If I were king for a day, I would ban open-plan offices

September 13, 2014 7:32 AM

"There is nowhere to have a quiet chat – if a channel controller wants to discuss a commission, they must first book time in a glass-walled meeting room named after some long-gone BBC character – the Del Boy or Wilfred Pickles suite or something. The Mr Pastry Suite or the Basil Fawlty Snack Bar would have been no more likely to produce creative ideas, but at least it might have been fun getting the summons." (SLGuardian)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (62 comments total)

Hah, you can read my comments about this here.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 7:44 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

Everybody likes to complain about cubes, but if it wasn't for them, my coworkers and I would have a lot less fun throwing pens, dimes, and hardware at each other. Take the walls away and everyone gains the ability to detect an attack.
posted by TrialByMedia at 7:55 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

I hate this type of layout. Until recently I was working at a place with an open floor plan and cleverly named meeting spaces. "What? I have a meeting in Adam 12 (actual name) in 5 minutes? Where the hell is Adam 12? Will Kent McCord be there?"
posted by MikeMc at 7:58 AM on September 13, 2014

Not to mention those times that an clumsy spill on the slacks would be so convenient to just close the door, pull them off and to a quick napkin press on each side to dry them out then a few big waves in the air to finish off the dry. So embarrassing when that knocks the knick knacks off the art directors monitor and whacks a couple folks trying to concentrate across the old door on sawhorse tables. And everyone stand up an applauds.
posted by sammyo at 7:59 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

At my previous workplace, the idiotic management imposed an "open plan office" on us (software developers). The stated idea was to increase collaboration, but it was pretty obvious that the real goal was to increase surveillance. The walls were short, managers were seated so that one of them had a view of pretty much every developer's monitor, client services was seated one row over.

It was a godsend for the incompetent. Their tactic became "wave frantically to the person who works across the half-height wall, and ask them questions" any time something requiring knowledge arose. What did not happen was any "cross-team collaboration," because usually there's very little that one team has to say to another. What does a salesman whose job consists of convincing people to give us money have to tell me, when my job consists of designing a JSON service payload to allow our apps to talk to each other? He needs to shout (apparently) on telephones at people in Missoula. I need to concentrate quietly for a few hours.

The CEO came by one day and asked me why my desk was so messy. It had a coffee mug, a squeezable stress ball, a mouse pad, two monitors and a keyboard on it, along with about a half dozen books related to my job (standing neatly inside book-ends), along with a piece of paper on which I was diagramming relationships between various objects inside the system. I looked at him blankly and said: "Everything on my desk is related to my work. My mug is for drinking things. My stress ball helps me because I fidget when I'm thinking. My computer equipment is self-explanatory. The papers are my work at the moment. The books are related to that."

He asked me—seriously—"What do you use books for?"
posted by sonic meat machine at 8:00 AM on September 13, 2014 [65 favorites]

Open plan offices seem especially awful for the 1/5 people who are highly sensitive to stimulus.

But forget alienating a large chunk of your workforce: I fail to see how you can discretely incorporate reasonable accommodations for disability into open plan offices. Here's hoping that some lawsuit wipes this idiocy off the map once and for all.
posted by Skwirl at 8:11 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

I fail to see how you can discretely incorporate reasonable accommodations for disability into open plan offices.

I hate hate hate open plan offices, but this isn't an objection I've heard before. What kind of thing did you have in mind?
posted by asterix at 8:19 AM on September 13, 2014

I'm clearly an outlier but I love open plan offices. I work on a very large team and it helps us enormously with collaboration. All the management also sit with us in the same open plan area with the same desks.
posted by Joh at 8:27 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

One of last times I worked in a small, open pit set up it was extremely distressing. Not only was there the distraction of multiple conversations and activities going on at the same time, you had the pleasure of actually witnessing it when people were pulling out their knives to stab each other in the back. At least with cubicles your eyes are shielded somewhat.

Headphones are a blessing in those open environments if management allows them.
posted by fuse theorem at 8:28 AM on September 13, 2014

The last place I worked that had short-wall cubes, I was parked for a time across an aisle from some marketing guy who used speakerphone for every call. One day, I went over and asked him if he had to do that, because it interfered with my work. He said "I'm multitasking." i think he had Solitaire on his monitor. Later, one of his marketing colleagues thanked me, and said they'd been complaining about his habits forever.

