Slashdot Mirror
Large Tech Companies Moving Beyond the Cubicle
statemachine writes in with a story from Silicon Valley about how Intel and Cisco, among other companies, are experimenting with cubeless, open, and unassigned seating. "Beginning this month, [Intel] will set up three experimental work sites. Open areas, comfortable armchairs, extra conference rooms and tables where people can plop down with laptops will replace the ubiquitous cubes that have been standard issue for decades. Each morning, Intel employees will log onto the corporate network using wireless connections. Their phone numbers will follow them. White boards that employees use to sketch out business plans and project strategies will be outfitted with electronics so drawings and plans can be transferred to laptops and e-mailed to colleagues. 'People feel much more comfortable coming up to me. It's more of a friendly atmosphere,' Cisco senior manager Ted Baumuller said. 'I hope I never have to go back to cubes.'"
like books, personal items, photos, etc?
I was moved from a single office, with a door, to a double up office, to a cube farm in a call center with cube walls one foot higher than the desk. This was intolerable and clearly designed to get people to 'volunteer' to work from home. We still have a so called visitor center but unless you have ITN installed on your VoIP on your PC you don't have a portable phone number.
Don't kid yourselves, this is just about some PHB wanting to save on office space, cramming yet another dozen workers in the same space.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
central europa I personally think the cubicle system is nothing more than a sick joke. :-(
The company I work for recently had to move offices because it was not conformant to working laws anymore, every person hat about 5 times the space a single cubicle has
Over here normal offices with 2-3 people are the norm, cubicles would not even remotely adhere to the law, and when I see them I usually think on those chicken farms where chicken are in the boxes only to be in there to lay eggs.
I suppose having an open office will help with the dispersion of various odors.
I mean it just sounds like manager code for less personal space and stuffing everyone into large open spaces that minimizes privacy and ups the whole chat noise factor the nth degree.
Am I just being cynical?
ACK
So the senior manager is happy with the arrangement? Great. Guess what: that kind of guy deals with people all day long. It makes sense to make it easier for him to interact with people.
But not for me. I'm a hardcore techie. I spend days not interacting with people, fighting with the code, and I need my concentration. Every time I get interrupted, I need about 20 minutes to get back to work properly.
Yep, I'm in a cubicle. I hear everything that happens around me, and maybe I'm just not good enough to blank it out. I regularly have to reserve meeting rooms just to have a little peace and quiet to be able to think.
Yeah, I'm mad because my request for noise-isolating headphones was turned down. Does it show?
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
makes it harder to read /. at work.
Now get back to work wage donkeys!
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
My work requires my test equipment (45kg) and its power module (20kg), a signal generator (20kg), a specter analyser (30kg), an oscilloscope (5kg), a lab power suply (5kg) and dozens of meters of various cabling, so:
-They don't plan to move me around anytime soon.
-No one wants to share such a noisy environment.
And where are they supposed to put their dozens of Unix/Windows and programming language books or other engineering books? Paperwork? Is this also supposed to be the magical land of the paperless office? I'm all for more open spaces - my team of programmers and I all go down to the lab every day and work next to each other instead of in our cubes, but we still have cubes to hold all that random paper junk. Pete
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
No desks? Laptops on for 8 hours? You do the math.
Great, I'm sure this isn't the first time a large company has had such a 'radical' idea. The problem is that whilst it does sound like a nice working environment it's likely only ever going to be actually adopted in a small number of prestige or flagship areas.
Everyone else will continue working in the exactly the same was as they normally do because companies cannot afford and cannot be bothered to spend the money to do this for 90% of their employees.
"I've just seen this new strategy re the comfy seating and un-assigned working locations"
"Excellent, that's marrrvellous"
"Yes, most of our chairs already meet the recommended comfort standard so we'll keep those. The only thing is they're not really suitable for using laptops with so we'll keep the desks too since they're handy places to put the phones and coffee etc on. Now most of our guys work in teams and are kind of settled where they are but obviously we don't actually directly assign specifc seats so I guess that takes of everything ?"
"Marrvellous, our new strategy is a grrreeat success !"
"Yes, I knew you'd agree."
1. You're at work, you don't need personal items to distract you. If you really want photos, set them as your backdrop.
2. If you are offered the chance to work from home, this can be a good thing. You won't be so distracted by office jibber-jabber and won't have to spend your own precious time traveling. If you can motivate yourself you should be fine.
3. Hot-desks can work well. Some companies offer privacy cubicles so you can make that important call with no distraction. Break out of that idea that the desk is yours.
4. Good for them making more effective use of office space. That's their job.
The absolute worst thing in my own opinion is companies who hand out Blackberry's. Why would I want to be assaulted by email in my own time? These are switched off as soon as I finish my day's work!
There are plenty of writings about this - Wired did a piece years ago about BBWA Chiat Day in the US, there's the famous management course Oticon case study and recently I just read a nice book by Ricardo Semler. Normally the open plan offices translate into qualitative benefits in the company (people are happier, more collaborative, less secretive etc...).
It's odd to read the comments here along the lines of "Send me back to the server room, I can't stand the lights....", but I guess there's no pleasing some people.
29 mpg. YMMV.
Contrast that with Joel's Software, where each person gets his/her own office with a window, read what he says about it and how it improves productivity. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
My company (architecture/engineering) uses an open office plan and I like it.
It takes a little getting-used-to; you need a little bit thicker skin when it comes to distractions, but it is not nearly as bad as I first thought it would be - and the benefits in day-to-day workplace communication are significant.
If you can see someone is at their desk by standing up and looking across the office, you are much more likely to walk over and talk than to send an email or call someone who is 20 feet away. It may sound inefficient to a slashdotter, but face-to-face communication is really useful.
