58% of High-Performance Employees Say They Need More Quiet Work Spaces (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a CNBC article: Behold the open industrial office space. At one moment, it feels like such a hip environment, bustling with easy communication and collaboration, innovation and headphones just behind every monitor. At another moment, the open office is the loudest, most annoying, distracting and unproductive environment one can imagine. What if the open industrial office is just part of a larger misguided fantasy? What if this office style is hurting our employees working on the hardest problems -- our high-performance employees (HPEs)? What if the open office is causing retention problems, and affecting the quality of our end products? As I outlined in my HPE article, executives and high-performance employees tend to optimize against completely different trade and life principles -- they generally have very different views of the world. This disconnect shows itself very clearly in the environmental conditions of our creative and technical offices. My latest anonymous survey shows that 58% of HPEs need more private spaces for problem solving, and 54% of HPEs find their office environment "too distracting."

Comments

Get rid of meetings

[Billly Gates]

Of course it's hard to concentrate and get things accomplished when you are in meetings 6 hours a day talking about what your going to do rather than doing it.

CHEAP

[Anonymous Coward]

The open floorpan is not there to be hip, innovative or to facilitate collaboration. It is the CHEAPEST possible way to provide working space to a lot of people. All of that other stuff is just a con.

Re:CHEAP

[Headw1nd]

Architect here, this is the correct answer. Open plan offices are far more space efficient than cubes, to say nothing of the enormous costs of actual separate rooms. The thing that people don't seem to realize is that this was almost always the case for peons, look at offices from the early part of the 20th century: They are just open rooms with desks. Cubicles were actually an upgrade.

Retention

[wierdling]

The only way this would affect my retention at a company is if they went to the open office layout after I had already started working there, because there is no way in hell I would take a job where I am expected to do my coding in an open office environment. Cubes are bad enough, an open office would just kill all of my productivity.

I love a quiet office space.

[toonces33]

It is far too distracting when you have voices in the hall, phones ringing or anything else. Even having my own cell phone ring pisses me off sometimes, as it breaks my concentration. Of course it isn't every day that I need to concentrate like this, but I appreciate having that ability when the need arises.

Sometimes I work from home, but if my wife is around, her work has her on the phone all of the time, and I can't concentrate. She tells me that "I can't multitask", but to me multitasking is largely a myth unless the tasks are all fairly trivial and the mental context switching overhead is relatively small. A lot of "multitasking" that I see people doing amounts to "multi-goofing off".

Re:Bias from personal preference

[jellomizer]

The problem is that Bosses, Managers and Sales Extraverts, so these open (Noisy) environments are comfortable to them, and all the noise and hustle and bustle is comforting to them that people are working and excited on what they are doing.
While the Problem Solvers tend to be introverts will prefer the quiet space, to be alone with their thoughts, try things make mistakes without judgement, and sit down and really focus on the problem at hand. But to those managers seeing the guy just sit there and think looks horribly unproductive.

That said most of the High Performance employees are also professionals so when things get loud or distraction just just deal with it. However most of them would be happier if they are working in a quiet location than a loud active room.

Re:Bias from personal preference

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just that they make it harder to get work done, they make it harder to collaborate too (SHOCK HORROR, that can't be true, the whole reason people do it is for collaboration, right?)

When you need to collaborate with a colleague, this is the typical process:

In individual or 2-up offices:

• You go poke your head around the corner of your colleague's office door.
• You have a quick discussion about the problem
• You possibly pull in one other guy who's relevant
• Because your meeting contained a small number of people, you come up with a solution, and you go back to efficiently doing work

In an open office:

• You go have a quiet discussion at someone's desk
• You need to pull someone in, and realize that you now need to go to a conference room to discuss it
• All the conference rooms are full, so you need to schedule a time
• You invite a bunch of extra people, because you *might* need them, and if you don't have them there, then you might have wasted a bunch of extra time, and have to schedule another meeting
• Your meeting happens 4 hours later than it otherwise would, and now involves a bunch more people, which reduces the productivity of the meeting

Alternative way it might happen in an open office:

• You go have a quiet discussion at someone's desk
• You need to pull someone in, so you pull them over, and continue your discussion
• You're now distracting a bunch of people around you, and stopping them working effectively
• Someone overhears something out of context, and interjects, derailing the discussion
• Everything spirals into an unproductive mess

Final alternative way this might happen in an open office:

• You sit at your desk and think "wow, it'll be really annoying to have to go and discuss this, because one of the above scenarios is going to happen"
• You decide you'll just hack something in, and not collaborate at all

Open offices are just not good places to collaborate at all.

It's a tradeoff, oriented toward management

[davecb]

When my job is mostly tech lead, a small open office with dev, ops and qa adjacent is wonderfull: you get "small office telepathy".

When I'm trying to drill down and find a subtle bug, its a consant clamor of "oooh, shiny!"

Re:HPE != HP Enterprise

[BiggerIsBetter]

It's not an IT term. It's just some douche trying to coin a phrase and get noticed, " As I outlined in my HPE article, executives and high-performance employees tend to optimize against completely different trade and life principles -- they generally have very different views of the world.".

I shit Sherlock

[crmarvin42]

Open offices have NEVER been about productivity. They've been about lower cost per employee, and making sure you can "keep an eye" on your less productive employees. The cost on everyone else is someone else's cost center and so doesn't matter.

Re:Bias from personal preference

[wafflemonger]

The boss and the manager can also close the door to their office when it gets too noisy.

Re:Bias from personal preference

[Grishnakh]

In America, that won't work; someone will sue for sexual harassment or something, or someone else will complain because their religion forbids it, etc.

In Taiwan, you don't have people happy to sue for harassment, and you don't have conservative religious nuts.

Re:Again with the incredibly obvious

[cowdung]

It's weird how it's a surprise that such an obviously terrible idea is discovered to be a terrible idea.

Surprise or not, it's the orthodoxy and it needs challenged.

It was challenged.. like 30 years ago.. in Tom DeMarco's book "Peopleware"