Now I have an office, but the walls may as well be speaker cloth for all the privacy they give. I can't wait to retire.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:30 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

I actually find that the open layout does increase collaboration. I appear to be one of its rare fans.
posted by jpe at 8:33 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ain't nothing wrong with leaving a charged capacitor on a desk when the occupant is away, TrialByMedia, walls don't stop that one.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:35 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

I work in sales, and in my old office there was an ongoing and longstanding tradition of stressball warfare. Our corporate marketing team literally sent bags of these things, ostensibly for distribution to our clients. No one was safe in the pit. I personally witnessed at least 2 laptops permanently decommissioned through water/soda/coffee explosions. War is heck.
posted by stinkfoot at 8:36 AM on September 13, 2014

They can't be that bad, Project Arcturus was successful using an open office plan.
posted by 445supermag at 8:37 AM on September 13, 2014

I actually find that the open layout does increase collaboration. I appear to be one of its rare fans.

What is your job? I ask this because, in my office, the sales and business people did think it improved collaboration because they could come over and interrupt me with questions when they felt like it. For them, this was "collaboration." For me, this was "destroying the short-term memory of the complex problem I am attempting to solve so that I will have to think about it for an additional half hour."
posted by sonic meat machine at 8:39 AM on September 13, 2014 [54 favorites]

Yeah, my internal response to "it helps collaboration" is generally "why have we assumed collaboration is good?"
posted by penduluum at 8:45 AM on September 13, 2014 [13 favorites]

I've worked both in open plan and in a more traditional 4 person offices and in a cubicle (albeit briefly, when spending a couple of weeks at an overseas office).

The open plan ones were fine, probably because it wasn't an excuse for management to peer over my shoulder - they were positioned in their own separate area in one place and in their own offices in another. There was plenty of useful interaction between departments and reasonable morale - shared jokes etc. Overall, I get more distractions in my current two-person office than any of the other places, but that's due to the nature of the job and the distinct shortage of resources.

Open plan can work. Doesn't mean that it actually does, most of the time.
posted by YAMWAK at 8:45 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

they could come over and interrupt me with questions when they felt like it. For them, this was "collaboration." For me, this was "destroying the short-term memory of the complex problem I am attempting to solve so that I will have to think about it for an additional half hour."

Yep, this has been my experience too. I've worked in an office, a cube, and now in an open floor plan. In the open floor plan, I get interrupted with a lot of "collaboration opportunities" that are really just someone wanting me to look something up that they could look up for themselves. I catch myself doing it too, because it's just so easy to ask my coworker, but now I've badly distracted him from whatever he's doing. And in ten minutes he'll do the same thing to me.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:46 AM on September 13, 2014 [4 favorites]

What is your job?

I'm in tax. I also work with salesy people and tend to answer more than I ask, but that doesn't really bother me all that much. I actually sort of like it, because it's an opportunity to come up witth fun ideas.
posted by jpe at 8:52 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm in tax. I also work with salesy people and tend to answer more than I ask, but that doesn't really bother me all that much. I actually sort of like it, because it's an opportunity to come up witth fun ideas.

This makes sense. You likely work on a "client" basis, where you work on taxes for a particular client or account, right? Most likely, there's a pretty well-defined process for taking a client from sign-on to complete. This is less sensitive to interruption than a "flow"-based task, where you are given something very amorphous and need to find a solution, which can take hours or days of thought and can be completely derailed by interruption.

The distinction between these two types of work is something that a lot of managers and business-people don't understand: "On Saturdays, around 2 PM, our largest client's workflow stops working and begins working again on Monday morning at 10 AM" is a very different problem statement than "Our client needs this aspect of the business process done for them by next Friday."
posted by sonic meat machine at 8:58 AM on September 13, 2014 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I could see where with the right mix of people doing the right mix of jobs, open plan offices would be ideal.

The problem comes when they're adopted without due consideration of the people and jobs.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:02 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

That's well put, sonic meat machine.
posted by jpe at 9:04 AM on September 13, 2014

I have to make a lot of phone calls about confidential personnel issues (which legally need to be private) and about contracting/money issues with subcontractors (which aren't precisely confidential but also aren't helped by having an audience). The only way I could do that in an open plan office would be to reroute all the calls to my cell and walk outside (or to an enclosed meeting room) for every call, which in turn would be a pain because of not having access to my computer. It's not unsolvable but not ideal either, and I wonder how people manage in those situations.