At my current place of employment, there wasn't an office for my desk, so I'm set up in the corner of a room. Unfortunately for me, the front door to the office is near my desk, so I think people sometimes mistake me for a receptionist.
Personally, I hate being in an open area. There's nothing to protect you from loud coworkers, people coming and going past you all day, and of course you can't slack off because anyone can just walk by and see if you're actually doing work or not! What I wouldn't give for a nice door I could close when everyone's getting on my nerves or I need to concentrate on something.
Take it from someone who's worked in several open plan offices over the last 8 years - they're almost always too damn noisy. Of course it depends on who else is in the office, how it's laid out, where you sit in relation to the noisier ones, etc, but the number of times I've either worked from home or gone in at the weekend or on a public holiday and been two or three times more productive is quite frankly depressing.
There have been times when I have *longed* to work in a cube farm. I'm sure they have their disadvantages too, but I'm betting that done well they're a damn sight quieter.
I agree with the others who have said that this is a cost-saving exercise, and add another reason - open plan means more people can see you and what you're doing, means less chance of an employee spending too much time on personal email, online games, etc. In other words, it's to save money and because the managers don't trust their staff to work.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Cubicles are almost exclusively a US thing as far as I can tell. The UK norm is to have senior management in offices and everyone else open plan. It's much better for collaboration, it's much better for morale.
it's much better for not having asshat coworkers playing radios in their cubicles, for not having people hide away and do bugger all for days, for a myriad of things.
Cubicles are isolated and depressing. Embrace the european style.
As for no set desks - well that's a little tricky for engineers who have multiple workstations, and I'm not sure it's the best idea, but scrapping cubicles is definitely good.
BTW, i work for a huge multinational you _have_ heard of, not some little startup, this is not new.
No, you're not being cynical about this. I'm writing this from an open workspace, we've had this about 7 years now. I'ts hell. Most of us complain about the constant disturbance from loud talkers, loud talking passersby, loud telephone conversations, etc. Don't even bother asking about quiet rooms, yes we have them. But of course they're always in use. What pisses me off the most is those who spend a good part of the work day talking about football, or the others who talk incessantly about their cute kids or pets. Or both. Our productivity is measured by the half hour and we are required to hold at least an 80% debiting level (debiting customers at least 6 hours every day). My personal productivity has gone down to way below that; others say the same thing. Because we could get sacked for not holding 80%, we write our time as 80% anyway, no matter how much we actually get done. More than half of us (48 people) would gladly go back to a private room facility, which is what we had up until 7 years ago. This open space concept is another dotcom fantasy that just didn't work out in practice. Piss on it all.
Whenever I go to work, I typically sit thinking to myself for several minutes.... "How could this be made more like cheap air travel?
I am glad to see that Intel has now answered that call.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I've made countless great friends from working in an open plan environment, where you get to share your experiences more readily. Of course, there are some very annoying people who I'd prefer a divide from, but they're luckily been rare in my experience, and I'm often just rude to them :-P
But seriously, communication is key to professional success, and cubicles reduce communication.
Cisco's office in Atlanta had something very similar to this in 1999. I remember thinking it was a pretty cool way of using technology but not something I would want to work in. At the time I liked having little geek toys decorating my cube. It would have taking a long time to set up my toys again and again.
Who am I kidding, I still have little geek toys decorating my workspace.
This sounds great maybe a side table to hold my books, drinks and a few other knick-knacks. /.. Is the 42-inch TV include and what channels come on it and where do I store the beer?
I can just put on my mpeg3 player, put the chair back into recliner mode throw up the leg rest and veg the day out reading
Sure type can somewhat suck and laptops can get a little hot but such are the hardships of working in a modern environment.
Open-plan offices aside, I think that unassigned seating is a bad idea. People are creatures of habit and they will generally sit where they sat yesterday, they will take the same route to and from work etc.
I've had two jobs in my life, one with open-plan offices and another with a private office. I vastly prefer the private office merely for the peace and quiet and a space to call my own. All my co-workers are a few offices down the hall from me which makes it possible to have easy face to face communication which is so touted by the open-plan evangelists.
Unbeknownst to many, Intel actually invented the cubicle.
In Norway Telenor, the biggest ISP, tried this a couple of years ago. They stopped not long after. Apparently people like to have a more or less permanent place to be. They don't like coming to work every morning having to search for a free desk or chair. I have never been in this kind of environment, but I don't think I would like it. It's better to have an office and know the people around you and being able to have at least some personal items there.
i had the "pleasure" of working for IBM advanced technology down in boca 5 years ago, and basically what you outlined happened to me.
one afternoon, my logins stopped working, then the next day (friday) my keycard didnt work. when i complained that morning, i was told i had been terminated and everything was escorted away.
poof...no notice no nothing just gone.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
My company is going even further. Except for a handful of large sites we all work from home (or travel). While it does have some issues I find it preferable to a cube any day.
In the photo (in TFA) there's bad posture and trailing cables. How this got past health and safety I'll never know.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
In order to shut out the noise when really necessary. I have no problem getting deep into code in our open plan office, and neither does anyone else. When you're an engineering department the whole open plan is quiet anyway.
just don't put sales in the same room/floor.
will be forced to repeat it.
Behold exhibit A, TBWA Chiat/Day.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat.html
How does an on topic, cautious, and completely respectful post get modded by TWO different people as a troll?
SSH to your home server. Read /. using Lynx. Problem solved. Lynx looks like work :)
Give it four or five years and there will be a lot of lawsuits because of Repetitive Strain Injury. Laptops are bad for ergonomics and RSI, as are "comfy" chairs etc.
These companies are just setting themselves up for a whole heap of trouble. I'm glad I don't work there.
