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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.'"
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.
Open plans aren't new either They were big in the 1970's. Heck My high school did a refit to an open plan and with in 10 years most of that was gone.
Open plans don't give those that need a quiet place to work a quiet place to work as everyone's phone calls can easily be overheard.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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.
I don't mean to sound insulting or presumptuous, and I don't claim to know nearly enough about you or your work to make this claim with much accuracy, but perhaps you have adult ADD? I know someone who has it, and described nearly exactly what you said. They can't block out sound/visual input well and basically any sensory input not related to the task at hand, and once they get side tracked they have a hard time being able to regain focus.
Or it could just be simple boredom/frustration/fatigue with doing a task for long stretches of time.
What's stopping you from bringing your own noise canceling headphones?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.
What's stopping you from bringing your own noise canceling headphones?
I have adult ADD, and work in a cube. It's a lose-lose scenario. I used to listen to music on headphones all of the time to keep from being distracted, and was told that it was giving everyone the impression that I didn't want to talk to them.
Of course, it's still better than some ridiculous open seating plan where I couldn't customize anything. I have three monitors at my desk that I scavenged when everyone else was getting rid of their CRTs. Being able to have so much simultaneously-visible working space is great for my concentration. I use it kind of like the display in Minority Report - moving various windows around depending on what makes sense for any given moment. I had to use a single screened laptop for 2-3 weeks when my PC died and it cut my productivity in half.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
They did this when I worked at Andersen. It made sense there because hopefully you were out at client sites more than in the office. With a job where I go to the same place every day people will start to stake out their areas, not unlike seating in college.
;)
For fun I used to move all around the room and sit in other peoples seats. They'd freak out at first but I'd actually talk about it, make friends (or enemies) and then move somewhere else. If the people weren't complete assholes (maybe 10% were pricks), the entire class would lighten up and become friends. I only had one class where that didn't happen. Ah, the think they're better looking and smarter than they are whores, how could I ever forget them
It will become a turf war if these people aren't actually out of the office more than they are in it. One more worry people have to take on (assuming they're anal retentive, which seems to be almost all the engineers, programmers, etc. that I know).
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'
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
Noise-isolating headphones work mostly against background white noise. They aren't so good at blocking out, say, the guy talking on the phone one cubicle over. Earplugs, on the other hand, are very effective and quite cheap.
Chris Mattern
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.
I wonder how much of this is due to the Hawthorne Effect?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Cubeless office? Some bureaucrat working for the British Raj invented them 100 years ago.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Fine, but I need a pile of text books and standards to do my job, and most are only available on paper. Changing desk means moving more than I can carry. I've worked for organisations in the past that rather overestimated the paperless office, and it was a nightmare. Fortunately (and not entirely by chance) I work for a more enlightened company now.
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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?
Forget the personal items.
I need a place to hang up my data dictionary posters.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm not surprised to see intel go this direction. Their cubicle farm looked like an employee parking lot. You can see it all on this conan o'brien clip. http://www.clipstr.com/videos/ConanVisitsIntel/
What a soul crushing environment.
I work in a "War Room" now and its the worst idea ever conceived. Programming requires being able to quietly concentrate on your work, but the war room atmosphere is noisy and makes for a lousy enviromnent for the developer. Its all part of this FrAgile process... the next job I take will not be in such an environment.
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!
And I'm sure there's tons of others. If I, as an employer, were to institute this system, I'd ensure that the employees had the flexibility to organize the space as they wanted. If I, as an employee, were to be part of this system, I'd design a tightly knit squad of nerf-enabled roombas to guard my personal space, and lead assaults on other employees during lunch hour.
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.
It will be interesting to see how removing any sense of personal ownership in the office space works out for the companies that try this.
It's not really a new idea. Here's a still from Orson Welles' "The Trial" (yes, from the Kafka novel), and that was made in the 1960's. The only difference now is that there's *nothing* kept on the desk - in the old days, there was at least a typewriter. Over time, other objects appeared; in and out boxes, pencil holders, etc. And that's when the concept of "assigned desks" and the cubicle took over, out of a necessity for both better working conditions and more productive workers.
This is a regression backwards; there's nothing new about it, and it's not what workers want, that's for sure. Management loves it in theory because they can keep an eye on many employees at once. They know who is there, they know who is working and not just staring at the ceiling or throwing darts at their cube walls.