For a manager, I can see the appeal of looking out across your workers like you do on a factory floor, and having "oversight" be a literal rather than metaphorical term. Whether or not it is good for the organization is less obvious, though.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:19 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Where I'm working now is mostly open office. The days I have meetings, I go in. The days I need to do work that requires a couple of hours without interruptions I stay home. I'm not the only one.
posted by Spumante at 9:25 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

"why have we assumed collaboration is good?"

Because it very often is? At least in my experience in my field of science. Some of the best experimental ideas my group has had have been developed over morning coffee break. Certainly everyone needs time on their own to digest data, but it's invaluable to know my coworkers experiences with different experimental setups. Often they'll ask about some data point that was being ignored or assumed and it will turn out that addressing that solves some block (or sadly means a positive result was a fluke, boo.

I'm not saying I love open offices, but I think any scientist will argue that coffee breaks and beer hours often provide as many if not more experimental breakthroughs than all the meetings and online collaboration software you can schedule.
posted by maryr at 9:26 AM on September 13, 2014 [4 favorites]

"why have we assumed collaboration is good?"

I work in software development in a team of about twenty and we really couldn't do our jobs (the way we do them) without almost constant collaboration. We're pretty much always moving chairs around to sit together to work things out or pair-program or fight our way through a knotty problem. Email, chat or phone are so low-bandwith compared with the communication throughput that you get from sitting next to someone.
posted by octothorpe at 9:37 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

First sentence of the article:

"An open-plan office is a way of telling you that you don’t matter." Yep.

And if you hear business-speak terms like "collaboration," just walk away....
posted by CrowGoat at 9:50 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

Whenever I interview, I always ask to see where I'm going to be working. If it's in an open office plan, that's a deal breaker. My work (programming) involves long periods of buckled down concentration to get shit done. In order for that to happen, I need to be in an environment that is actually conducive to that, as opposed to one where I'm going to be interrupted constantly, often for reasons which have nothing to do with collaboration.

I think more proponents of open offices need to see and give some thought to this. Not all interaction is good. If you really want to increase collaboration among your staff members, create spaces in addition to individual work spaces for folks to be able to do that. You know, like meeting rooms. (There's a concept!)

Another thing I'll throw into the discussion is that, anecdotally, the folks I see who like open office plans tend to be extroverts who have a high need for interaction with others. The open office plan doesn't necessarily make them more productive. Often quite the opposite. I get the impression that they may feel more productive because that "high interaction" need is being satisfied.
posted by jazzbaby at 9:59 AM on September 13, 2014 [26 favorites]

He asked me—seriously—"What do you use books for?"

I sincerely hope you immediately picked one up and hit him upside the head with it.
posted by sexyrobot at 10:04 AM on September 13, 2014 [6 favorites]

I would hate open plan. I already dislike cubicles. We have pretty high cubicle walls, but per the usual all the desks are set up so that your back is always to the opening. You do feel like you're being surveilled, but also I'm constantly being startled when I am working. I have a mirror, and have developed a pretty good sense of when people are passing by, but honestly, when I am working intently, I really don't want to have someone scare the shit out of me with a friendly "whatcha doin'"? When I want to collaborate, I stand up, go find the person I need and talk to them. It's a nice break for me, actually. I'm good with calls or emails.

Hollering across a room with no walls, no relief from work drudgery and no privacy is my idea of hell. I've already worked in a call center, I don't need to be in a place like that again.
posted by emjaybee at 10:06 AM on September 13, 2014 [6 favorites]

I've only ever worked in an open plan office. As long as nobody has to be on the phone all day it's alright
posted by MartinWisse at 10:19 AM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

I always want to say I love open-plan offices, but I'm not sure I'm talking about the same thing. I definitely would not want to work in the photo in the article.

My "office" is currently two double-wide trailers stacked in a trailer complex with everyone else's trailers like an apartment block. It varies; we're nomadic by project with a few permanent locations. The thing is, we don't sit in one place all day, so it isn't the same as say, a programmer.

A typical work flow for a technican or engineer would be getting assigned a job. They would have to get with the other organizations on the same job, discuss the objective, research requirements, develop an individual plan of action, hold meetings, stage all their materials, and support the work team. All of this is mostly autonomous and involves going to where other people are, using our trailer as a base.

I could, I suppose, divide up my trailers so each person had a cube to work out of. For one, that would take a lot of real estate for desks that are frequently empty. More importantly, though, having the trailer set up as a community space with several desk/computer workstations, a "round table" area, a quiet area, etc. seems to encourage organic mentoring of the junior technicians by the senior ones and supervisors, and more of a team approach.

