The Open-Office Trend Is Destroying The Workplace

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I'm not sure why this lady is blaming Google for this, I guess we're all supposed to hop on the bandwagon here. DAMN YOU GOOGLE! DAMN YOU! ;)

After nine years as a senior writer, I was forced to trade in my private office for a seat at a long, shared table. It felt like my boss had ripped off my clothes and left me standing in my skivvies. Our new, modern Tribeca office was beautifully airy, and yet remarkably oppressive.
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Try working out in the field with 0 degrees and winds of 40mph.
 
Open offices are new and trendy!!
2z7k9jn.jpg
 
She works in advertisement, so of course she is messed up :D
 
I've never seen a 'cubicle' office in the UK. I've always worked in open offices and I much prefer them.

I watched Office Space and thought...yuk...cubicles = battery farming for humans.

As for separate offices, the only thing they are good for is to allow staff to talk about their useless manager without them over-hearing.
 
I've worked in several environments: cubicle, open, and office. I prefer an office as I can close my door to concentrate. (I'm a programmer). Offices are rare - shocked my current job offers one.
Cubicles - I hear every personal conversation, phone call, etc around me. It's distracting as shit. People are making lunch plans hours in advance and not working. At least I can't see them picking their noses.
Open - same problems as cubicles except I can see them.
 
steakman1971 said:
I've worked in several environments: cubicle, open, and office. I prefer an office as I can close my door to concentrate. (I'm a programmer). Offices are rare - shocked my current job offers one.
Cubicles - I hear every personal conversation, phone call, etc around me. It's distracting as shit. People are making lunch plans hours in advance and not working. At least I can't see them picking their noses.
Open - same problems as cubicles except I can see them.
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Pretty much the same. Except I'm very tall, and several of the places I've worked in that had cubicles might have well been an open office. Even sitting down my eyes often went over those short cubicle walls.
 
steakman1971 said:
I've worked in several environments: cubicle, open, and office. I prefer an office as I can close my door to concentrate. (I'm a programmer). Offices are rare - shocked my current job offers one.
Cubicles - I hear every personal conversation, phone call, etc around me. It's distracting as shit. People are making lunch plans hours in advance and not working. At least I can't see them picking their noses.
Open - same problems as cubicles except I can see them.
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Same boat here, would rather have some space when I'm working, but at the same time I could see some benefits to an open office idea I suppose. Cubes are fine with me but I usually put headphones on to avoid getting distracted by office chatter.
 
My company has steadily lowering the cubicle walls in the last eight years I've been there. The only benefit is cheaper cubicles. Everything else is a negative. Hearing everything going on around me is terrible for my productivity. Headphones don't work for me because they are just more noise. I'm trying to avoid noise!

I would love an office, just a small one with a door, but that ain't going to happen, unless I figure out how to work from home better (my remote desktop experience is awful).
 
I'm certainly more comfortable working in a cubicle. I like the idea of facing my cubicle rather than another person facing us.
 
We have a mostly "open" work area. Hard to describe, but it works well for our company. We don't share tables, as we each have our own "area", but there are no cubes. We collaborate often, and it's handy to holler across the building sometimes :)
 
I've never worked in anything but an "open" environment. There are benefits for integrated teams, but also a lot of distractions. I'm not really sure if it's good or not, it can be annoying. But I am better at tuning out things than most people. It drives some of my co-workers (programmers) crazy.

It's certainly not a new trend, however. It's was a big trend in the 90's and is now industry standard. This op-ed seems about 20 years behind the times, most of the companies she blames didn't even exist or were just starting up (Google, Yahoo, eBay). None of them ever had old fashioned 70's style offices.
 
I was going to cite a recent New Yorker article about just this very topic, but I see that the linked article does so as well. The New Yorker article is worth a read: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap

FWIW, I think open offices are terrible, and I can't really engage in deep thought. There must be some compromise between openness and freedom from distraction.
 
Open offices are fine so long as you put people of similar disciplines together. I'm a Master Technology Architect, but the desk I was assigned at my office in Palo Alto is right next to a bunch of blabby sales people, so if I go to the office not only do I lose at least an hour or two of the day to my commute, but I get nothing done because the sales folks are a complete and total distraction.

Of there are times when my stay at home wife can be worse, so I have to pick my poison.
 
It really depends on what you do, and what you are made of. For example, most (good... decent?) sales people I know of still engage in constant phone calls, and none of that whispering into the phone nonsense, either.
 
One of the things Microsoft still does right, pretty much entirely offices or less commonly tall cubicles. A single officemate is fine, a huge warehouse of annoying officemates is not. Can't stand open workspaces, they aren't really workspaces in my opinion.
 