But employees hate it, and I know this from experience. My previous job didn't quite go so far as having empty desks where employees could sit anywhere, but we did have a completely open office without walls. What you invariably end up with is as many people crammed into a room as the employer can fit, because there are no boundaries telling anybody "this is enough space for one person". At my office, this was easy to do because the whole office was just a series of long metal tables pushed together, so when we hired somebody new, everybody just scrunched down a little more. And because nobody has any claim to any personal space, or any "ownership" of it, they end up throwing garbage everywhere and not ever cleaning it up. So it's cramped, crowded, smelly, and there's no privacy. It's like what you'd imagine working in an office in the Soviet Union was probably like. Or some sort of sweatshop.
Cisco probably hasn't gotten to that point yet, but I guarantee their employees already hate it. And eventually, it'll become intolerable and everybody will be clamoring for the days of cubes again.
This is just another example of somebody thinking they've stumbled onto a great idea, not thinking through the unintended consequences, and not realizing that countless other people have tried the same thing many times before, without success.
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
As a dweller of cube land (and one of those people with no personal effects in my cube), I'd argue that the only reason people become defensive of 'their spot' (be it a cube or a chair in college) is because it is defined by a physical object or location. You remove the physical delimiter of 'my space' versus 'your space' ... and it's hard to fight over space. The same story has been done in a million TV shows. You have two characters that have to share a room, and they fight constantly. One of them has the brilliant idea to put a line down the middle, so each has one half. The moral of the show is that the line always makes it worse. Suddenly everyone is hypervigilant of the line. Remove the line, and no one notices if my stuff is three inches over it.
In college we had our regular table in the library, but if it was taken when we showed up, we had no problem sitting at another identical table nearby. I think people sit in the same seat in class out of habit, not because they fancy it 'their seat.'
I'm sure after a while people will fall into a routine in this open office environment, but I think the danger lies more in distraction than turf wars. You get a ton of people in an open room working together, and they are going to talk. I guess it depends on what kind of work they do, but I know as a lowly programmer, I can't think straight with people around me talking all day. At least for my job, I wish I had an office with a door AND a big common area. The office doesn't even have to be mine (or very big)... just something I can reserve for the day and shut the door to get some work done. The common area is absolutely necessary for team work. Ever try to work with people in cubes? I always feel like I'm invading their space and want to run away.
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
I envision lots of glass doored conference rooms and lots of big cushy leather arm chairs and couches arranged in sitting areas with coffee tables in the middle. Add some larger 4 person tables to spread work out over and you have what looks like a library but with out all the bookshelves.
I think it could work out to be a great work environment if you do not over staff the areas and provide free quality coffee and tea.
That photo looks a LOT like offices in Japan. The staffrooms for the schools I work at all consist of a bunch of metal desks pushed together. Personal stuff doesn't tend to leak over because everyone has their "own desk", but the other problems you mentioned do exist. It's noisy, and I have trouble getting anything done because someone is always looking over my shoulder, walking behind me, or having a discussion at the next desk.
Pro:
-The boss can watch everyone!
Counterpoint:
-Employees always feel like they must look busy, and will often do so even at the expense of doing real work. If it's true that "a watched pot never boils", I think it's even more true that "a watched employee never works".
Pro:
-When you need to bother someone with a question, it's easy to find them.
Counterpoints:
-It's easy to be interrupted and bothered with questions.
-People (including bosses) tend to walk by with their own issues and interrupt two people in the middle of a work discussion. There's no concept of "These two people are having a private meeting so I'll leave him a note", rather "These two people are chatting in a common room and I can interrupt one of them with my trivial matter". The difference is subtle but important.
Pro:
-It's easy to walk/lean over and ask a quick question.
Counterpoint:
-When I'm working I tune everyone and everything out. In a cubicle or office, I "wake up" and listen when someone enters my area. But in a workplace with no clearly defined personal space, I must ignore people standing right next to me to get the simplest task done. This results in many people thinking they've communicated something to me when in reality they've just talked AT me.
Pro:
-No need for a separate meeting room; just hold meetings where everyone is at their desk!
Counterpoints:
-A meeting just happened at your desk, whether you need to be there or not.
-Many people just continue their work, ignoring the meeting.
-Often a meeting starts without me realizing it. (Refer to "tuning out" above.)
Basically having your own space, however small, means that you can feel free to define rules for that space. For example: "I'm working on something, so leave immediately." Or "I think looking at piles of paperwork is distracting, so this area is clean." Or even "I ignore everything that happens outside this area."