Everyone can overhear when you're about to make a big mistake and let you know. Everyone can hear the production yahoo giving you grief and help squash that shit. Under-employed-at-the-moment people jump in when a need arises without having to be called and asked. Every day I learn something applicable to my job because someone else is in a situation I haven't been in yet. The slacker can't hide in his cube, and it isn't the supervisor he wants to hide from, it's his peers.

Maybe the key is density, and not being chained to the chair all day by the nature of the job.
posted by ctmf at 10:19 AM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

I seem to recall that Tom DeMarco had a lot to say about open-plan offices in “Peopleware”, back in the late 80s.

Whether or not open-plan can work, IME, depends on the environment at work. Small teams used to collaboration, able to organize their own workspace, maybe. Large corporate barns full of rows of desks, with the managers as overseers, not so much.

The worst ones I’ve seen are in some of the big financial places in London: no cubicles, just whole office floors filled with parallel rows of desks, each row having a dozen or more seats. I simply cannot imagine working in a place like that.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 10:28 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

Open plan offices are simple: essentially they privilege collaboration over focus. Whether that's a good tradeoff depends on the needs of the job. Personally I think they're terrible for software development because engineers need to be able to focus to get anything done. The solution I've seen work is "quiet rooms": you turn over one meeting room for people who want to focus, and declare it uninterruptible space.

We've know this since Peopleware, yeah. The reason open-concept persists is because it is cheap and easy to reconfigure, and yes, bosses like to be able to see everyone.

A side anecdote, because the article is about the BBC. I had a meeting, years ago, with then-BBC head Mark Thompson. The BBC had just done its much-ballyhoed physical redesign, and my company was considering using the same firm for ours. I got toured around by people waxing rhapsodic about how the new design reflected BBC values around transparency and democracy and flatness of hierarchy, and then brought into Thompson's physical workspace, which was open plan, shared with aides and assistants and so forth. They pointed me proudly towards his neat little nook in the corner, and then ushered me into the boardroom ... which he had totally coopted as a personal office, complete with desktop computer plus peripherals, all set up on the boardroom table as though it were a personal desk. Personal art on the walls, an Aeron, desktop lamp, lolol. I had difficulty keeping a straight face. (And yes in the end my org did the same kind of redesign, and had much the same result.)
posted by Susan PG at 10:30 AM on September 13, 2014 [20 favorites]

I've only worked in cubicles twice in my life, in two different jobs that totaled less than a year, combined. I hated it. I love being able to close my office door.

Back in my days in strategic communication consulting, we courted a Very Well Known Client (VWKC) who had a major branch office in the country where I lived. The entire corporation had recently decided to do away not just with cubicles, but any kind of personal space at all: there were desks and seating nooks and small meeting rooms, and power outlets everywhere. The idea was that people would be more likely to actually move around and engage with other people in the company if they didn't have a fixed location.

This was about a dozen years ago, so while cell phones and wireless Internet and laptops certainly existed, they were all a lot clunkier than they are now. We wasted so much time waiting around while the people we were meeting with tried to track down colleagues they wanted to bring into the conversation, but whom they couldn't find easily. Also wandering around in search of a relatively private seating area large enough for all of us but with some level of privacy. It was hellish.

I had honest-to-god nightmares about that place for a week after every visit. Thankfully, we didn't get the contract, so after the half dozen courtship trips, I never had to go back.
posted by Superplin at 10:44 AM on September 13, 2014 [4 favorites]

"why have we assumed collaboration is good?"

Because it very often is? At least in my experience in my field of science.

The problem with open offices and collaboration is sort of the difference between going camping for the weekend and being part of a hunter gatherer tribe. One is break, a diversion and can be lots of fun, refocusing ones self and allow people to come together, but kind of requires proper preparation so that you can actually live comfortably during your foray into the woods. The other is a lifestyle choice that you probably don't get to make or prepare for and is an uninterrupted grind from the moment you come to age until you die, probably at a relatively young age.

Collaboration is great when you've got some ideas and don't know where to turn next, but when you are just trying to sift through your data, trying to figure out what you're dealing with. Nothing about that is helped by having someone stand behind you and offer his pet theory that requires an antibody that binds tighter than streptavidin and biotin and violates the Einstein Stokes law in a big way.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 11:13 AM on September 13, 2014 [15 favorites]

In the 70s, there was a wave of "open classroom" architecture schools, with no walls, so that students and teachers could collaborate and combine in groups at will. I student taught in a building that was designed for that. It had tall "temporary" dividing walls and bookshelves that had been erected to form ad hoc walls so that the classrooms could go back to the standard "egg crate" arrangement. Two of the teachers did take down one partition between the classrooms for a special collaborative project they did once a year, but then they put it back up.