RSI Info
If people (as americans are prone to do) are constantly shooting off their mouths about crap, perhaps they could do with a little British restraint. Maybe this is why cubicles are so big in the US - without them y'all have no idea when to shut the hell up.
Large open-plan area with about 80 people in it. It's great in many ways, as I can easily see who's in, who's busy, when people become free, and it encourages communication. Not so good for just getting your head down and coding, but that's what headphones are for, and people quickly realise that "headphones on" means not to talk to people with less important things.
In addition, just being able to hear the conversations around you can frequently be useful, as you overhear problems that you might be able to help out with, and there's a much higher level of teamwork.
My Journal
... Unlucky! I worked in a cube farm in the US for a few months and hated it. Maybe it just depends what you're used to.
. . . when your desk is next to the furnace in the plant room?
BTW, I haven't been paid in six months - can somebody do something about that?
What?
I don't think working on laptops on a coffee table all day long is very good for your neck and back.
Sounds like what Delphi Automotive was already doing way back when I left them in 2001, if you remove the wireless connection of course. Seating was based on a cross-departments project base. Let's say you're working on Project A this week, you'll sit in the A open space. Next week you're on project B, move over to the B open space. Paperwork from Project A stays in the A zone, paperwork from the Project B stays in the B zone. It created a bit of a mess for tech support, as it could be hard to locate the user if he forgot to tell you which open space he was in at that moment (or if the delay between call and intervention was too long).
The Sun Flexible Office based on SunRay that Sun had deployed before I left them way back in 2004 is also quite similar in its approach. With the exception of the support team, you don't have a dedicated seating space. All your stuff is in your lockable caddy and your locker at the end of the day or it is thrown in the bin. In the morning, you take your caddy and push it to the first available desk space. You could book a space in advance if you were fast enough (or were clever enough to cron the booking in the wee hours of the weekend). The PABX was somehow (perl I think) connected to the SunRay server, so your phone number would automagically follow your sunray card/badge. As pointed out before, the whole setup cuts down time between the brown envelope and you being outside with all your crap.
today more and more workers are online
people already stay connected even when working at a curstomers' office
tomorrow they will also work remotely, from home
why do you need offices for 1000 people when most of them can work efficiently online and only gather a few days per month ?
then why not gather in a virtual world ? with virtual meeting room ? second life for corporations ?
of course it wont be as second life, it must be both more user friendly for Joe Average and less "fun"
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Nice! Take away the cubes and just give us a chair in an open room while they get their nice big cushy offices with DOORS and WINDOWS! If they want to get rid of "the office" then just give everyone a laptop and pay part of their internet service costs and provide us a phone line and let us work from home. It would save them tons of money, and us too.
If they would say pay half of internet charges (so we could VPN in) say $25-30/month then pay for an additional phone line (for work use only of course) - about what $40/month. Then provide us with a laptop - what about $2,000 one time fee. Their monthly cost would be somewhere around between$65-70/month. How much would they be saving a month though - MUCH MORE. Think about the costs they DON'T have to put out - cost of cubicles, less office space rental, less electricity usage (power used in cubes, lighting, refrigerators, microwaves etc..), savings on water costs (toilets, sinks using water),
For us it would save us lots of money on gas, maintenance on our vehicles we could sleep a little later as we wouldn't have to get up so early for the long commutes. Oh don't forget we wouldn't have to be around all the STUPID office politics all day long. We could listen to music as loud as we want without worring about bothering our "cube" neighbors.
Of course all of this means they could more easily outsource us - not like that isn't their "master plan" any friggen way - "Global Econmy" which really means "sell out the U.S." so corporations can get rich off the middle - lower class.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
As to why private offices are such a good idea.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
Absolute statements are never true
Some developers like to sit in a hole and pretend that they are working on some great piece of art. The rest of us realize that in order for a team of people to get a very large piece of software work without heavy processes that slow things down, you have to collaborate. Collaboration is much easier when you can just talk to someone across the desk. Besides, there's always cross pollination going on when that happens so good ideas get incorporated by eavesdroppers as well as the people involved. I've worked in both environments and cubes lead to anti-social behavior, poor communication, and failing products. As much as I disliked the noise and distraction of the open environment, I could shut that out with headphones. I can't pretend this stupid grey wall doesn't exist. Maybe it's an analogy for open vs proprietary. ;)
Cubicles are only a phenomenon in Hollywood movies, right?
Cubeless office? Some bureaucrat working for the British Raj invented them 100 years ago.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Just turn your company into a giant Starbucks.
Make a difference: move to a swing state.
1. no personal items
/. to avoid finishing that project I am late with :(
Did I have photos in my cubicle ? No. but some people do. They have plants, action hero figures... etc etc. I personally only had specially crafted documents (crap no one else understands), but I know how deep people get hurt every time they moved them.
2. YES personal items.
No, I do not mean photos. I mean coffee stains, skin particles, food grease, saliva, boogers, pubic hair. No I am not a health/cleaning freak at all, but these are the personal items you ALWAYS find at someone else's desk/area.
3. My chi
I am sorry, but sitting at a different place disturbs my concentration, provides new distractions, and it takes time to learn to learn how to lock out that annoying new neighbor who chats to the wife screaming on the phone.
4. Special devices
Unless you are that uniform person who works with the standard given crap you are in trouble. Do I need a 22" to program code?
Well, not necessarily (even though at home I have one, so more text fits on it), but at work the standard 17" will do.
Then what? Oh well, I hate mice, and being a rather tall individual I cannot stand regular keyboards - too tight. Besides knowing how crappy the the keyboards and mice were the last Fortune 10 gave to the employees, even if I was ok with mice and regular keyboards I would differ to use any given one.