I am willing to bet the architects that design these open concept offices, do it in private closed offices. They should really be forced to eat their own dogfood.
 
They might work okay in an open collaboration environment, especially if it's limited to just 5-7 people.
 
Hi All

I guess a lot of folk here never served in the military, or if so, were not in line units.Oftentimes I was required to perform my duties outdoors in conditions not always ideal. in civilian life, as a paramedic the same thing applied. Even now as a physical therapist working with young children ,sometimes things get a little hectic. I'm almost never in a secluded office. I've always had to work & interact with coworkers & patients. I guess it's all in what you're predisposed to, that determines how you'll react to change.
 
jtm55 said:
I'm almost never in a secluded office. I've always had to work & interact with coworkers & patients.
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When your job is actually to interact, of course it is no big deal to be distracted.

Imagine your job required that you do intensive math problems. Except solving the whole problem might take a month composed of hundreds of steps. Most of the steps interact with a half dozen other steps. When working on one step you have to keep 6 other steps in your head and solve math problems related to interconnecting them.

Do you think you would want to do that in with people chatting and talking phone calls around you. One interruption and you can lose the mental connections between the steps and it can take 15-30 minutes to get that mental map rebuilt.

That is kind of what it is like to be a computer programming working on complex software. That is why a lot of us HATE open concept offices. They are forced on developers by managers who have NO clue what the actual work involves.
 
I think she is just upset that she lost her "private" office.

As a software developer I like a more open office space. It makes collaboration between dev team members easier. The office building I work at now has cubicles with walls that are just above waist height, which pretty much means if you are sitting properly in your chair you have no issues seeing of the walls to your neighboring cubes.
 
The OP of that article makes it sound like the open office space is like this:
ek0uba.jpg


...when.. it's more like she lost her privilidged private space and got brought down to earth with all of the other people she works with.

Invest in a good pair of headphones, and stop whining.
 
Hi All

@ Snowdog,I see what you mean. Given the scenario you described it would be best to have a secluded office where you'd be able to perform the tasks you described.
 
We have tall cubicles and white noise generators at my workplace, and it's really nice. The white noise generators take care of any stray noise that floats over the top of the cubes, and the walls provide a combination of privacy, storage space, and space to hang up calendars and paperwork. We're on the phone a lot, so those buffers are nice. I'd rather have an office, but those are reserved for management only.

I have worked in open environments before as well, and it isn't terrible. Your coworkers make the difference. If they are working on the same issues as you, or at least doing something similar, it works well. If they are busybodies or obnoxiously-loud, it will be a nightmare. At my current job, I would HATE to have an open office for that very reason. We are right next to level 1 support, which is comparable to being in high school again.
 
It's not for everyone. The reason it works for Google/FB/etc is that the people in there are young. They went through university with these conditions. They excel in a team atmosphere, and the environment that an open office presents is key for their work enjoyment. If you enjoy your job, you work better.
 
I like a combination. I think just about everyone should have an office, but also offer some open space areas for collaboration...not just conference rooms. Allowing employees a choice of where and how to work is best if you've done a good job at hiring.
 
I used to do part-time work at an office where it was open concept, but it was sparsely populated (yay startups that can't get off the ground). Every little noise went through the whole room. That place NEEDED cubes but nope, the owner wouldn't have it. Taking a call on your cell phone at your desk was considered rude lol. People were constantly ducking into conference rooms. Good productivity -.-;

I'm happy I have a cube now, even though it's more of a pen I share with two other people.
 
delsydsoftware said:
I have worked in open environments before as well, and it isn't terrible. Your coworkers make the difference. If they are working on the same issues as you, or at least doing something similar, it works well. If they are busybodies or obnoxiously-loud, it will be a nightmare. At my current job, I would HATE to have an open office for that very reason. We are right next to level 1 support, which is comparable to being in high school again.
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I like most of my coworkers. Doesn't meant I want to hear every meeting they've ever had on the phone (we do a lot of phone meetings). Not even people who talk loud...if I listen closely I can hear people talking 30 feet away. Employer should have invested in white noise or acoustic ceiling tiles or something. But you can't see any of that in a PR photo showing how "modern" your officespace is.
 
slightly open office, "cubicles" but shared, with halfheight walls in between. As long as the airhandlers are noisy, its fine. If the environment (other than people) is quiet, its problematic.

Noise cancelling headphones are your friend.

BB
 
I can see that sucking if you had your private office and were asked to move out into the open. I've always worked in a "open office" so I don't mind it, it's kind of a hybrid though. My first job was help desk, we had cubicles but only to separate us from the other departments. Where I work now we have cubicles but with short walls, we actually designed it ourselves, we went over lot of people's heads and just rebuilt or whole office and moved it to another part of the building to make it more efficient for us. I work in a NOC though, you can't really have tall cubicles in a NOC.