It was terribly noisy. Classrooms are already "open plan" as it is, with lots of small people working in the same space, and making them function even when they're enclosed requires solid management skills. The only time teachers can get any "thinking & planning" work done in them is when the kids aren't there.

Some years later, I heard they had redesigned the building. Yeah, they built enclosed classrooms.

We're looking into building a new middle school where I teach now, and the teachers had to read a book over the summer that was full of "innovative" ideas for schools. It was a book that was designed by architects, so it was full of old ideas that we know don't work and was, as a book, very badly designed and almost unreadable. I'm hoping I can retire before the new building is occupied.
posted by Peach at 11:47 AM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

We had short cubicles at the company building before this one, and it was kind of annoying because I ended up next to sales when I needed quiet to concentrate. In the new building, it is fully open plan but I don't mind it, because it is larger, we are in the quietest corner, and sales is at the opposite end of the L shape. Also, I work from home 3 days a week, so when I do go to the office I want to interact with people.

It's very situation (and person) dependent.
posted by tavella at 12:35 PM on September 13, 2014

I'm not sure what I want. I hate open plan because of the interruptions and prying, I hate cubicles because of the noise pollution, I'm not sure about offices but suspect they'd quickly feel isolating, and I hate working from home because I don't get any work done.

Possibly what I want is a combination of open-plan regular seating plus enough closed-door offices that I can work from one when I need to focus. But that means having two desks (or at least 1.5 desks) for every member of staff, and nobody's going to swing for that.
posted by bonaldi at 1:06 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

> I work in software development in a team of about twenty and we really couldn't do our jobs (the way we do them) without almost constant collaboration. We're pretty much always moving chairs around to sit together to work things out or pair-program or fight our way through a knotty problem. Email, chat or phone are so low-bandwith compared with the communication throughput that you get from sitting next to someone.

I've been in software development and it seems like a nightmare to me. Listening to 20 people talk all day? Do you really collaborate with all of them at the same time? What exactly do you do when three people are chatting about something that's interesting to you but not relevant to your work?

Interruptions are well-known to be devastating to your productivity. How do you get work done?

Email and chat are really exceptional tools for collaboration, precisely because you have to formulate your questions precisely. It's very often that I'll be puzzled on something, start to formulate the question as a chat, start to do research on parts of it, change the question, and eventually figure the answer out and delete the question before ever asking it - or even post the question and answer at the same time.

As a strong problem-solver, I tend to get a lot of questions from people when I'm working in a place where the "barrier to interruption" is small. Often I get repeated, successive questions. "X?" "Did you google Y?" "OK, I got to this article but...?" "Did you look up what this key word Z means?" "OK, but...?" "The article really does have the information, look here..." Basically, my work is stopped over this period because the 5 minutes between questions are not enough time for me to get back to where I was.

People should learn to do their own research and only bother their colleagues when they are honestly stuck. Barriers to interruption are good, not bad. If your work is invulnerable to repeated interruptions, then it isn't very difficult work.

The place I work now there is no office. I work from home, and I have Skype open on a laptop all day. When I need to talk to people, we just turn on the Skype and go - happens many times a day. If I need a long think, which happens fairly often, I just go to "Do Not Disturb".

We also do a lot of code reviews - which work much better in text.

Most of the engineers are much older than the average - it might be that we have less desire or need to ask questions of others because of that.

I should add that my being a super-extrovert makes an open office particularly awful for me - because it's really hard for me not to join in a discussion, and those discussions are going on all day. GOOG was a nightmare for me for this reason...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 1:34 PM on September 13, 2014 [13 favorites]

Open plan is great for Starbucks because of how often people need to take a walk.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 1:42 PM on September 13, 2014

bonaldi:Possibly what I want is a combination of open-plan regular seating plus enough closed-door offices that I can work from one when I need to focus. But that means having two desks (or at least 1.5 desks) for every member of staff, and nobody's going to swing for that.

[Hi bonaldi!]