Pickiness? Well, when you spend 10+ hours at a computer (did I say 16+ ? ), and I am sure a lot of guys here do, you want the best input devices. I personally only work with a Logi trackman and any (non-cheap-o) split keyboard : MS, Fellowes are OK, without these I suffer after a few hours of working.
But then again I am a sociopath and quit a good job because I hated cubicle life so much, and I love to work bare-feet, underwear with my dogs sleeping next to me....
Anyway, this kind of workplace sharing is completely incompatible with me. I program and sysadmin, and while "sysadmining" tolerates socializing and noise at times of maintenance/support, programming needs dead silence and no changing environment for me. So does systems engineering, or even installing an unknown feature into an environment (e.g. reading docs, and try until it works kinda stuff).
Put it into any coating, it comes back to saving money to these corporations. It has nothing to do with you being well changing workstations.
Just my 2c.
damn I would do anything, even write a book on
As soon as you stand up, someone else takes your chair. Soon people are walking around like hot-dog vendors at a baseball game, laptops suspended from shoulder straps.
After that individual phone lines are replaced by party lines. Employees are rewarded for each person added to their party line.
Finally, we have people fighting over the table in the lunch room. [If I could have remembered that movie where 2 guys pull on a table that they share between a wall, I wouldn't be needing more coffee...brb]
I come here for the love
Relax, Homer. At Globex, we don't believe in walls.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
My current assignment is at a company that already has open work places, though granted we do have desks, but no one has his/her own desk.
Generally we have people trying to get the same space everyday, but that's not a given.
And of course people who are working together will sit together. Which is more easily done. If your project changes, you can sit somewhere else without any problems. And if you have a problem with that colleague across from you, there is nothing that prevents you from getting up, take your laptop with you and move to another location.
(You'll also find that a 'clean desk policy' will actually work better in such environments)
I have yet to encounter any 'cubicles' here, but that's probably because I live in The Netherlands, and not in the States.
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
I don't really like homeworking, guess I'm old fashioned, but coming into the office gets me in the mood for work, rather than mooching about and raiding the fridge every so often. And open plan isn't that distracting, to me.
I recommend either over-ear style headphones, or active noise cancelling ones. Both allow you to listen to music at low volume whilst blocking out outside noise.
>>Yeah, I'm mad because my request for noise-isolating headphones was turned down. Does it show?
Perhaps Sir should request a noise-cancelling Louisville Slugger?
(The capatcha is "communes"... how appropriate to a discussion about "flexible" work space!)
I am currently working for a company that does that. I HATE HATE HATE that setup. Although we have our own personal spaces, and that's huge, there is NO privacy whatsoever. You cannot have a phone conversation without someone overhearing you. You can not check your web email without thinking your neighbor sees everything that happens on your screen. Trust, me it SUCKS. Everybody hates it.
Yet here I am, posting on Slashdot. Why? Because at some point, I stopped caring what my neighbors think of me. I'm too good for them to fire, and they are willing to overlook the fact that I take personal calls, surf the web, and act like I have my own office.
I had only heard of the concept of cubicles before I came to the UK. My dad works for Schlumberger in Norway, and he has always had an office and indeed, there are NO cubicles at the office, it is quite disgusting to look through the windows of a company in Edinburgh and see nothing but what I can only describe as grids of workforce. They look almost like a gym transformed into a testing area. The only problem I can imagine with an office is having to keep the door open all the time, I dont like keeping doors open. I hate knocking on doors, it always seems like I must be interupting something.
ugh...
But, as this shows, the end result of trying to create a pleasant environment for the workforce is to have your butt blown off by the competition!
--Dan
Web Tips
Aside from the fact that open layout has been in use for hundreds of years elsewhere* I doubt that breaking down the cubicle walls will dramatically increase productivity everywhere. Developers for example need their private space for their work (others wrote about it, if noone cited that article yet).
But if someone works from home (s)he already has that much required personal space at home, and doesn't care if the place is more 'social' in the official office.
By the way that layout sure will spread in the next years due to the catchy words you can attach to them: 'social', 'open', 'collaborate', 'flexible' instead of 'closed', 'walls', and 'cube' (as a boring kind of shape).
*Don't know about you but to me cubeless offices bring the picture of some Scandinavian postal office where the customers can watch the clerk picking his nose.
Ah, yes, but that keeps anal-retentive middle managers from being able to micromanage their employees. They would no longer be necessary except to keep the conference room chairs warm.
Besides...letting people work at home might actually make them *happier*. And change is for the good of the company--not the employee. And you can't make a change that's good for the company if it is also good for the employee. Win-win is for losers.
I say this in all seriousness with my tongue firmly held in cheek....
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
When I showed up at my first job they had a desk ready for me. But, since they are in the process of renovating the suite directly behind me for us to move into in about 3 months, I was placed at the the end of a hallway. Now, I get to listen to construction all day outside the cubicles of others. Having ear phones on are the only way I get work done. Bonus is that I've a little more space than the cube dwellers. I wish
import system.cool.Sig;
Just been on the other side of this decision: planning our own office layout for our new office. We're currently in the big open plan space (no cubes) setup and the noise is deafening at times. You can just see people's heads swivel as soon as an interesting argument/discussion breaks out on the other side of the room. Of course, as many have said they then need ages to get back in the zone.
Cubes seemed too horrible to us and private offices seemed a bit lonely and isolated.
What we went for in the end was a set of 3-6 person rooms, some of which can be combined if required. The idea was to merge the benefits of each approach - you get a dedicated "project room" where ad-hoc conversations, whiteboad design discussions, etc. are encouraged. The team gets to personalise their space, as does each of the workers (for at least as long as the project lasts).
On the other hand if a team is in deadline mode, they can shut the door and agree between each other to be quiet. Similarly if a team wants to play music they don't disturb others, etc.
We'll see how it works out... Anyone else tried this sort of approach?
