from Hacker News

The Open-office Trap

by marchustvedt on 6/2/14, 6:51 AM with 155 comments

by aeberbach on 6/2/14, 12:49 PM
Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriving for an oversold airplane? Now you can have that at work every single day!
Truly modern offices have hot desks AND are wired for teleconferencing - right in the open areas! That's right, if "open" is good for communication then a 60" screen on the wall with video cameras pointing at you is even better! You can share in the dull roar of collaboration with people on other continents ALL DAY! In the average open space you can fit at least two, maybe three such screens. When you have them installed, get the tradesmen to come during office hours. It costs way more if they come after hours and your employees should get the chance to see drills, saws and nailguns operated by professionals, they may learn something.
We all know there's nothing that stimulates productivity like the sound of productivity, right? So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of hot food - all these things will make employees feel right at home. Using only the most modern materials in the office - lots of glass and steel - will ensure the entire workforce shares the joy. You don't want to be damping the precious sound waves with carpet or plasterboard.
I wish I was joking.
by pbiggar on 6/2/14, 8:40 AM
We've just moved into our first place where everyone has a private office. It's absolutely amazing! I had been complaining for years about open-plan offices [1], but I was actually surprised at just how much more productive it is to have a door that closes!
[1] http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/
by hliyan on 6/2/14, 8:28 AM
The office depicted in this article looks almost exactly like the office I used to work in before I moved to a smaller place a year ago. It was a nightmare for those who are sometimes loosely (and perhaps erroneously) categorized as type-A personalities:
I want to focus on one thing and do it as perfectly as possible before moving onto the next thing; I hate multitasking unless the situation calls for it; I have highly (and perhaps unnecessarily) attuned peripheral vision and hearing. The chatter was impossible to tune out -- especially design discussions taking place two workstations over. People who did 'soft' jobs kept suggesting that I listen to music to drown out the chatter without realizing that mine is not the sort of work that can be done while music is playing.
People walking about in the background behind my screen would distract me from the complicated problem displayed on it. It was difficult to have private chats with people -- the moment I asked to see someone in one of the glass cubicles, everyone (including the person called) would assume that person was in trouble.
My current office layout is very 'residential' -- smaller rooms, wooden furniture, doors and windows, no sterile white partitions and ceilings etc. Needless to say, I haven't had any problems concentrating.
by NateDad on 6/2/14, 9:58 AM
What's funny is that I actually have no idea what a non-open office would look like. I've worked for 15 years and have never even walked in an office that wasn't open. How do you give each person an office without using like 5x the space as a cubicle farm? That's the real reason that companies like open offices - because they can jam a lot more people in the same space. Someone who is ok with a 6x6 cubicle would feel trapped in a 6x6 office.
by chrisgd on 6/2/14, 2:03 PM
Interesting article. My favorite sentence is this though, "Open offices may seem better suited to younger workers, many of whom have been multitasking for the majority of their short careers."
Despite what I want to believe and what I have been told (all companies only want to hire multitaskers!), multitasking is neither productive nor really possible. You can really only do one project at a time.
by emsy on 6/2/14, 1:09 PM
Open-offices are downright dangerous. We had an Indian colleague who had tuberculoses. After it was diagnosed, every employee had to get an examination. One colleague got infected. Worst of all, the management handled the matter rather unserious and kept jamming everyone in the same office (including the infected colleague!) Gladly, I worked remotely for that company.
by austinz on 6/2/14, 8:57 AM
I am thoroughly disillusioned with open offices. Headphones are a paper-thin barrier against being interrupted while in the midst of thinking; a good, solid, closed door might do the job better.
by bitwize on 6/2/14, 8:42 AM
Open-plan offices are a cost-effective panopticon: cheap, effective way to ensure that not only the boss, but other co-workers are aware of where you are and -- more or less -- what you're doing. The "other co-workers" bit is crucial because even if the boss can't find Dave himself he can ask anyone in the space "hey, have you seen Dave" and be led to a meaningful answer.
