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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 you could create your perfect office how would it work?
I'm a fan of Joel Spolsky's writings (see Joel on Software), so I was fascinated to read about the office space he has designed at his company, Fog Creek Software.
I like what he's built here because the emphasis is not just on catering to developers, but providing an atmosphere where great coding can thrive.
Sigs cause cancer.
Here are a list of things I've had and loved...
-Fast internet connection. Not only useful for downloading tools/patches/etc fast, but people will want to use the internet to check news, email, slashdot in the morning. A fast internet connection will help them get it out of the way quicker (right now we have a 5 floor building on on T-1 that also serves as a connection between buildings. I'm lucky if I get 5k/sec).
-Budget in money for free sodas/water/coffee. I like to go for a morning coffee run, but I'd rather have an espresso machine and some cold Coke's at the office
-Aeron chairs. Spoil my ass please. These things are more comfortable to sit in than it is laying down. I bought the one I used when I quit one of my previous jobs
-Actually, modern looking furniture in general makes the place look a lot better and makes it seems like your job is more important than it really is, making you a little happier
-Cubes offer good privacy, but you can feel cramped. The best experience I had was a big open room. People had their l-shaped desks against the wall, so you couldn't see their monitor, but you could see their face. Also, moving desks is never fun!
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
- Massage Girls in Bikinis
- Flying Fish IPA on tap
- La-Z-Boy Recliners
- Dual 2.5GHz G5s for all
- Sweet aromas all day
- Foot spas under all desks
- Killer game room
- And the soothing sounds of the dead all day long
Oh, you have a budget?People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
by demarco and lister.
Any suggestions I would give are probably covered there.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
Of Yea? Well I'll go build my own office. With hookers and black jack. In fact, forget about the office.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
First of all, I'd assert that fffice policies are just as important as office layout. If I'm told I can redecorate, then I'd almost rather do that than trading generic beige for something that some stranger decided is "artistic".
Here are ideas to consider:
No fluorescent lights. Try to provide full-spectrum sources where possible, and give people the ability to control how much light they work with. I have a big black insert in my window to keep glare off my screen and usually keep my overhead off too. Programmers and creative types are usually the most sensitive to this.
We have a couple people that are seldom in the office. We actually give them larger offices with a spare table and use them as mini-conference rooms while they're gone. And since they're seldom in, they usually have clean desks. (This assumes you have square footage to spare like that.)
If anyone in the office commutes by bicycle, a shower is a great thing to have. Appreciated by them *and* their coworkers. >:0
If you have a snack area, you'll probably have a microwave. Consider also having a toaster oven, or better yet a full size stove/oven. This makes it easier to fix whatever you're in the mood for. And I'm more likely to hang around the office if I can have what I'm in the mood for. (Microwaved bagels are right out, for instance). Ditto for an icemaker.
Have enough printers. Having to walk from one end of an office to another just to print a short doc is annoying. Make sure the printing facilities are split up and placed strategically around the office.
If you have creative types as mentioned, at least one conference room should be wall to wall with whiteboards (or smarter equivalents if you have the budget). I like to have two in my office alone.
Make sure there is good (and adjustable) air conditioning and heating. It's very hard to productive when you're too hot or cold.
At my current company we have an M&M jar on the front desk that gets emptied and replenished every couple of days. Nice for those times when you've got a munchie attack but don't have time before your next meeting to go get something. Doesn't have to be M&Ms, but just something along those lines.
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
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.
One place I worked was in an industrial park, and they took over half of a building. The kitchen of the place was actually the remains of a failed industrial park-ish greasy spoon, and as a result we had a commercial gas range, two huge fridges, a deep freeze, a full complement of pots, pans, etc. It was great. Nothing like being able to just walk into the kitchen and make yourself a good non-microwaved meal to make one feel at home... Mmm. Still miss making steak for lunch...
And a good flyswatter.
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?
pants optional
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.
Er... this is Slashdot... LINUX... not Windows... You like to look out a Linux and see a beautiful view...
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
I once toured a nify building in Melbourne Florida owned by Encso. Each floor had a ring of offices around the outside and a communal lab in the center. Everyone had plenty of windows and they a shared area to work together in.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
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.
It was wonderful.
However, now I live in Hawai'i and my lab here is kinda the opposite -- here I have an office which is completely surrounded with glass - but overlooks a beautiful landscaped garden - so it's worth it. Still have the rolling chair, no carpeting and incandescentlighting and locked door.
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
However, number one on my list of light tips is NEVER EVER put a light source in the field of vision behind a computer monitor (eg. don't face your desk and computer out a window). It will force your eyes to continuously adjust between light levels while trying to focus on the light produced from the monitor and that coming from behind it. Always put light sources behind the viewer. Use diffused lights (eg. not a window) when possible to reduce glare, too.
Plants are also a benefit in increasing the mood of a room. I don't have any at work (yet), but the shelves in my home office are covered in plants, and I can attest that when they're not there (I recently had a mealy bug infestation and had to quarantine them) the room is not as nice of a place to be. And I mean real, living plants, not the plastic kind. If you're worried about maintenance, get succulents like hoyas -- they'll stay happy even if you forget to water them for weeks, and they have really cool flowers.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
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.....
umm...yeah. milton...i'm gonna have to ask you to move your desk down to storage b.