My first programming job was like this; very open, using extreme programming principles. The company was small, about a dozen developers or so. People paired up at which ever computer hardware setup was required for their project. (no set work station) There were desks arranged in a large circle but no cubicles. As for personal items, we had a small amount of personal space, not for pictures per se, but more for jackets. As for the massive amount of books that people tend to acquire throughout an IT career, we simply wrote out names in them and put them on the _bookshelf_ where everyone could use them. To be fair, most books were bought and paid for by the company so this system worked well. This was the most effective programming team I have ever been a part of of. Ideas were shared, questions answered, and a very open family feel emerged.
After leaving this place to join a software giant like Symantec, I see how valuable that configuration was. I found myself walking all over the building to get answers and track down people on my team. I even spent three days pairing with someone in their cubicle, not even visiting my own. The open space not only saves money on cubicle walls, but it fosters open communication between everyone on the team.
My current employer (edmunds.com, shameless plug) is also into the "open seating" trend, but with assigned desks for everyone. Dev is over here, creative is over there, QA is somewhere else. This works great, but we can already see that for a particular project, we need all the groups near each other for the duration of that project. For you personal phone call nuts, like HR and execs, we have small pods (offices) that can be used by anyone at any time for times when some privacy is needed.
In short, yay for open seating, boo for the execs that move into their pods so they can have pictures of their kids on their desk. I'd pick functionality over a corner office any day.
Here in Japan, a standard office has the boss's desk up a the front and everyone else in several long rows side by side. There's no privacy, or expectation thereof. The result I've observed (only personal experience, mind you) is that productivity is increased, but even more so the *appearance* of productivity is increased, since no one has the personal space to goof off, but is expected to look like they're working constantly. From looking at my co-workers, I would definitely NOT recommend it as a way to increase employee satisfaction or reduce stress, however...
I think I'd find another place to work.
Jobs that are conducive to this environment:
- marketing
- pre-sales engineers
- artists (graphical, musical, etc.)
- people managers
- sales people (maybe). Depends if they are usually out in the field or taking calls from customers.
Jobs that should be conducive to this environment but the workers wouldn't enjoy it:
- human resources: easily accessible, able to really keep a pulse on morale but a constant need for privacy.
- desktop support: easily accessible, immediately aware of issues but unable to get proactive work done.
Jobs that absolutely cannot work in this environment:
- developer: needs absence of interruptions and quiet for concentration.
- security: no one should be able to peek at security information whether physical or logical.
- sysadmin: same as security plus during a failure the accessability and interruptions would be detrimental.
- accounting/payroll: security concerns as well as customer privacy issues.
I could see a hybrid environment working well - a handful of cubes and offices and 75% of the space as described above. Once you get past the job descriptions, then you must consider whether or not it's conducive for the company's industry. At Cisco and Intel where you have a high percentage of "idea" people and sales people, it works. I'm quite certain the engineers, IT and some back office functions will not and cannot be part of this experiment.
Maybe they can talk to their own sales department and see how "Intel Mobile Solutions" can help them be a "Telecommuting Success Story"!!!
http://ipip.intel.com/go/category/events/2006/tysonscorner_2006/
I'm a programmer stashed away in an exposed set of 8 cubicals, in what amounts to a closet of a closet, at the farthest end of our building, where I'm bathed in a gazillion watts of fluorescent lighting.
I have to walk a hundred paces just to see the outside. If there was no seating assignment, I'd at least have a chance to get my fair share of natural light -- especially in the winter months when the only daylight I see is on the drive to work.
When it comes to personal effects, programmers (at leas the ones I work with) don't really seem to exhibit anything they're too attached to. And with personal laptops, you can keep some mementos stashed there.
I'd have to give up my plants, and my facetious posters, but it would be well worth it to work in the presence of natural light at least some of the day, instead of these cold buzzing demon tubes that seem to have just the right color temperature to make my eyes feel strained and my head ache. And if you gave me ample facilities and the freedom to use them whenever, I'd probably find being in the office a bit more tolerable.
It may not do anything for my productivity, but it might keep me around longer.
Of course, giving me a private office in the front of the building would probably achieve the best of both worlds, from my perspective.
Move all sig!
This is from "Wired", pics about new "Futurama". The company seems to be the same one, but there are two pictures, from two offices:
From the one of the most developed country in the world (USA):
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/multimedia/2007/11/ff_futurama_slideshow?slide=3&slideView=2
And from one of the "developing countries", i.e. Korea:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/multimedia/2007/11/ff_futurama_slideshow?slide=11&slideView=3
Where would you like to work?
No sig today.
I just left a large company with cubicles. I've worked in solitary cubes, 2-4 person cubes, office, etc. Now I work at a small company where we have an open loft type of area with simple desks and no walls. Nice thing we have no fake ceiling with a big sky light. Natural light is nice since there's no windows in the area. Bad thing no carpet or ceiling allows it to echo like crazy. As a software engineer I prefer a lone cube. Leave me alone I want to listen to music and write code. Office banter at the beginning of the day is fine as we are getting coffee and stuff. After that I want solitude so I can get my work done with minimal distraction.
Where I work now, I actually like the cubicle as it gives me a bit of privacy. Also my current job (and most likely future jobs) doesn't require that much interaction with other co-workers. Open-concept could be useful in certain environments, like in a team environments that require a lot of interaction but otherwise it is not necessarily better... Also it is dependent on your co-workers too, I mean if it was some attractive co-workers I definitely wont mind going Open office but it can also work against you if you have some rather annoying or unattractive co-workers.
Sounds like some of these decision makers spend too much time in the airport. Fact is that comfortable atmosphere is gonna suck when it comes to making phone calls or if you have a loud Harold in the group. Certain jobs sort of require a lot of typing (engineers, writers) and this setup would be a nightmare.
