighting (the standard stuff anyway) can be a pain in the ass. The artificialness and 60 Hz buzz in poorly wired rooms can lead to all sorts of strain.
For not too much more, however, you can get the office properly wired to avoid any such 60 Hz buzz. Installing "Happy-Lights" that more closely reproduce natural sunlight is a HUGE PLUS. So shop wisely for the lights and you can find some pretty relaxing spectrums that not only keep people happy inside longer, but allow them to see better as well.
...actually...our boss supplies fruit...pretty much as much as you can eat, and we always have filtered water chilled in the fridge...I love caffiene...and I've worked places that supply free cola as well...and I've gotta say, it's great working for a boss that thinks two steps ahead of me and knows that while I may work insanely long hours on caffiene, I'll still be working for him in 10 years on fruit/water.
There's a reason why ESR came with that idea. Code only happens when you sit at the damn keyboard and type it, not when you're spending 7 hours a day talking to everyone you can find in the building.
Coding is inherently a _very_ boring activity, if you're a total extrovert. And I can see it around me every day. The ones who produce good code and lots of it, are the ones who can shut up for hours straight and just program.
This doesn't mean being a complete hermit, and unable to communicate at all. Sometimes, yeah, it's necessary to talk to someone else in the team. Sometimes you have to convince people of your vision of the architecture. And the occasional chatting pause at the water cooler or smoking place is OK, too. (Noone is 100% introverted either.)
But in the end, to actually have a program by the deadline, and earn your 8 hours a day pay, you damn better be able to spend at least 7 of them actually coding.
On the other hand, the least productive two, the ones who haven't actually produced anything in two years straight (not a joke), are also the most social people. Not only they'll talk to each other for hours, they'll even turn any communication with other team members into a 2 hour negotiation.
To get any of them to actually fix their own bugs, it turns into something resembling a negotiation with terrorists. You first have to explain to them why you want that bugs fixed, why you can't possibly live with their function returning the wrong result, listen to their view of why it's OK, listen to their grandious view of their architecture and why it shouldn't be changed (even if it returns the wrong result or crashes), etc.
Not only they're not producing anything in that time, they're also keeping other people from producing something.
When such people get promoted, it's even worse. They end up calling endless pointless meetings, just because they're bored. The kind of meetings where in the best case you spend 2 hours learning that nothing is new and worth discussing, and in the worst case you spend 3 hours hearing about their vacation or their kids. The kind of pointless meetings that keeps a whole team from working, just to entertain a bored PHB.
Either way, please do realize that some people would rather concentrate and work than listen to you. Hence the request for doors.
The absolute worst environment I've been in, was one freaking big room with 20+ people in it. No walls, no cubicles, just a ton of people in a cathedral sized room. And with the accoustics of a cathedral.
At any given time you'd hear at least two different conversations, one co-worker slurping tea in the loudest possible way, one idiot listening to music on his speakers (I bought him headphones, but he said he hated headphones and continued the noise pollution), 2-3 idiots taking a break to play Counter-Strike (at least one of them on the speakers, on a bad day also with a subwoofer), etc.
It was such a noise cacophony that it was plain old impossible to concentrate on doing any work. Eventually I started listening to loud music on the headphones just to cover that disruptive ambient noise. Of course, that was a bit of a distraction in itself, but it still beat listening to the equivalent of coding in a railway station.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.