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How To Get Rid of the Cubicle?
wikinerd writes "How can we get rid of the widely hated cubicle and its ugly cousin, the stressing open-plan office? Some business owners and managers cannot understand the advantages of teleworking, different office layouts, or the morale benefits of private offices with Aeron chairs. There are still people in high positions who seem to think that stuffing a bunch of engineers into a noisy landscaped office is the best way to organize a company. It is not, and we all know it, but can we prove it? How can we communicate to them the fact that living in a groundhog warren is bad not only for the engineers, but also for the organization?"
Our company moved into a relatively nice office building, paying quite a bit of rent, just because the president of the company thought that it gave us more credibility - even though we rarely have ANYONE from the industry come to our offices.
One day, I took the VP aside and gave him some numbers - I showed him that if we were able to telecommute, we could run a t1 to every employee's home, and still come out a few thousand cheaper each month than rent. Because the VP once new someone who slacked off when telecommuting, he completely rejected the idea. Ah, well.
Even though we're officially a non-telecommuting office, that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. When I really don't feel like going in to the office, I call and tell them that I can either work from home that day, or just take the day off. I usually get to work from home.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Depends on your company doesn't it? I used to work for a giant company. The decisions about our working conditions were made across the country literally thousands of miles away. Yes you could email those people but they literally had no idea who you were and didn't give a flying fuck. To them your entire location was just one number on the spreadsheet. If updrading the bathroom so that it doesn't smell like stale ass made that number go up then they wouldn't do it.
In large companies it's another world. At my company when the programmers requested offices with doors (two to an office) the company refused. When the assistant to the accountant demanded an office she got one. The only office available was too big for her position so they spent a ton of money making the office smaller. What's odd is that making the office smaller for her actually cost more then building walls in the programmers space to give the programmers walls (we know this because we got quotes from the same construction company).
evil is as evil does
On balance, if I like the team I'm working with, I prefer working in the cube farm.According to my personal experience, the most efficient team-size is up to five. If you group your teams in offices, there is no need for cubes. Big pro of non-cube: you see where the noise comes from. I find that less disturbing/hate producing. Having your teams in offices, a good placement of coffemaker and xerox machine makes inter-team communication easier. Corridor-drums are very efficient.
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