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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?"
Upper management loves stats; give them stats.
I didn't like my cube ridden environment. I quit and joined an employer who did these things better.
Evil people are out to get you.
Unfortunately, you can't.
As one of my colleagues use to say: "You can't explain to someone who doesn't understand." (freely translated from Swedish).
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?"
I would speak to "them" with your voice (mouth, tongue, voal cords, et. al), either in person, or via telephone. Barring that, I would use a written format, such as "email" or "letter", in a lanugage that "them" would readily comprehend.
Are there some other, hidden, secret forms of communication that I'm missing, here?
Is it just me?
I have worked in IT environments in both Open plan with cubicles, Small offices of about 4 and open plan with desks.
I preferred both of the open plan options (i.e. with or without cubicles) than the small office. It may get noisy at times but it can be more sociable too.
Maybe I am just a freak...
I've worked in closed offices and in cubicles, and they each have their plusses and minuses. The best thing about cubicles is that you overhear some of the conversations that other members of your team are having. This can be really helpful for a small team working on a complex project, as I sometimes overhear something I should know about, or something I can give useful input into. In other words, working in cubicles can be really good for team dynamics.
On the other hand, the worst part about working in cubicles is the same thing-- your neighbor's loud conversation can be annoying and disturb your concentration. The lack of privacy can be annoying.
On balance, if I like the team I'm working with, I prefer working in the cube farm.
prefereably in a mainstream publication showing that, in fact, private offices and Aeron chairs are in fact cost-efective. If you can show this to management, you oughta be good to go. Showing them an article by Joel and saying "but ... but ... my concentration!" probably isn't gonna do it.
I'm still dubious. I mean, yeah, sure, I'd much rather have a nice quiet office, an aeron and the fastest desktop available connected to dual 21" monitors. Who wouldn't? But does anyone actually have some sort of operational study showing that it does, in fact, increase productivity [i]that[/i] much? Joel makes a good case, but most of it is simply appeals to our programmer instincts, and has little to do with fact.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
In the UK open plan offices are very common but cubes are virtually unheard of. I've heard very few complaints about open plan offices in the UK, as long as there's a decent amount of space between people then it's fine and can create a good atmosphere, too crowded and then it can be a pain.
However, people who are used to their own private office will find the extra noise disturbing and there's a problem where you can't just close a door when you don't want disturbed.
Where I work the next two levels of management are also in the open plan office. Not sure about the people above them, they're on a different floor and I've never needed to visit them.
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.
Years ago, our company had an office that was fairly low-rent, and didn't have cubicles. We just set up some desks around the edges of the office space, and some in the middle. One of the coders, in particular, had his desk facing the wall, and everyone in the room could see what was on him monitor.
This same coder had his email client set to automatically open new messages. Yes, you can guess what it coming - one day, right after he left for lunch, he received some porn spam. Not just any porn spam, but some pretty far-out stuff, the kind that even most people who like porn wouldn't go for. The next person to walk past his desk was the VP of the company...
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Private Offices Used for..
1) Showing higher status
2) Shagging the Intern/Teenage Junior
3) Surfing on the internet without being spotted by other employees
4) Playing music in
5) Watching TV in
6) Sleeping in
Open Plan Offices
1) being forced to do what you are paid to do as long as someone else is bothered to monitor your activity
2) Daydreaming about Orgies involving all the teenage interns and juniors until interupted by supervisor for not looking like focused on work
3) Chair Races when supervisor in toilet
4) Smelling other people's farts
5) Organising fag breaks
6) Discussing last night's TV, night out or spousal problems.
- Whenever you're on a business trip abroad, buy small plush toys at the airport to make gifts for your co-workers.
- When you've done enough trips, everybody has at least one plus toy on its desk
- Twice a day (possibly more), when the project manager is out of the room, yell : "PLUUUUUUUUUUUUSH FIGHT !"
- Enjoy as the plush toys begin flying around.
- If this does not decide your manager to create smaller, separated offices, at least it's a good way to have fun.
;-)
This is really what happened daily a few years ago when I was working with some 20 other co-workers in an open space lab. Oh, and the fact that most of us were under 30 *did* help us enjoy itIn Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Read Peopleware and offer it to your manager for Christmas, this book is the bible about productivity in IT.
It is extensively implemented at Google (and Microsoft for instance) by letting each developer have his own desk - with the door shut - or have a small desk with 2 to 4 people inside, in order to improve focus as it is critical developers doesn't lose focus too often as it is very easy to do when you work in a open space.
A typical developer needs 15 minutes to get into the "mental flow" of productive work, so even if he is disturbed for only 3 minutes, he will really lose about 15+3 minutes because of the delay of being in the right/productive "mental flow" again.
