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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."
When I'm in the office I can't hear myself think, and anyone I'm on the phone with hears everyone around me. It loses us customers as they believe it wholly unprofessional. My employer has an open layout approach and no white noise along with no noise cancelling headsets, so all my customers and I hear is everyone around me. And some of these assholes take pride in being loud("you're telling me to change who I am!"). Luckily, I work from home or on the road the majority of the time, so I don't have to deal with it, but, ultimately, fuck open layouts. Give me offices, or at least tall cubes.
I'm not selling anything, and loud office spaces make it hard to get work done. I end up trying to work from home as much as possible, even when it is theoretically less efficient.
If they want to pack us in like sardines, fine, but: 1) Make cube walls go up to the ceiling, and give us doors and that both of these are reasonably sound-proof, 2) Make sure there is adequate parking for the number of employees you intend to pack in, 3) Make sure there are adequate restrooms for the number of employees you intend to pack in, and that those restrooms are cleaned frequently (ideally by same-gender janitor, so they don't shut down for 15 minutes every 15 minutes), 4) Make sure HVAC is capable of cooling an office with thousands of employees, thousands of computers, inbound sunlight, etc.
At one moment, it feels like such a hip environment, bustling with easy communication and collaboration, innovation and headphones just behind every monitor.
How many employees have ever said this? Open spaces are cheaper per sq ft and allow easier monitoring of personnel, but that doesn't sound good in a pro/con discussion.
I worked for a firm that did the open space thing. Devs listening to ColdPlay or Neutral Milk Hotel at full volume is one thing, where I just used earphones. Other people running around popping each other with Nerf guns, missing, and hitting other people who were trying to concentrate due to a sprint was another. The fact that if you got up and went for a break, there would be someone sitting at your computer talking with someone didn't help either. Especially the jackasses who kept trying random passwords on any machine they sat at, locking someone out for 20+ minutes.
Glad I moved on from that environment. Every open area workplace I've been at was a waste of time, with nothing getting done.
>> What if the open office is causing retention problems
That's part of the design, especially in cases where established corporations move to open offices (sometimes coupled with a move "downtown"). The idea is to flush the older, more expensive workers out without actually creating an age-ist environment that would get the company sued.
>> affecting the quality of our end products?
Let me know when you see "quality" as a top goal of a software group.
>> executives and high-performance employees tend to optimize against completely different trade and life principles
Not necessarily true. Remember that Superbowl commercial where some douche walks through an open office and then goes into his private office? In that respect, many executives and HPEs (not HPVs - that's an STD) are similar.
>> 54% of HPEs find their office environment "too distracting."
I actually like open offices more than most people, but I do find myself bitching that I'm distracted and then taking a long walk or coffee break I didn't really need, so thanks everyone else for creating the perception that bugging out of the open office for extended periods is cool.
It's no surprise that chatty marketing types, who are promoting their companies as cool places to work, show off their open office plan marketing areas.
After three remodels at my last office, we finally decided on (nearly) floor to ceiling cubicle walls. It was quieter than a library, it was glorious to work there, sound was trapped really well. Moving to an open office plan in another group on the other side of the floor, I got stuck next to some very chatty employees, my productivity plummeted to about 15% of what it was before.
I think open office plans are great for marketing types, maybe some of the sales people, even management, but for engineers it's really truly awful. Most of the engineers at my new company have bought noise canceling headphones at $300 a pop. I get more done at home by a country mile.
moox. for a new generation.
I'm a cyber defense analyst for my organization. I work in a bull pen style office. I type away most of the day, taking a few breaks throughout for refreshments, coffee, read the latest on slashdot, etc... but mostly I work. I come to work to well... work. The non-technical workers, are the most unproductive and distracting people in my vicinity... especially the managers in the offices that surround my bull pen area and even more so the managers that don't understand what I do at all.
I had a trash can behind my desk for the longest time - a community trash can - that was the responsibility of the pen workers to empty on a daily basis. The manager in the office right behind me, a completely toxic dumb ass that should be fired, had a daily ritual around 3 pm every day where he would empty his office's personal trash can into the community trash can. Since I'm the closest employee to said trash can and he has no idea about or respect for what I do for the organization, to him it was my job to take it out, every day. Usually by 3 pm, I'm in some coding nirvana, banging out some slick new tool in python or whatnot... IE: not to be disturbed. But every day at 3 pm, that bastard would come to me and tell me that he needed me to drop what I was doing and take out the trash immediately.
This was until one day when he couldn't find me because I was in a classified, closed door, need-to-know video conference about my organization's cyber defense posture with several other sites. Said manager couldn't find me and apparently asked around as to where I was. He finally tracked me down, barged into the conference room without proper clearance, need-to-know, etc... and while on the video conference screen... visible to the remote ends... he told me that I needed to leave that meeting right away to take out the trash.
I gladly told him ok, went and grabbed the entire trash can, dumped the ENTIRE trash can into the dumpster outside, and returned to my meeting.
He was confused about the lack of trash can for a few days. Then brought up that I must have hidden the trash can. Talked to my manager who defended me and then threw in the fact that the dumb ass barged in on a meeting that he wasn't allowed to be in to badger his top worker for no apparent reason. After leveraging the fact that my manager could report him to HR for his security violation, the dumb ass now hasn't even uttered a word to me. He takes out his own trash.
Now if I could only get rid of the people around me that talk too loud on their phones, play music on speakers instead of head phones, and cause a variety of other distractions... perhaps I could get some more work done so I can go home for the day and spend time with my family.
Upper management at my office read whatever trendy report that started this whole open office debacle and decided that it would be the greatest thing ever. They went whole hog and got the long single desks with itty bitty dividers between them and 'chairs' that look like overgrown foot stools. Everyone in the office absolutely HATES the new floor plan. They went from moderate sized half-wall cubicals that provided a bit of privacy to a four foot desk with a foot high dividers. Not only is there almost no place to put anything (the computer and phone take up 75% of the desk) there's absolutely zero privacy. When they first proposed the idea they pretended to ask for employee input (which was overwhelmingly negative) but we all knew it was a farce since they already had all the new desks ordered and stored away.
Thankfully I'm in a locked and secure lab, so when they came around to see if they could put the new desks in the lab we sent them packing (the same morons wanted to rip out our network closet and turn it into a managers office). Now everyone suddenly wants to be on our team just to be back in a cubical. I seriously think that I would have looked for a new job if I was forced into one of those open desks.
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
This is my experience with open offices.