More on why personal offices generally suck
Love this passage from the Max Barry book, Company. A great way of describing my feelings on personal offices and why I’ll never have one again.
Like every other department in Zephyr, Training Sales has an open floor plan, which means everyone works in a sprawling cubicle farm except the manager, who has an office with a glass internal wall, across which blinds are permanently drawn. Open-plan seating, it has been explained in company-wide memos, increases teamwork and boosts productivity.
Except in managers, that is, whose productivity tends to be boosted by – and the memos don’t say this, but the conclusion is inescapable – corner offices with excellent views.
Also, thanks Greg for the suggestion to read Company. Good read.
Thanks, glad you’re enjoying it. I’m inclined to agree with you about office layouts, which is why I was so surprised to see this: https://qz.com/85400/moving-to-open-plan-offices-makes-employees-less-productive-less-happy-and-more-likely-to-get-sick/
Yep, well there are two sides to every coin I suppose. Now, the picture they use is the extreme and yes, that environment would kinda suck.
And yep, I do think employees probably get a little more sick in an open environment. And they probably are a little less productive individually.
But they collaborate far more in an open environment. And you can’t have any kind of interesting or fun culture when you’re all walled off, so saying they are “less happy” is probably the one I point I’d have the biggest problem with. Closed off office space promotes things like office politics, elitism, resentment, and almost always hurts collaboration which hurts productivity OVERALL.
We could also write an entire counter-point on why employees shouldn’t even leave their houses to go to work, they should all work from home. “Employees that actually go to work are far more likely to die in a car crash, they spend more money on gas and are less productive due to their drive time.” So therefore all employees should stay home ;)
I tend to agree with open office space being good for collaboration, witness the scrum room, which I’m in all day, every day :)
However, one of the most productive places I worked and it had one of the best cultures I’ve ever been a part of, had offices.
Maybe the difference was EVERYONE had an office. You could choose to share, but you didn’t have to.
They subscribed to the Peopleware philosophy (https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Second-Edition/dp/0932633439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369259377&sr=8-1&keywords=peopleware)
Peopleware is pretty kick ass if you haven’t read it, you really should.
Maybe a little dated, but easy read and I think it will resonate.
It’s not that I don’t think there should be “offices”, I just don’t think people should “have” offices, except for very few positions. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t work in an office for a few days if they had to pound something out, or make a ton of calls, but generally I think offices should be used when you need them for the purpose they provide: to talk about something sensitive or if you’re going to be super distracting to everyone around you. Otherwise, I think people should be out in the open.
As an “executive”, I certainly have to have sensitive discussions frequently, but I manage to grab an office or conference room to do that, which is probably 15% of the time. What a shame it would be if the other 85% of the time I was walled off in my private sanctuary, cut off from the rest of the company simply so that once in a while I could have a private conversation. That’d suck.
Also, thanks for the suggestion on the book! I think I’ve thumbed through Peopleware before but I’m going to go ahead and grab it per your recommendation.
Yeah, the happiness element was what I found most surprising as well. My theory is that it’s the same reason people prefer commuting by car over mass transit — the sense of “ownership” of a space, no matter how small or inconsequential it might be (I’m reminded of Les Nessman on “WKRP in Cincinnati”, forcing coworkers to open an invisible door before they could enter his cubicle). I also think there’s a status associated with having an office, so not having one makes you feel like you’re less successful (even if no one else has one either).
Right, exactly. I think you nailed both points. It’s both a status thing and its a sense of ownership. Both of which are selfish (even if subconscious) in terms of being part of a team/company.
My theory is you would have to break that paradigm from day one at a company. Have the rules set in place – no offices – so that people respect it and just know that’s part of the culture and deal. If people come into the situation with that expectation, I think/hope it could be accepted.
And then I’d say, if people leave that company because they want an office, then they aren’t the right people anyway.
I’m not saying I disagree with you. I’m not even saying it can’t be done. I’m just saying that human nature is a powerful force, and you need to be prepared if you’re going to challenge it head on.