For (perhaps some similar, some different, reasons) I think I'm pretty much in agreement with this. When you and I worked for the same paper, I found the open plan thing if not invaluable, then certainly extremely useful, when it came to some stuff - editing other peoples' work was always done better when I had people to ask a question of, whether that was a factual clarification, a matter of style or a lengthy debate on this or that point and whether it was bollocks or not, and certainly the process of headline, caption and standfirst writing almost always resulted in a better finished product when it was a collaborative process. And likewise, planning for this week's/next week's/the next few months' worth of issues was eased by everyone being in the open (at least most of the time). But good god, sitting at a desk in an open plan newsroom was a colossal pain in the arse when trying to actually write something substantial - the distractions were just too much when all you wanted/needed is a quiet couple of hours of time uninterrupted by overheard discussions of magazine photoshoot problems or what have you.
posted by Len at 1:50 PM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

above: s/I've been in software development/I've been in software development for three decades and still am/
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 1:53 PM on September 13, 2014

On an unrelated note the Mr Pastry reference gives a remarkably precise estimation of Paxman's age as early to mid 60's.
posted by glasseyes at 3:09 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have noticed in several firms now that managers sufficiently high up the hierarchy, whose primary responsibilities are to communicate and coordinate with their colleagues and peers throughout each day, do not for some reason need to benefit from the "collaboration" they so highly tout, and have private offices with locking doors.
posted by at by at 3:29 PM on September 13, 2014 [24 favorites]

I'm hoping I can retire before the new building is occupied.

Please, if you're at all involved in the design of the new building, stand up to the architects if they start spouting nonsense. If your district is forcing junk on you, that's one thing, but you are really the architect's boss. I'm working with a school district now that's looking at building a new school, and we went on tours of a bunch of other schools in the area with their principals, which was really interesting for me (working in an architecture office) as well as the principal and the teachers of the prospective new school.

Anyway, I've worked in a couple hybrid offices that I thought worked really well, but it may be as much about your co-workers as it is about the design. The places I liked both had low or no cubicle separation, but in both cases the office was divided up into a number of rooms, so you always had your own walls and shelved for stuff you needed and there weren't more than 6 people in your area anyway. I think one reason I may have like both those offices is that I was way in the back both times - the people up front didn't seem to like it as much. What also helped was that the people I worked with at both places were pretty competent. I later worked at a place with an open concept that also tended to hire people that didn't know what they were doing, and it was the worst job I've ever had. I was constantly peppered with questions by my co-workers, and my boss would basically try to goad me into complaining about it so that he could fire them using that as a reason.
posted by LionIndex at 3:53 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

> The walls were short

Walls!? Luxury! We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank The new hotness at my co. is a studio office plan. What's good for the industrial designers must be good for the mechanical engineers, thus the hardware and finally the software engineers.

Looking around, it seems the renaming open to "studio" (and lots of white desks and floor-to-ceiling glass) is industry-wide. Fucked, fucked industry.
posted by morganw at 4:45 PM on September 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

I fail to see how you can discretely incorporate reasonable accommodations for disability into open plan offices.

I hate hate hate open plan offices, but this isn't an objection I've heard before. What kind of thing did you have in mind?

That's right, in my experience businesses can't make reasonable accommodations for disability if they have open plan offices, and therefore, they don't have to. Or at least, they didn't while I was still working in industry.

The wording was "so far as reasonably practicable" which means they don't have to change anything and it's not their fault.
posted by tel3path at 4:56 PM on September 13, 2014 [3 favorites]

Wen I was working as a secretary for the equities department of a bank, it was an open plan office - and the secretaries were mixed in with the traders, with the managers all in their own offices. I was at a table with eight traders, miles from any other secretary.

I was so profoundly lonely at that job I'm happy they laid me off last year.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:36 PM on September 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

I have a large private office with a door, and so do all of my colleagues. I suppose it's status-y and comfortable, but I find it profoundly counter-productive to good or efficient work. We often end up with multiple people trying to solve the same problem at the same time. Our communication is terrible, and it seems to me that the closed-door office culture helps foster way too much secrecy than is good for the organization. I find it immensely lonely for the most part and am constantly dragging people I'm working closely with in to work with me. I converted a third of it into a consultation space to encourage that.

On the upside I call the shots. I get to decide when and how my office is used by others, so that's colouring my perspective, obviously.