It's quiet and as a bonus, I don't get phone calls. It rings back in my 'cube'. What do I care? If it's something important they walk up and talk to me in the server room.
If the management were to tell me to do otherwise, I'd get the hell out of the company. It's my life and they have no right to reduce its quality.
echo 'cat sig | sh' > sig
"plop down with laptops" yeh right like I am (or any one else is) going to be able to work efectivly like that
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
Yeah, I'm mad because my request for noise-isolating headphones was turned down. Does it show?
Where I used to work, they had this brilliant idea to put everyone in cubicles - except for the tech side. We got to sit in "bullpens". Think of 2 cubicles on either side of an aisle, with the aisle-side walls removed. So it was a big box, where 4 people could sit facing the wall of each corner. It was supposed to increase communication and productivity, but everyone hated it. You couldn't concentrate, there was always something distracting. And if someone in your bullpen decided to have an impromptu discussion with 3 other people - tough for you. So instead of changing it (they couldn't admit they were wrong) they got everyone in bullpens noise-cancelling headphones. So if you wanted to concentrate, you had to put on the headphones. They gave me a headache, unless I was listening to music in them... and sometimes I didn't want to listen to music. And everyone else (sales, cust support, etc) were supposed to leave you alone if you had your headphones on, but instead they would come up and bother you anyway. I don't think the urge to kill has ever been so great as when you are trying to concentrate on something and some dufus walks up and taps on your headphones with a pen. So then they instituted "office hours" where those people could come and ask questions, the rest of the time was supposed to allow us to concentrate. Didn't work, nobody observed it.
All they had to do was give people cubicles where they could have some sort of private area to concentrate. We *asked* for cubicles. But some genius manager wanted to be "innovative" and "think outside the box". Here's a tip: listen to those people who have to live it day in and day out. I am all for trying new things, but if it doesn't work, don't force it on people.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That's why I decided to become a computer programmer in the first place. Machines are much more reasonable on a Monday morning, for one thing. My preference is a decent sized cube with very high walls, a low ceiling, and dim overhead lights, so I can bask in the warm nurturing glow of the monitor. The telephone is an annoyance (people again), but what can you do? At least I can pretend email doesn't involve a human being.
Besides, open office plans are designed for paranoid bosses who feel they have to keep an eye on everyone from their glass-walled offices, looking out over the length and breadth of their sovereign domain.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I'm a bit mixed on this. On one hand, yeah, this has a whiff of PHB planning.
But on another, frankly, I'm not sure how much my cubicle contributes to my productivity anyway. I've done far better work taking my laptop to another room, working from home, etc., anything but actually sitting around in a grim gray box for IT Biscuts. Several of my co-workers are semi-mobile, and it works well for them.
I'd imagine the one factor is, even in an ideal situation, the individual personalities.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
As of today, my current working place is undergoing a huge floor planning exercise. As a consequence, we (engineers) have to move to a new area where only desks and chairs were provided. No more cubicles. So here are the UPs and DOWNs...
UPs
1. Face-face with all in the room.
2. When boss (he has a seperate room) is speaking, everyone gets attention.
3. No need to travel minor distances to share ideas with fellow guys.
4. Aware about who's coming and who's leaving the engineer's area.
5. No more secret discussions with fellow guys.
DOWNs
1. No privacy at all.
2. Hard to escape without noticing to anyone.
3. Hard to concentrate as so many other, loud, useless grape-vine is broadcasting in the surrounding environment.
4. Too much peer pressure, so hard to do little, enjoyable things (like posting in slashdot, watching top gear).
5. Getting too much garbage on your desktop from passing by people. (mostly, your fellow guys around).
6. Great danger in missing things (Specially.. important documents).
No cubicle/office is very good for technicians and field officers, as 80% of their time, they are at some work site.
I remember, Microsoft did an advance research on this work-floor arrangement... can anyone share it with us???
My workspace at the BANK has been like this for about 3 years now. I'm sure other placed have been like this for ages as well. It's called Future of Work at my place. Nothing new to see here, move along.
Pardon my insanity, but I like my walls, and at that currently it drives me crazy that the fixed and standard cube config allows people to walk up behind you. I can barely keep my sanity in that situation. I was much calmer and more productive when I had an office.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Microsoft is sort of famous among tech companies for giving every employee a private office, regardless of status/level. But increasingly some groups are deciding to move to open concept offices by choice. Each work group has a pretty high degree of autonomy to decide what they want to do and those that need a high degree of ongoing collaboration throughout the day like the open space approach. They aren't really cube-farms like at Intel. Rather, they're open spaces with little clusters of desks and lots of lounge-type rooms/spaces etc. The nice thing about it is the exposure to natural light compared to private offices where quite a few are on interior corridors. I have worked in both environments at various companies - cubes, cube-less open work spaces and private offices and I prefer private offices for privacy and quiet. Friends of mine who do design work really like the open space approach. To each his/her own.
Dilbert was mocking this practice a decade ago.
No cubicle? But where will I fart? WHERE WILL I FART??
I work for Intel, and while this setup may have advantages it has some huge disadvantages. No permanent location impliles that the employees are using laptops so they can move them around. I currently declined a laptop at Intel because by going for a top-of-the-line desktop I get 4 cpus all to myself for my development work. Yes, I have access to a giant farm of linux machines that I can log into and use to compile or run simulations, but they are all shared. There's no guarantee that the rude asshole down the hall won't bother to check the load of the machine I'm on before he kicks off some giant simulation on it slowing down everything I'm doing. So I need a fixed location with a fixed computer that I can work at.
