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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.