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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."
Everyone hates open offices. Or they are the most efficient way to work. It depends on who writes the article and who is running the survey.
I've worked in open spaces my entire life. I'm one of those so-called HPEs. I don't give a shit. If its too loud, either ask people to be quiet or put on headphones for the whole 5 minutes its noisy.
Even at a Major Social Media Company, the noise was never bad for more than a few minutes when some brogrammer fools wanted to laugh about some stupid shit before they finally went to get a coffee and leave me in peace.
Sounds like I don't like open spaces, eh? I do. I prefer them.
It's weird how it's a surprise that such an obviously terrible idea is discovered to be a terrible idea.
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 find myself largely immune to the hustle and bustle of our open office plan. While most require noise-canceling headphones in order to get anything accomplished, it actually energizes me more than inhibits me.
As someone who went to middle school in one of the Open Classroom schools of the 1970s which had not yet moved to completely physical partitions between rooms, I hypothesize this may have a lot to do with it. I was trained for 4+ years on how to operate with many noise distractions.
Than in an "open" office.
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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.
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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.
It was only when I read the article the third time that I clued in they weren't talking about HP Enterprise employees, but rather High Performance Employees (HPE).
Hate it when IT re-uses acronyms to mean something else.
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It doesn't even have to be an open office - those rooms with glass doors may look nice, but it's a PITA whenever a secretary in high heels walks by. Managers shouldn't be astonished that there are Dilbert cartoons.
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.
Noise? What is this noise thing you speak of? I don't hear any noise...
This has been known for a long time (with studies to back it up). It's a bit puzzling that open concept is still considered "hip" or novel when they've been around for at least 15 years now. AFAIK the real reason they were foisted on us was to save companies money by not having to invest in as much furniture (cube walls) or physical structures (physical walls). Another "benefit" was that it made the panopticon approach of management easier.
>> 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.
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.
No matter where you go, there you are. So Enjoy it.
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.
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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".
Do Low performance employees also find the office distracting?
Do they blame it?
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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!"
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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.
HPE here. This is why I work from home, alone.
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Everybody is different and thinks and work differently. Any "always do X" rule for work or project management should be taken with a grain of salt.
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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.
1. place those 10x devs in rooms WITHOUT the opposite sex (because we are talking about the 10x, right? It's such a better name than HPE...)
2. remove all forms of entertainment of that office (from consoles to rubik cubes, ban personal mementos in the office desk, personal phones, etc etc)
3. invest in some active noise cancelling gear for them for good measure
4. get a full-time psychologist to assess those with actual asperger's on the office, so they get special needs taken care of
And to the 4% that answered no to "distracting offices" but answered yes to "need private space" (58% - 54%), get them an individual office or cubicle and also invest in some active noise cancelling. If they are 10x and manage to be this consistent, THEY DESERVE IT. Being in such a group means they get to be well performant and still not entire douches. All they want is to procrastinate without the alt-tabbing gimmicks they need to keep making themselves look workaholic (like ALL OF US), and trust me, they will be more productive without having to resort to those. They won't stop being 10x because you gave them more privacy: they will still get the work done if pressure is still applied with non-presential peer pressure (e.g. emails, issue trackers...).
Since teams and environments are not the same, why not promote the process of output measurement and A/B testing?
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.
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... they reduce office costs. The move from walled offices to cubicles to industrial open spaces was not done because productivity increased. It was done because each step was cheaper to build and much easier (and cheaper) to modify than the previous step.
When you've worked in a bullpen, the open office looks like heaven.
If I'm writing code or a query, I want peace and quiet. I'm If I'm troubleshooting I want people I can tell "hey, you seen this before"? Or "hey, did you do something to the blahblah server?"Problem is when you do both, which I do. I'm stuck in an open layout and mostly just grit my teeth and work slower when I'm doing things that require lots of concentration.
Sure, they don't completely eliminate talking and other noises but they're good enough. If they're not, you're being too picky and aren't as high performant as you think you are.
Discussions such as these are based on the false assumption that productivity, employee retention, and cost drive office layout shemes. Instead, the purpose is for executives to be seen as superior to the regular employees, *in particular* the high performance individual contributors. HPE's are to be shown off and bragged about like one's fine art collection but must be perceived as a servant, or better yet, an inanimate object. When an executive is hosting guests, his importance must be perceived to be as high as possible, and this means having an office that's seen to have far more comfort, luxury, and exclusivity than everyone else. If productivity is reduced, so be it, since the executive will have long since collected his bonus and moved on to the next company.