Laptop monitors are tiny. When I write code, I want the largest physical monitor possible with the highest resolution possible. I want to be able to put PDF documentation side by side wtih vi and code. In fact, I want my dual-monitor setup to stay the way it is. Now, there's nothing to prevent a company from having random desks with monitors and docking stations that a laptop could plug into, but most of the proposals I've seen do not show that kind of a setup. And the last thing I want to be using is some fixed keyboard that god know's who else has been using. Keyboards are dirtier then the average toilet seat and not something I want to be sharing with co-workers.
This concept of "no fixed work space" sounds like some Utopian dream, but I don't see how a 'one-size-fits-all' solution can work. At best, I see the most productive people becoming slightly less productive and getting fed up and moving on.
Where am I going to lock up my top-secret documents that the company demands I keep under lock and key? Currently all of these things are securely stored in my cubicle, and every proposal I've seen for the "no fixed work space" glosses over these details.
And, as usual, I don't care. Because I freelance by the hour.
We have companies that want me to do creative work (design and development of a software or hardware/software system).
Instead of being given a quiet area conducive to concentration, I am put into either a cubicle farm or a completely open area. With interruptions. With noise. I have even been put into a cubicle, shared with someone else, *and* three servers, *and* two automated CD pressing machines.
I have a noise-cancelling headset (takes care of low freq noise), and a lot of patience.
Still, I have a theory -- could not the environment be why F/OSS can be soooo much better sometimes?
I wonder what the working conditions at TATA are like?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
No - I think the main point here is for very technical jobs, the employees are required to load up a large amount of information into their mind to solve large, complex problems. Anytime a person comes into their space to ask them about something unrelated this causes a context switch in the employee. They have to unload some or all of the information for the task they are currently working on to contemplate the topic that person who interrupted them wants to talk about. Once the interruptor has left, then the employee has to figure out "where they were at" which is essentially re-loading all the information needed to perform the task they were working into their mind.
Having a cubicle or an office at least establishes the notion of a boundary. In an open area, there are no boundaries and that typically makes other employees feel as though they can interrupt you for any reason at any time. The employee then becomes less productive due to the increased context switching.
Personally, I think for highly technical jobs that do not lend themselves well to multitasking, an office or telecommuting is best. You can lock your door, put your phone on DnD if you're working on a deadline sensitive task that you can't afford to be interrupted from.
We'll make great pets
When we were growing and felt like moving, we expanded instead, using the older space strictly as a lab. To get to the office, you have to cross the parking lot to another building, so there's some "campus" to it - no schlepping carpet, you actually get to walk through the elements.
;P
The new office space has about 2k square feet for about 7 to 10 people, one entire wall is windowed, facing trees, mountains (and parking lot and gas station - ok, location, location - perfection is hard) and two private rooms - also individually windowed to the outside and to the common area.
One thing we looked for was an irregularly shaped space - not to save money, but for several simple reasons. First, acoustics - squares and rectangles are good for having resonant frequencies (lambda=(1100 ft/sec) / individual_room_dimension = resonance in Hz, btw) - irregular trapezoidal rooms don't boom and echo so much. Second, harmony - work in a sqaure space then you think in a square space - work in a soft space, create software. Finally, marketing - there is no thinking outside the box, we've left the box behind - good for any customers wanting to see our facilitites (hey, it happens).
Each person gets a glass ergonomic workstation, a suede ergonomic chair, and a locking small cabinet for personal items (workstations are **all** 24" iMacs/4GB/500GB/1TB backup/wireless everything/Parallels). People are free to use the room however they want, and they're still learning (we've only been there since Sep 1).
Communication is largely skyped, with other VOIP, plus iChat, plus Jabber, video to offsite wherever offsite bandwidth allows.
No one's complaining about noise or space for personal calls - this works I think because there's a single team in the environment (despite separate projects sometimes), the ability to stretch your legs and visit the lab, and because everyone is used to using their cell phones away from everyone else for personal calls anyway.
As far as monitoring what people do on the web, mostly we couldn't care less. My philosophy was to give software professionals a professional environment and they'd have better things to do than surf the web. And so what if they do? Maybe they'll read this.
An open office environment doesn't have to be about management saving a buck or taking away privacy or turf. In my concept, it's about collaboration, it's about empowerment, it's about removing class barriers. I did a cost-benefit analysis for my partners that went like this: human intellect has no price, but any barriers to intelligent people we put up have costs we'll never understand - let's remove the barriers and call it squaresies.
I came in for a meeting with them and to give some updates on the other divisions. Instead of big paper on walls or easels, one guy asked why I couldn't sit on the floor with the big pad and have everyone cluster around. Great fucking meeting for a change - see what happens when you relax the requirement of fitting people into square desks, square cubes, square rooms, square conference tables?
Water seeks its own level. So does intelligence.
PS - no open seating. WTF is the point of violating someone's well-adjusted comfy chair? Work is uncomfortable to begin with, that's my thought on that.
PPS - that's how it's done, people. I challenge all execs reading here to follow suit! Take everything you've hated about it felt when you were coming up the ranks and just fucking stop doing those things!!!
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Seriously. This is like working at Starbucks. It is not a good way to concetrate or focus. I recently got my own office and things are much better. In my last position I worked in a similar environment and it is not easy to work with code while the hyper active tech editor wouldn't stop talking about selling her house and asking you to fix her computer when it isn't broken. As strange as it sounds we still didn't end up collaborating until meetings even though we all sat next to each other and listened to all our bio noises after lunch. Headphones are great for hearing your own noise but after a while I get tired of hearing my own music. Yea it was great. Management crap that sounds ok but is horrible in practice.
The first time I have to go to work and sit in a beanbag chair, I'm giving my notice, and will flee the tech industry for something more rewarding, like ditch digging...