Additionnaly this book is all about employee happiness == employee productivity.
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Proje@neonux
1) People are commodities. When one quits we can just hire another one jus as good...
2) Cost, cost is everything. we need to squeeze every penny we can from floor space.
3) Everyone else does it so it must work.
4) Offices are reserved for high skill positions, like management.
There you have it, how they think.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Everything is looked at through the lens of the Dollar. As management listens to whatever research and advisory firms already output, let's see what Gartner, as an example, has to say on the subject.
Processor.com, July 2, 2004:
As vice president for research firm Gartner, the world's largest IT research group, he's studied the question at length and learned that just because a new technology makes something possible, it does not, sadly, make that very thing probable... "I can point to clear examples where call centers are highly virtualized," says Raskino, "with agents working almost entirely from their homes." But when he speaks to other managers about how virtual technologies are being used, they look at him in utter disbelief. "They say, 'Can it be possible? I'm sure our unions won't accept it.' The forces of inertia get in the way. They don't stop the change, of course. They just slow it down."
Gartner.com, 30 Oct 2001:
In his October 30 address at Symposium/ITxpo 2001 in Brisbane. Gartner vice president and research director Simon Hayward... enjoyed poking fun at today's cubicle environment, using the cartoon character Dilbert to help him out. "It's not just the workers who are objecting to the cubicle culture," he told his audience. "Managers also recognize that people will be more effective if the environment is better adapted to the reality of work."
CFO.com, October 01, 2006: Another factor pushing companies to reconsider office space is the widening gap between what workers need and what workplaces provide. At one time, office employees labored primarily in solitude; today, they spend two-thirds of their time collaborating, according to Gartner. But offices are still set up for the old style of work. "In most companies, you find that conference rooms are overbooked while offices and cubicles are empty," says Mark Golan, Cisco's vice president of worldwide real estate and the chairman of CoreNet. "It's insane. Not only is it wasteful, it doesn't suit the needs of your workforce."
Even if you can build the case against cubicles, you still need to be able to communicate with management. That means, y'know, diplomacy, communication skills, a lil bit of cunning, and what not.
Nevertheless, you might be heard, but don't expect them to listen.
Of course, if they've already invested in cubicles, tough luck. Nothing's gonna change their minds. Cubicles might be less productive than other office layouts, but dumping an existing design == dumping money. Bad ROI.
As for Aeron chairs? Why not demand an onsite spa and inhouse office-desk pizza delivery while you're at it?
Being a "software engineer" doesn't mean that I spend my head down programming all the time. Half of being a competent engineer is teamwork, and that works much better in an open-plan office.
I wonder whether people's objections to open-plan environments come from experiences with bad acoustics, or in offices shared between developers and sales staff that are on the phone all the time. In the open-plan offices I've been in, unwanted interruptions from other people's noise have been minimal - mainly due to good acoustic design, but also partly due to everybody being reasonably considerate and taking loud conversations off to a meeting room.
Anyway, not all sofware engineers are hermits! Some of us are sociable!
Perhaps, but that's the mentality of the management.
- Should an employee take a pay cut for something that makes them more productive?
- Does a little goofing off really damage overall productivity?
I say a happy, motivated employee who can concentrate when he wants to get stuff done is going to be far more valuable.
Weren't we, just recently, all for OpenOffice?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
and.....
:)
1. Start talking really loud.
2. Stop taking showers.
3. Fart atleast once every 10 minutes.
Good thing here is if you are located very close to your manager
Use SCRUM !!
Create groups of 5 co-workers strap them together with ropes back to back eliminating the need for chairs or desks.
Every morning pitch scrums against each other making them run from opposites sides of the office to clash in the middle. The team that manages to push the other team back to their side of the office gets to spend half the day eating coffee and drinking doughnuts, whilst the other team is forced to refactor all the work done by the winning team the previous day.
I think I should be writting books on this stuff.
I'm a non-USian who has worked in several open-plan offices and hated it.
d o-it" stereotype.
Is it made impossible to concentrate simply by virtue of the fact the office is open-plan? No.
Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate? Yes.
Does it make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration? Yes.
Does it mean you're in contact with many other people, so your "chance of being noisily interrupted" must be multiplied by the number of people in the office? Yes.
Does it mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity? Yes.
(n.b. Bad managers are notoriously bad for underestimating the loss of productivity when they break your concentration for something trivial. I've had a manager complaining about my productivity who used to shout down the length of the room to ask my e-mail address, when I'd worked for him for two years, my address was in his Outlook address book and even when he had it written down in his desk drawer. And once you drop the eggs it can take half an hour or more to get back up to speed again. In a busy, noisy department with 50 people in it, you can easily go entire months without achieving flow state even once.)