If the work you have to do is entirely yours and never requires input from others, I can see how any kind of open plan wouldn't work for you. My work is pretty much always in shared and group context, so I'd rather work the way the work itself is structured. I think the ideal would be smaller "home base" offices for everyone involved off of a carefully designed, shared space. That way if you need to do something that requires privacy or quiet (like phone calls, writing, recording, or other solitary work) you have somewhere to go and close the door, and you have a place to keep your stuff, but you also have a comfortable place to spread out and work on stuff with a group when that's necessary. For me, there are certain points of the year where everyone I work closely with should be all in one place working on the same stuff, and a space like that is what we need. I've been hacking something like that together with what I've got now, and the results are good so far.

I also think we need different kinds of spaces for different kinds of tasks. I wouldn't model anything exactly on a home, but I think we need something closer to that ethos than a cubicle farm. Soft seating for conversations and brainstorming, some private spaces for quiet work, a big kitchen table for getting down to it with groups of people, that sort of thing. It would take a bit of feeling out, and it would have to be tied to the kind of work the org does. The work has to dictate the space. But I think a modified open plan, a sensitive one that's context-appropriate, could be the best workplace ever.
posted by Hildegarde at 9:06 PM on September 13, 2014 [4 favorites]

I work in software development in a team of about twenty and we really couldn't do our jobs (the way we do them) without almost constant collaboration. We're pretty much always moving chairs around to sit together to work things out or pair-program or fight our way through a knotty problem.

But in my experience (12+ years in the software industry, including significant chunks in cubicles, private offices, and open-plan offices; currently working remotely from a home office), private offices are actually better than open-plan for this type of collaboration.

At Amazon.com for a while I was in a two-person office with a door that closed and whiteboards covering three of the walls. If someone, or even two or three someones, wanted to come over my desk to work or talk together, we could close the door and really go at it. In an open-plan office, you just can't do this unless you have complete disregard for your other co-workers. And there's less whiteboard space.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:25 PM on September 13, 2014 [6 favorites]

I am one of those people who would like open plan if we all could all agree that a certain amount of talkery is okay. I'd love to be able to collaborate with coworkers across the room when I need to ask a quick question or when I have the answer to an overheard dilemma.

But the two people who sit on either side of me demand total silence! They both wear earplugs and give me side-eye even when I mutter softly to myself. I can't even cough or sneeze without being told that I am "disruptive" for cryin' out loud!
posted by a humble nudibranch at 1:35 AM on September 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

I am a college professor. Because the current hotness in academia is "run it like a business", our administrators have been experimenting with "collaborative offices". What this meant for me was 4 of us biologists with our desks lined up in an office. We arranged our L-shaped desks to create some semblance of cubicles, so at least we weren't staring at each other all the time.

I love to collaborate with other faculty, and we do it often. We meet at one of the coffee shops on campus, or if there are a lot of us, we reserve a meeting room. There are two things I do in my office: quiet work (research, class prep, grading) and meeting with students. Neither of those got done in my "collaborative office". I couldn't do the quiet work, because one of my officemates was always talking on the phone or meeting with a student. As for meeting with students, there is FERPA, which basically says that student records should be private--it's really hard to keep someone's GPA or health situation private when you are talking to them in a room with 3 other professors.

The only "collaboration" that occurred in our shared offices were situations like "As you just heard, in direct violation of FERPA, my student in suicidal. Do you know the phone number for counseling?"

Recently, some new office space was built. Most of the new offices are single person offices, but the original plan was for some "collaborative space" for those who wanted it. They sent out a survey, and shockingly, nobody wanted a collaborative office. However, come August, it turned out that "the contractor made a mistake and built the collaborative space anyway", so some faculty who thought they were finally getting their own offices were instead moved into these new "collaborative offices".

When I was sharing that office with three other faculty, our dean, who thought collaboration was so nifty, had an office the same size all to himself. Next door, his two assistants also had an office the same size. And of course the president, all the vice presidents, the provost, all the assistant provosts, and every single associate and assistant dean all had their own offices, as did all of their assistants. One might wonder, if collaborative offices are so great, why the upper level folks never seem to want them for themselves.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:30 AM on September 14, 2014 [9 favorites]

A common theme above, and my own personal experience, is that it depends a lot on what you do, and how you work, and what the people around you are doing.

In my current job I'm in an open plan office. It actually works pretty well for me, because most people are quietly beavering away doing their own thing, but if you happen to want to bounce an idea off someone you can turn around and talk to them (and the unspoken rule is that you try to only do that rarely). Yes, it can be annoying to be the one interrupted, but it can also be useful. And there are always places you can go if you really don't want to be interrupted.