I think it really depends on the nature of the work too. If you are doing active work like designing stuff or writing or anything of that sort a private office or cubicle is probably better. Anything where you have a bunch of people essentially doing the same thing, like help desk, customer service, NOC, etc then open office makes more sense.
 
I think an open office would suck unless you were all working on the same project. 20 people working a dozen different projects seems like it would be utter chaos. Well, if that is the work environment, adapt or leave.
 
Maybe is she watched less porn or did more work, she wouldn't need to have her conduct policed by her peers.
 
Snowdog said:
I am willing to bet the architects that design these open concept offices, do it in private closed offices. They should really be forced to eat their own dogfood.
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Famously not, Norman Foster is a proponent and did it for his in own company very early on.
foster_partners_desks_q191011_5.jpg


And you can see it in his buildings even going back to the 70's with the Willis Building.
http://place-photography.com/norman-fosters-willis-building-ipswich/

Really though it's not architects, it's mostly driven by cost saving. It's enormously expensive to give people offices. You can see this at any of the top law firms these days where you'll be lucky to get an office and when you do it's surprisingly small (a senior partner at a top firm might get a 20*15 corner office) and even if you look back to Foster that willis building where the swimming pool put in for employees was given over to more floor space. Most companies will pack them in as tight as they can get away with. When they do this it's actually fire regulations or people to toilet ratio's that gives you any space at all.

Where it becomes a bit more interesting is that it's a point of differentiation for a lot of firms, where hiring is competitive they are far more likely to put signifcant effort into creating a nice working environment. That's why many of the more leading edge tech firms, whilst being open plan, have very well designed spaces that properly segregate space and are nice to work in. In this there is a merit to sitting with colleagues from a productivity perspective (this is whole premise of activity based working) but it's dictated by the type of work you do and whether it is predisposed to that. Some just do need quiet spaces.


On topic though, this girl is just whining because she lost her office.
 
It depends on the work environment, type of work being performed, and the professionalism of your co-workers.

I've worked in call centers, taking customer calls all day long. Most of these were in short/tiny cubicle arrangements that did zilch to filter noise. This sucked. There were several times when I really had to concentrate, I had to either close my eyes and cup my hands over my headphones. Sometimes I crawled under my desk. My supervisor hated that, as he couldn't see me.

Same kind of work but in tall cubes, much easier. The tall cubes may only block an additional 10-20% of the noise, but at least you don't have to look at everyone making the noise.

The only difference between shorty cubes and long tables / no cube walls is a slightly improved sense of personal surroundings. "My Space". If your neighbor is a total slob at least you have a tiny wall blocking their mess from overflowing into yours.

If I find myself back in another shorty cube or totally open workspace, I will have to have the most expensive noise canceling headset provided. I find it really hard to concentrate on technical issues on the phone (with people from other countries on horrible, low volume phones) in a noisy environment. And I will have a sign on a stick printed up that says "On the phone, working, please fuck off" that I will wave at everyone who wants to chat with me or just likes to talk to themselves very loudly.

A million years ago I worked in a shorty 4 way cube call center environment. One "big" 15x15 cube with shorty walls and 4 people inside it. Fucking MISERABLE. If they had used tall walls, then at least your primary concern is the other 3 people in your cube. But with short walls, you were face to face with a counterpart in their own 4 way cube in the same situation you are in. They installed "white noise" generators that were supposed to cut down on noise. 2 problems there... they did kind of work, from a distance. Managers could see us but not hear us clearly. However it provides zero help when you are 18 inches away from the next person. Other problem is, and I can't be the only one with sensitive hearing on the planet, but I could HEAR the white noise. It was like super high pitched whiny static. Miserable. No headphone of the day could block that noise (90's). I lasted about 8 weeks in that environment before I quit. I didn't hate my job, just the working environment.
 
Gah, no edit. I meant 10x10, not 15x15. Basically if everyone stretched arms out they could hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah
 
I will add, that I have been a Cube dweller fairly consistently since about 1996. With standard high cube walls (~5'6"). I never felt that it was in any way a barrier to collaboration and provide the necessary limit to distraction to focus on detailed problems.

Sometime this spring open concept is being forced on us...
 
Place i work went open office 2 years ago and it is miserable. Everyone justs hunkers down and doesnt talk anymore because they dont want to disturb anyone. We have like 5 or 6 different groups in one small area. Toss in the white noise and it sucks. Glad i work from home now
 
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