Companies will get rid of open-plan offices when they stop being such gift-wrapped boons to middle management, and not a second before. If you don't like it, adjust or exercise your right to be fired. This is America.
by psychometry on 6/2/14, 6:08 PM
Can we stop pretending open offices are about anything more than spending a minimum on an office construction? Let's face it: it's much cheaper to convert an empty warehouse space into a office space than to buy or build a traditional one.
by dsymonds on 6/2/14, 8:26 AM
This is a dupe from January of this year. Here's the discussion from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488
by bluedino on 6/2/14, 2:02 PM
I can't believe we're still having this debate, how many years has it been?
You can't simply take a closed-office environment and just knock the walls down, pass out headphones and cram everyone in one room.
You need to change the work culture so that open offices work. You have to adapt things like pair programming and remove things like phones and email. Put everyone on a certain project at the same table. Switch partners out.
You can't have people who sit by themselves, don't communicate and don't work together in an open office environment. You're nuts if you think that's going to work.
by rl3 on 6/2/14, 6:24 PM
It's clear that both open and closed office plans have their advantages and disadvantages. Ditto hot desking.
I'm surprised that no hybrid solution to this problem exists, or at least one that's taken hold. The best solution we currently have seems to be giving everyone a private office and augmenting it with really good team collaboration software. In most cases however, this does not eliminate the need for direct human collaboration, which is partly why open office plans exist in the first place.
It seems you could accomplish a hybrid approach by somehow giving each employee the ability to toggle the privacy of their workspace on or off. How you would accomplish that remains an interesting question. Some ideas that come to mind:
a) Have two physical workspaces for the employee: one private, one open.
b) Some sort of The Jetsons-esque enclosure around the workspace that can be toggled. Might use technologies such as electronic smart glass (for privacy) and/or active noise cancellation.
c) Have two floors and lifts under each desk. Want privacy? Just ascend or descend into it. It could even support hot desking on both floors, provided the proper visual cues and safety features existed. The cool part about this approach is it could in theory make moving your desk much easier.
d) In the future it could just be a matter of telling your standard ocular and cochlear implants to filter your peripheral vision and hearing accordingly.
Disclaimer: Some of these are admittedly crazy.
by danso on 6/2/14, 11:01 AM
Anyone here not ever work in an open-office since professional employment? I was going to say that I had never had an office, including my stints in food service and construction...and I had never even had a real cubicle, i.e. partitions where I couldn't see the person across from me.
But that's not true...I had about a year in the "dungeon" when I was moved to my newspaper's online multimedia team, in a windowless basement...by then I already had the habit of surfing the Internet, but I did manage to learn enough PHP and MySQL to build a crime-mapping site and do other data projects, and even do things like get Drupal working (which ended up not being very useful, but still, my first web framework).
by PythonicAlpha on 6/2/14, 1:24 PM
It is amazing, how a so old wisdom (I read it many years from now in a book called "Peopleware" from 1987! could be ignored so many decades (by people, who claim to be reasonable).
But it just seems that some ideas, because they are economical interesting, stick so much, that management people come up every 6 month with an other idea or excuse, why the dead horse must be ridden again (and not buried).
by cel1ne on 6/2/14, 11:10 AM
Old news.
If work is boring, routine or extremely exhausting open spaces are great cause' you can talk to each other and lift each others spirits.
If work is any type of creative, where you need to concentrate, it's better to have your own space.
by pnathan on 6/2/14, 3:49 PM
I have worked in cubes, private offices, shared offices, and open offices. For productivity and thinking, I found the physical barriers were proportional to the thinking. For communication, in any of these, company IM worked quite well most of the time, and when it failed, face to face worked out.
I strongly advocate for private or team-member-shared offices at any chance I get. It's just that much better.
by ThomaszKrueger on 6/2/14, 3:41 PM
I work in such open office arrangement. The worse is when the two guys across your desk have their phones on a conference call on speaker phone and the echo of both come through as they speak, utterly distracting, I might as well just pack and go home.
by luka-birsa on 6/2/14, 11:48 AM
Couldn't agree more. Open offices, while fancy looking, sport apalling usability. After moving into ours we had super issues with the team adapting to the noises and layout. Things got better only after most of the people started using headphones.