Also, although of course there's a heft amount of deviation, national character might have something to do with it, too. The Swedish and Dutch people I've met tend to be very considerate and quiet, while the Americans (as a nation) to tend more to the loud, less considerate "get-things-done-even-if-I-have-to-shout-while-I-
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
I was working for a place were i could do 80% of the work at home.
But the people I was working for did not like the idea.
The only time i did work at home is during a bad snow storm were it was not safe to drive the 150 Km to work.
THe job was building control panels and pc boards as well as PLC programing.
With that job I just needed to be in the office/work space for install and final testing so it could be shiped out and pick up the next pile of parts ect.
I could build the units faster at home with less distractions The dreaded phone ect.
Saveings for the company one less workspace/office needed
In the end the company when belly up because of cost over runs office space ect.
I for one don't miss the 2 hour average drive to work and back home.
Now I work nearby travel 10 minutes to work and do some part time repair work at home for a sound and lighting company.
Making more money because im not burning up 160 dollars in gas a week and the car will last longer.
As well as enjoying more home time with my family.
I also do a part time bussness at home now restoring old records and 78 ect as well.( got more time because of less travel)
If more people would and could telecommut it would do a lot for the planet.
and the quailty of life.
But some have the old school mentalaty if not in the office not working but if you got someting to show at the end of the week. EI control panels to install or paperwork done and brought in so you can pick up the next batch/work list.
Yes, try changing your organization to being 6 times as large and then you'll find that the unrealistic assumption of TFAS:
"It is not, and we all know it"
May become slightly more true.
</sarcasm>
I mean the whole concept that "we all know" that cubicles / open-plan offices are bad is bullshit to begin with, so there's no way we can simply "communicate" this "fact" to management.
Every company I have ever worked in has used open-plan offices with 8-20 people and there has not been any problem.
If the stupid precept TFAS was trying to get across was modified to say "open-plan offices are bad for 40+ people" then I might agree, but at the moment we're being asked to prove something that simply isn't true.
A lot of us don't work in offices with more than 10 people and the idea of shutting people away into offices is dumb, as is the idea that everyone will be able to communicate effectively if they are all at home. I can't believe I'm reading a question that says open-plan offices are bad and raises telecommuting as a sensible way to run a business. It's telecommuting that's the dumb idea, and the managers all know it. Email and IM simply do not have the bandwidth of face-to-face communication. Unless you really are just stuck in front of a terminal all day doing your own work which never interfaces to anyone else's, telecommuting does not work.
But here we have a situation where all managers are supposed to be "idiots" that need to show humility to the uberknowledge of the geeks; whereas the geeks show absolutely no inclination to look at the subjects sensibly or from a business-oriented perspective. The evidence is in the careless way the precept is phrased - such as to make it not even true. Yeah, people, let us all go to our managers and tell them in absolute terms that open-plan offices are always bad with no evidence or even common sense to back us up. That's "communication", right?
Or maybe it's just the rise of the pointy-haired programmer.
It's telecommuting that's the dumb idea, and the managers all know it. Email and IM simply do not have the bandwidth of face-to-face communication.
Well, yes and no. As with the claim that cubicles and open-plan offices are always bad, this also depends on the task.
Historically, technical people have often collaborated very effectively via print media. The reason is well understood: There are a lot of technical concepts that can't be expressed easily in English or any other "human" language. To communicate effectively, you need to use a blackboard or a piece of paper - or email. Things like equations, diagrams and software can't be communicated effectively via a speech medium; they can only be expressed in writing.
I've seen this on a lot of projects. Very often, I end up just listening quietly in meetings, because it's obvious that people aren't communicating very well. Afterwards, I'll type up my analysis and suggestions, and email them. That's where the actual communication takes place. Then management wants a meeting to discuss things, and we have another meeting where people are talking past each other, and again I mostly sit and listen.
Note that I'm not claiming that this is always true. Some topics can be discussed verbally. And if the group's problems are mostly personal, verbal interactions can be the fastest way to get to the crux of the problems.
But saying that telecommuting is a dumb idea is itself a dumb idea, as bad as claiming that open office plans are always wrong. Some of the most effective computing projects have been done by groups that never meet face to face. I've done some successful projects with people that I've never met. And I've seen group meetups that were quite enjoyable and successful social occasions, but which didn't contribute at all to the project's progress.
It all depends on what you need to communicate, and what's the best language for that communication.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.