I think the minority has the "answer", being 42... percent.
Seriously, it's a complex subject because
different kinds of projects require different environment.
different kinds of people require different environments.
different kinds of work require different environments.
And unfortunately offices are associated with status so some people who don't care about quiet are going to require an office if others are getting offices.
Plus offices are more expensive and even cubes cost about $5k the last time I saw costs 5 years ago. Crazy eh? So offices must cost even more to provision at a big company.
My last job, we had "bubblers" and and they really did cut down on background noise a lot. For highly collaborative projects, we went to the collaborative floor and worked in rooms with 30-40 people. Noisy, fast access to every team on the project.
For less collaborative projects, we worked in our own area and had meetings in one of the 8 tiny meeting rooms on the floor or one of the 2 big meeting rooms. The bigger rooms required formall booking while the smaller ones did not.
Our walls were high enough for privacy but didn't go to the cieling.
Working from home was an option but I never really got used to it. I'd do 1 day out of 10 at most.
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’cause it stands in the way of fat executive bonuses, and those guys already have a closed office.
Wow. Which location? I used to work there, and had a nice big cubicle (9x9 I think, or was it 8x9?). Towards the end of my stay though, they moved me into a "compressed cubicle (6x9 I think, with the entrance to the back of the seated inhabitant). It sucked. I'm guessing things have gone even farther downhill since I left...
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Headphones...
I work in a huge cube farm with low walls. I can literally see 50+ people sitting in their offices while I sit in mine. The ONLY way I can work is with my over the ear, noise blocking headphones... It's either that or I am forever getting distracted by multiple conversations, loud typists and an argument or two. At least they banned personal audio equipment unless it plays though headphones and nobody is allowed speakers for their computers (Not that you'd have room for them on the tiny desks they gave me)....
But, if noise is the worse thing about your job (like it is for me) count yourself lucky (and I do).
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I'm one of those HPE who often yells "fucking Microsoft".
I completely agree w/ the open office plan being very distracting; however, I do notice being especially effective at my local Starbuck. Just like how I can't focus on work at home with my wife biding for my time, I also can't stand "co-workers" stopping by every 15 minutes to get help. Essentially, the open office helps pull highly effective people down, not only in effectiveness, but to a level beneath them. Typically it starts off fine, as word hasn't gotten out that you're a high performer, but then you may have to start hiding at home to get you work done or even move on to another company to escape the shit storm.
Of course this is great for the non performers! They get to utilize your assets and present that work as their own. Heck, maybe even get promoted and promote open offices design.
This 58% can't be believed. I started doing the survey this is based on and aborted half way. The question on what may be wrong with your work space was compulsory but the only allowable options were of problems. There was no "none of the above option" and I am happy with my work space. So you either lie and make up some problem that doesn't exist just to finish the survey or else you abort it: so only those with complaints will finish the survey.
Maybe they should ask low performance employees what they need!
High performance employees clearly already have what they need.
I am an older tech guy. I remember reading a book in the 1970's that had a chapter addressing programmer productivity and studies that had been done. All showed that the best environment for programmers were small offices with doors that closed and phones that could be muted. Many, many studies since then have reconfirmed this but the trend for offices has been open space which is shown to reduce productivity. The reason for the office space trend is, of course cost. Later we came up with the rationale that these open offices helped collaboration. Studies over the last few years show that that isn't true either. Most folks in these environments have their headphones on and people talking are asked to go elsewhere. And, developers tend to collaborate over IM-type products as it allows sharing code and can be persistent so folks who were at some meeting can come back and pick up the thread.
It is like the idea you are more productive when you multi-task. Every single study shows this simply isn't true but folks want to believe it. Myths that make us feel good die hard.
It simply comes down to your social comfort levels. For extroverted people, working in teams and an open space make great sense. For the introverts, we want to left the fuck alone. We don't need a "team", we're to the right of the curve and adding "help" just slows us down. All this study shows is the correlation that introverts are the HPEs.
Open offices are hell. We often forget that cubicles were invented, to the cheers of office workers everywhere, because they made it possible to eliminate many of the worst aspects of the open office layout that was standard before their invention.
Sounds great
Nothing about that sounds great.
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