Separate office with a closed door = productivity boon.
by rjbwork on 6/2/14, 8:53 AM
Would love it if my company would get us each an office. We have the money for it. I feel like since we've expanded and I moved out of the 2 person office I shared with one of the front end devs (I'm back end) and into the 5 person back end space, my productivity has plummeted.
by dredmorbius on 6/2/14, 11:20 PM
Previously posted to HN: "Creativity is Not a Team Sport"
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=QfMvqkrQkYQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494705
One of the best lectures I've seen on the topic.
[There's] a very long and well-established literature in psychology that getting groups of people together is no way to come up with ideas. Creativity is not a team sport. What you're looking for is somebody's individual, intellectual trunk to make new connections and come up with something new.
Let's imagine billions of neurons in my head communicating with stuff they've been talking about all their lives together: there's a high probability that occasionally they'll come up with something new. Let's now think of the line of communication that you and I have got between each other, which is impoverished, because we have to try and translate complex ideas into language, and how many times do you find you've got a good idea, it's almost in symbolic thought inside your head, and you really can't articulate it to someone. And when you do, they get the wrong idea, because really, language can't encapsulate it until it's fully formed. There's no good evidence that I know of that these brainstorming sessions will come up with a solution or a new idea.
What they might do is improve a little bit of team spirit, or show some of the people in the group, "well, if that's the best they can come up with then I'm doing OK". The idea that you can marshal creativity is an error. I'd go a little bit further than this: if there is somebody who's spending 80 hours a week running a creative team, I'd stop them right there and tell them "you don't run a creative team, you allow a creative team to run". That would be the first thing I would jump on. People ask themselves "how do I make a team be creative?" You don't. You allow a team to be creative.
(Emphasis in original.)
More: http://redd.it/21qgiv
by qwerta on 6/2/14, 8:56 AM
I am ok with open-office if company provides paid sick leave. In Ireland there is at least one week every year, when 70% of company is at home with flu.
by geebee on 6/2/14, 3:57 PM
This is another interesting and good article, and I'm glad to see it getting (yet more) mainstream attention. But eventually, I think we should probably look at this as a solved problem and try to figure out what's going on upstream.
In other words, I'm completely convinced that open offices (and cubicle farms, where I work) are harmful. To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?
by josefresco on 6/2/14, 12:30 PM
Do we have to have one or the other? Can an office have private/personal work spaces, and communal open social places that can sometimes host real work? I feel often that managers/owners feel they have to force one or the other on their staff, not considering that their people are probably very diverse, and seek differing models from individual to individual.
by dang on 6/2/14, 8:13 PM
Burying this thread as a dupe: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+office+trap#!/story/forever/0....
Once a story has had significant attention, reposts are treated as duplicates for about a year.
by squozzer on 6/2/14, 5:21 PM
At my last job I had a private office, my first. Now I work in the most open office I've had since leaving the Army - my office there was called "The Motor Pool"
I didn't find it as distracting as I thought - but I am someone who can tune out everything when watching TV.
I miss being able to break wind somewhat discreetly though.
by stox on 6/2/14, 4:08 PM
Open offices are awesome during a crisis. On the other hand, they really suck when you need to focus on a problem. They work well for young start-ups, as crises tend to be quite frequent, but as a company matures, I think they become more of a liability than an asset.
by amake on 6/2/14, 1:20 PM
I wonder how dependent all this is on culture and expectations.
I've spent my entire career in Japan, and have never not worked in an open office. To my knowledge, non-open offices basically don't exist in Japan.
So is every Japanese company just leaving productivity lying on the floor by insisting on open offices? I wonder if there have been studies on switching to closed floor plans in Japan.
(Of course traditionally the cultural emphasis has been on consensus, not productivity, so there hasn't been a lot of impetus to experiment. Things are changing, however.)
by general_failure on 6/2/14, 3:48 PM
Not sure what the definition of open-office is. In our office, we have gazillion cubicles (the classic valley office). No sound proofing. And people of a team don't sit near each other. This means that you can end up with sales guys around who are constantly on the call and meetings. What's worse is that they keep pitching the same lines over and over again and you have to listen to it. It makes you empathize about a sales person's job but you end up hating your job and never want to step into office.
by DanBC on 6/2/14, 10:40 AM
There is definitely a need for better working environments.