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.
---
And Quiet.
These points really encapsulates the core issues of good workspace design, but achieving them can be harder than describing them. To restate them as I see them:
(1) Effective isolation from distractions. People doing valuable work almost universally need to be able to concentrate. For most of us, this means quiet. Intercoms, other people's phone conversations (and mobile phone ring tones), obtrusive music, noisy conference rooms, all steal productivity from your employees. (Some like having background music, some dont. Those who want it should have effective comfortable headphones so they don't disturb people who can't work as effectively with background noise).
(2) Effective workgroup communication. Basically, this means it should be trivially easy to speak face-to-face with everyone each employees needs to communicate with during completion of their typical daily tasks.
These two primary considerations can work together, but there's a tension between them as well. Workgroup communication is ideal when I can turn my head to a co-worker and ask a question, but the more people I can look around and see, the noiser my workspace will be. Workspace isolation is ideal when everyone has private soundproofed offices, but there's an increased cost to either IM'ing someone (instead of having the nuance available in face-to-face speech) or taking the time to walk over to the other person's office.
I have come to believe that workspace sharing is crucial, but the upper limit of a really effective workspace is around six people. You can possibly have eight very cooperative and respectful individuals, but workspaces tend to last longer than the teams that occupy them and I wouldn't recommend larger than six.
In my own history, I've seen lots of different office plans, from cube farms to private offices and lots of variations between. My favorite office layout had the team of seventeen (including development staff, QA staff, and the team lead in "quads". Each quad was a 20'x20' room with two walls covered with whiteboard, two others had bland office paint and some nice artwork. Four desks and a 4' round table easily fit in each quad. The five quads had staggered openings on a common hallway that led to one small conference room, one large conference room, a kitchen area, and the front door (on the other side of the common areas).
One other very nice amenity that I've never seen anywhere else was a single stall shower adjacent to the bathrooms, so doing a lunchtime jog around the hills near the office didn't leave you sweaty and stinky for the afternoon.
Too bad they were in Cincinnati when I really wanted to be in Austin...
Regards,
Ross
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.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. My current place of work provides none of those things and I really hate them for that.
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.
+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.
I agree about the computer thing. I personally hate over zealous admins that lock the hell out of everything. I mean, sure, there's a place for it. But often times it simply pisses people off because they feel as though they aren't trusted and it makes them dislike their work enviornment just a litle less.
This is a tough one. I've been a sysadmin in a couple small companies. I started at the company I'm at now (family business), and locked down the network a little bit, but users could install software, and change things a fair amount. What happened was eventually systems were becoming totally unusable as adware got installed, and all sorts of other garbage people were trying out got on there, and the system would need to be redone. Since my primary job wasn't being a sysadmin, this made me do a bunch of extra work.
I then went over to a software development company, and as we grew, I took on the role of sysadmin there as well. Initially I tried a mildly locked down environment with software delopment from Win2k server, and it was a nightmare. I took it off within a day because the programmers all hated it, and it was easier to install manually on the few support staff systems than it was to create packages.
When I came back to my current job (which is not a computer company), I decide it was time to redo the network. So now it runs on Samba, and the workstations are locked down so that users can't install software, and a few registry changes are forced at login. I also use wpkg for software deployment, which is a huge timesaver. Most of the security, however, comes from the permissions on network shares and folders.
While this is what the grandparent poster hated, I can totally understand why. The amount of time I deal with dumb problems of users screwing up their machines has dropped to almost nothing, and I only get a few people annoyed ocasionally that they have to get me to install software for them. (Well worth my reduced time). I think for the most part they understand too, because our workstations are basically never down.
Most people won't fill their machines with bullshit. And the ones that do are pretty easy to detect, and those are the ones you can lock down.
But then it's after-the-fact. You now still have to spend time reimaging and configuring the system. Then you lock it down, and the user is angry because they can't make changes like they could before and like everything else can.
Speak before you think
Meeting rooms:
1. no chairs
2. work table set to standing height for papers, etc.
3. all the walls are whiteboard.
With no chairs, meetings are exactly as long as they need to be, and no longer. Yes, I *have* worked in this kind of environment, and it works great.
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.
Keep those people stimulated
That is the best solution.
Ok, I dont have that...But I have everything that I need. I work in a small, software house in New Zealand, and here it works well...
We have free soda,
We have a free coffee machine (Beans, not instant-mud)
We have kitchen facilities,
We have a pool table, a dart board and "ping-pong"
We have an open office, two desks together, loosely couple by project.
Everyone has the same style chair.
There is a non intrusive radio playing all day.
Directors sit in a "fish bowl" (Out of the kitchen as it were)
Everyone has a PC that is capable of doing their job.
Everyone has VMWare too
We have fast internet access (Well it is NZ, so this becomes another story!)
And Friday is beer o'clock day, company funded.
If a small company can do this....?
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.
Sociopaths are very rarely good coders, they just think that they are. Predominately because they don't mix with enough other people to realise that they're barely mediocre. A good coding team has people that can work together and actually get on with each other; as well as being excellent programmers. Office toys like table football can help foster this kind of environment.