Glad we could clear this up. After years of complaining about less and less privacy, workers finally turned around and looked up to common work spaces. Managers of course, will still be provided private offices.
I worked at place where everything was open and we had no assigned place. You think we would have been crammed together as in school but the tables were large enough to take as much space as a cubicle. Well, I'm saying "no assigned place" but that was only for individuals. Each team had an area of its own.
For the record, Cisco has a metric ass-load of engineers. I'd wager there are more of us than the non-techies. I just looked up Cynthia Pham, the PM quoted in the article, and it turns out she works in customer service.
This plan started out as an experiment with some of the non-techie groups. I walked through there once and it looked as horrible as it sounds. No personal space, no privacy, no peace and quiet. They tried to solve these problems with lockers -- yes, lockers -- and "quiet" rooms, but neither seemed effective to me. The quiet room is where I'd want to spend all my time, but it was just a mini-cubeville with half-sized cubicles. The one worthwhile improvement was that there were many small conference rooms, some of which were only available as first-come, first-serve.
None of the engineering groups have tried it and AFAIK, none plan to. In fact, one of the floors where they did the original test was taken over by an engineering group so they actually converted it back to standard cubicles.
And their stocks are dropping like a rock - do you think all those people sit around the table and
dump their stocks, now that they can hear all the bad things?
Every study of programmer productivity shows that private office are the best for programmers. Programmers need to concentrate and not be disturbed. Open schemes are full of distractions and those distractions interrupt the thought process and concentration. Once disrupted in the middle of a train of thought, a programmer may need to literally go back to the beginning and think through bug or problem again.
What open schemes are good for is reducing costs. Small, closed workspaces with real walls and doors and the common spaces are the best. The common spaces allow for impromptu meetings, brainstorming, etc.
...Open Marriages. They're immoral! Begone foul beast of the netherregions!
Usually when the office standards in my job go down, the managers tell they would love to use the new arrangements themselves. ;]
So I would hate it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
At my current assignment we all have laptop stands, and some have an extra monitor (because they requested it, and they often sit at the same location, and coworkers do respect that where I work.)
:)
Indeed, dirty keyboards can be an issue, not sure how they have worked that one out, probably overlooked that aspect. You'll find me washing my hands before I go to lunch, and I don't eat stuff with my hands at the desk, all stay in their wrappers.
And almost every coworker has his own safe deposit box, either locked with a key, or one with a keypad. (I'm one of the lucky ones to have one with a key) Some don't have that, but then again not everyone deals with top secret stuff.
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
In my experience, the only way that I or anyone else can develop software is to have a quiet area where we won't be interrupted. In a big, open arena, interruptions and distractions will be constant. This may be fine for people in "people" jobs like marketing or management. But it'll be a total killer for any software development.
So I guess these companies don't intend to do that any more. Maybe all software development has been outsourced?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The call center I work at has moved to an semi-open layout which results in a lot of noise and no privacy. I myself would rather have well designed spacious cube rather than a open area where your constantly looking over your shoulder to see who is behind you. At the desks where I work, people tend to sit lower to not be seen over the partitions but in cubes people tend to sit up. As far as the more open communication point, one of my friends can't say hardly anything to anyone at her work for fear of someone taking offense and management calling her into a conference. The new open layout is used more to put people on display like some sort of human zoo. I'm all for collaborative spaces but there has to be some semi-private areas too because not everyone is social, many are even phobic about social interaction. I wonder how long it'll be before companies going to open spaces gets a law suit filed against them for violating the Americans with disabilities act.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Although Intel was one of the first companies to inflict cubicles on their employees, Bob Propst of Herman Miller is generally credited for inventing the cubicle around 1968 (about the same time Intel was founded)...
As an apparent act of atonement for inflicting Herman Miller's "Action Office" on the world, before he died in 2000, there are accounts that Bob apologized for his contribution to "monolithic insanity"...
No self-motivated person who works mainly with computers needs to be at a badly-lit noisy office every day, no matter whether it's a cubicle farm or open space. Computers have a network cable (or wireless antenna) for a good reason.
Given that most companies don't understand this, the only practical way to freedom today seems to be to resign and become a freelancer or start a business.
Been there, done that: While hordes of commuters burn up the whole planet with their CO2 emissions to go to work every morning, I happily go to nearby islands or hills with a laptop and 3G Internet and hack code or VPN/SSH to servers while listening to Mozart in the clean air. In fact only when the weather is bad or when I work on special projects I stay in my home office. The joy of actually making money while in the middle of the sea or at sunny beaches should make every competent programmer chained to an office to look themselves at the mirror in the morning and say "What contribution can I make to the economy? What are my greatest skills?" and then start hacking the next Web 2.0 hit, or get into consulting, or both.
That's it.
You can call it an 'open concept' office, you can call it 'hot-desking,' but at the end of the day it's a way of providing less space and less infrastructure per person. The companies toying with it are 'trying it out' not to see if it helps productivity, but to see if they can get away with it without causing their workers to revolt.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If you watch old American films from the 20's and 30's you will see the exact same office layout, including the ceiling fans pushing down hot air onto the workers. There is nothing new about open-plan offices.
The really new (and green) way of doing things is telecommuting, aka work at home. I've done work in coffee shops with wifi and in airports and in hotel rooms, but usually, I work at home where my broadband connection is generally faster than in the office.
The real trick is in maintaining teamwork and collaboration when you never meet your coworkers or even hear their voices. Lately we've been using a wiki to supplement email and the usual smorgasbord of badly thought-out and out of date intranet sites. The wiki has really caught on because it is so malleable. You can set up a peusdo-blog, or a pseudo intranet site, or a discussion forum. And no permission is needed, no forms to fill out, no costs to allocate. Just do it! And in our company people really do leverage this wiki for all of what I described and more.