This small table with a wool shell looks nice, and the idea could (with heavy modification) be used to create long benches of private working space where noise and visual distraction is reduced and people are not boxed into cubicles.
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/13088/gamfratesi...
by NikhilVerma on 6/2/14, 12:18 PM
Like anything taken to the extreme open offices are bad for you. I personally have worked in an open office and a semi-open office (where your team is in a part enclosure/room with a door). And I much prefer to have a semi-open office rather than a private office.
A private office for me would totally kill any social interaction I have with anyone. A semi-open office keeps it private on the team level.
by pbreit on 6/2/14, 4:26 PM
I've already bought in to the notion that open arrangements may have short-comings.
But in the Bay Area circa 2014 what arrangements are being tried out and seeing advantages? Low cubes, high cubes, fully enclosed offices, bull pens, mini bull pens, periodic re-arrangement, unassigned?
by jacquesm on 6/2/14, 9:31 AM
The problem with the open-office / everybody in their own room / some mixture articles and proponents of various solutions is that they all seem to ignore the effect of calcification.
by chrissyb on 6/2/14, 1:48 PM
I always wonder when i see reports like this at the amount of cherry picked data in the studies - and also the ability for the journalist to properly interpret it. The problem i have with this piece and so many others is that its just calls out a number of sometimes unrelated "problems", cites some studies with open offices and calls it a day. They fail to really come up with a strong conclusion or offer viable solutions.
As a designer working under an architect and having just completed an open office building for a 150+ employee financial firm[1] - i feel i have a pretty good handle on this subject. There a a couple key anecdotal design criteria that i'd like to address in relation to open offices that the report does not address.
Natural Light - Access to natural light
Artificial light - using the correct lighting for the task with the right output measured in lumens for the particular task.
Ventilation - Natural and sufficient HVAC Acoustics - Are proper acoustic absorbent materials being used.
Planning - has the space been thought out in a thorough way - is there a meaningful program to which the open office functions in both arrangement, flow and activities.
Psychology - Has there been effort to educate the staff about the new space and general systems in place to govern how it functions.
All of these points above can be easily planned for by hiring and adhering to the advice of design professionals like architects, electrical engineers, hydraulic engineers, acoustic consultants etc. Does this happen? In my experience - the answer is generally - no. Building offices and fitting thee out is an expensive exercise and time and time again i see clients willing to cut corners and forgo professional advice at the sake of saving a few thousand dollars. It may be that the ROI in terms of employee productivity could be significantly diminished due to a insignificant saving during the build phase.
I would agree in some respects that there are limitation to open office layouts - but that its due more to the ill-conceived notion that achieving an open office work environment is as easy throwing some workstation and humans into a cavernous space and expecting it to just work.
Moreover that is why indeed planners are moving away from open office and employing the newer philosophy of ABW (activity based working)[2].
[1]http://marklawlerarchitects.com.au/commercial/hunter-street-...
[2]http://www.jll.com.au/australia/en-au/Documents/jll-au-activ...
by michaelochurch on 6/2/14, 12:38 PM
Backdoor age and disability discrimination.
At some point, when an organization loses the purpose for its existence and selecting leadership comes down to office politics alone, the selection process becomes attrition. Since excellence no longer matters (there isn't real work for a person to excel at) the leaders are selected by subjecting people to artificial stresses and seeing who cracks (either a full-scale nervous breakdown, or just a passive loss of interest) first. Those were the weak, the less dedicated, etc.
Open-plan offices make that attrition faster, and provide more insight into who is next to crack up and entertain the crowd with an open-plan-induced panic attack.
That's also why this toxic micromanagement, in the name of "Agile" or "Scrum", that programmers are subjected to will probably never go away. When there's no good way to pick leaders (because the work isn't challenging or interesting) the stress of being watched, hour by hour, is a powerful attritive tool.
by inanov on 6/2/14, 11:25 AM
reading the title, i thought that it was about OpenOffice office software suite.