As of last week we've just moved into another area which I think is going to be a lot noisier, with lots of people doing things that have no relationship to what I do. It wont be nearly as unpleasant, and I'm really not looking forward to it. I think I'll be wearing headphones a lot.

I've also worked in my own private office at a number of jobs, and while it's quiet, it can end up being quite isolating. I'm no social butterfly, but in one job I actually spoke to people maybe once at week at most, and I don't think that was particularly healthy.
posted by damonism at 5:06 AM on September 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

All I know is, if I had to work in an office space as pictured in the Paxman piece, it would drive me absolutely batty. Kudos to anyone who can deal with that environment.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:26 AM on September 14, 2014

There are two things I do in my office: quiet work (research, class prep, grading) and meeting with students. Neither of those got done in my "collaborative office".

Well, right, that's what happens when you try to force individual-reliant work into a "collaborative" space. As people (including me) are saying above, the nature of the job has to influence the type of space.

But as a thought exercise: I don't think you guys took the "collaborative" experiment far enough. What if the students had no one true professor, and you were all 4 of you "the professor." You could divvy up lectures between whoever had the time/best presentation/enthusiasm rather than by class section. Students could see whoever happened to be in the office, or specifically choose the professor whose style/personality matched their own best. Grading could be divided up between the four of you and burned out with 1/4 turnaround time. Of course then, the overall student evaluation would have to be some sort of combination of everyone's opinion. Which would require still more collaboration.

I'm no college professor, and I'm not saying it would work. I'm sure like everything, it's more complicated than it seems to an outsider. My point is, you can't just jam people into one room and expect magic. It's a complete system that has to be tweaked all over.
posted by ctmf at 11:06 AM on September 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

And of course the president, all the vice presidents, the provost, all the assistant provosts, and every single associate and assistant dean all had their own offices, as did all of their assistants. One might wonder, if collaborative offices are so great, why the upper level folks never seem to want them for themselves.

A lot of people are saying that, and I can see how that would happen. That's too bad, though. My boss spends about half of his time in the same office as me, with the technicians and engineers, and the other half sharing an office with his counterparts up at the main building. I'd say the first person who has a personal office is his boss, but that's not so much her office as the default place all the meetings with her take place. I guess she's senior enough to not have to run from conference room to conference room all day; we come to her. The director, same thing. The only person I know in my division who has their own "Mine, keep out" office is the HR/Admin officer. For obvious reasons.

We don't even have the "collaborate" thing as a conscious buzzword-goal. We didn't do that on purpose. It's just the way the culture evolved.
posted by ctmf at 11:22 AM on September 14, 2014

I get the feeling that the work world is built for extroverts, just like it's built for early risers.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:58 AM on September 14, 2014 [5 favorites]

You don't have to be an extrovert to succeed in office environments, but it helps!
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 12:06 PM on September 14, 2014

I am a college professor. Because the current hotness in academia is "run it like a business", our administrators have been experimenting with "collaborative offices". What this meant for me was 4 of us biologists with our desks lined up in an office.

Every time I think my vision of my academic future can't get bleaker...

(Do you at least have a window? Please tell me you at least have a window.)
posted by pemberkins at 12:46 PM on September 14, 2014

I'm an introvert and like the open office because it forces me to interact with people. If I was back in my office, I'd revert to never talking to anyone all day.
posted by octothorpe at 6:28 PM on September 14, 2014

But as a thought exercise: I don't think you guys took the "collaborative" experiment far enough. What if the students had no one true professor, and you were all 4 of you "the professor." You could divvy up lectures between whoever had the time/best presentation/enthusiasm rather than by class section. Students could see whoever happened to be in the office, or specifically choose the professor whose style/personality matched their own best. Grading could be divided up between the four of you and burned out with 1/4 turnaround time. Of course then, the overall student evaluation would have to be some sort of combination of everyone's opinion. Which would require still more collaboration.

Well, since we each teach 12 contact hours per week (2 or 3 different classes), that would be an organizational nightmare. Also, we don't really lecture as our primary form of classroom modality. Also, I have no idea what would be the benefit to the students of a rotating cast of people who know them much less well versus one professor who gets to know them very well. Also, I don't know how FERPA would handle that rotating cast of people and decide who does/doesn't need to know students' disability statuses and such. Among the many other reasons that this would be fairly disastrous. Like our "collaborative" office was.

(Do you at least have a window? Please tell me you at least have a window.)

There was a window. The guy whose desk was next to it could even see out it.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:36 AM on September 15, 2014