Beyond hot desk communism | Hacker News Reader

Beyond hot desk communism

woobius.com

22 pointsswombat18 comments

Do any workplaces model themselves after university campuses? In essence, creating a wide variety of spaces to accommodate myriad working styles.

Lower floors of a library for solitude, campus coffee shops for more social or creative tasks. A myriad of rooms and open spaces for ad hoc collaboration. Outdoor areas with tables and benches. Lounges. Departmental enclaves with desks and storage when you need a more persistent environment.

It feels like my productivity plummeted once I graduated and landed in a cubicle.

I blogged about this once in more detail (like you care), but I think workplaces would benefit greatly if they had zones that were analogous to those found in houses.

  House                   Office
  Bedroom/office/study    Private Office
  Dining Room             Small team collaboration spaces
  Living Room             Common lounge
  Backyard/family room    Whole company meeting room/auditorium

People stay in their bedroom/study when they want privacy and the ability to concentrate. They hang out in living rooms and dining rooms when they want to see other people. When you have all your friends over, you most likely spend your time in the kitchen/family room/backyard. I don't see why your workplace should only have semi-private personal zones (bedrooms) or a single huge room (family room). No family would like a house with only bedrooms or only a family room, so why should employees like a workplace with only one type of room?

Sounds like Joel's description of the Fog Creek office space.

Funny you should mention that.

I think the thing I miss the most about attending a well-known, old-school Ivy campus (long, long ago) was the nearly infinite amount of "available space" for study/just plain getting away by one's self, or hanging out with friends.

There was the third-floor applied engineering library where no one ever went (where I often studied), the grad student "pen" in the basement of the computing center (this was a long time ago, when PDP-10's roamed the earth), the endless open classrooms in the science center, the mini-lounges on many floors of the chemistry building, to say nothing of the dozen-plus houses (dorms, though I was an off-campus student for the last 3 years), etc.

I'd make a wild guess there might be on the order of magnitude of a million square feet of usually unoccupied, interesting, pleasant space on campus (which stretched for a over mile in some dimensions).

(To say nothing of the many unlocked facilities like the small pipe organ in one of the dozens of performance halls, etc.)

In some sense, access to that kind of space is the ultimate luxury, whether for work or play.

i found it suuuuper hard to concentrate when i worked in an 'open cube' layout. i can only imagine that losing more space becomes stressful, like trying to find routine and focus while working out of coffee shops. it's surprisingly difficult!

the past few months i've been working from home with my husband on a joint venture. we both appreciate the flexibility of interaction levels, from working in separate rooms to putting our heads together.

i think i'm not alone in this need for concentration and chill, while still appreciating the benefits of neighbor nudging.

the whole interaction thing is of course much easier with just two people, but i think having flexibility of space and schedule is what makes us successful. and respect. nothing like working with your significant other to truly learn communication skills.

You should rethink everything if you cannot provide those people personal offices who absolutely must be at the office every day.

One thing you're probably doing wrong then is thinking that everyone should be physically there every day.

Interestingly, the design of "The Bench" takes into consideration that everyone is not physically there every day. They can be away due to holiday, sickness, or even because they are having meetings in a room round the corner. And when that happens, the "legless" nature of the desk means you feel that you've got more space that you really have got. It's like the architectural trick we use often to make a space feel more generous by increasing the floor-to-ceiling height. Here, we are trying to maximise the benefit of absences to make your perceived desk space more generous.

During our 9 months experiment, this is perhaps biggest benefit that we felt.

That's one thing I'm hoping to get out of this recession. The archaic notion that everyone must commute large distances, at great expense to themselves only to cram like fish in a can into a small expensive space called an "office" should get a rethink.

The central office should, hopefully, stop being the defacto standard for all employees and instead be used carefully for those who need the collaborative environment most, when they need it most. It should be set up explicitly to serve this purpose. At a certain population/productivity density, everyone going to the office every day might be economically unsustainable.

Unfortunately, the places I've worked have taught me that some older folks are going to need to retire before we can get past the notion that any time spent not physically at the office is vacation.

The trouble is, if you're unmotivated and your results aren't visible, time spent out of the office usually is vacation.

The solution to that is to not hire unmotivated, invisible workers, I'd say....

Thoroughly agree!

I think that view kind of misses the point that some professions are not solitary like programming.

I work from home (I'm a technologist), and love it that way. I can do great work by myself, without much input. But I've seen architects at work, and the majority of their work is collaborative, discussing ideas, coming up with new ideas, etc.

Designing a building draws together a lot of creativity applied at all levels, from the door handles to the shape of the building, and a major difficulty is to coordinate all this to keep the building looking like it was designed as a whole, rather than have all sorts of different styles mixing with each other.

Until architecture becomes a solitary activity (unlikely for all but the smallest buildings, for quite some time), central office spaces will remain a necessity there. This is probably the case for numerous other professions. There's no "one size fits all" work-from-home solution, not yet anyway.

i agree in many terms. One of the largest bank in the us, for instance, builds office buildings in the north and south of the city, just to provide office space and a shorter way to work to their employees. Taking this honorable efforts into account - it might make sense to provide them with HOME OFFICE equipment instead?!

That's an interesting piece and it's made me think a bit. One potential drawback: People historically never respect shared space as much as they do personal space. Regardless of the general maturity level, damage/uncleanliness of shared space is always going to be higher than in dedicated personal space. Part of this is because just one or two messy people will gradually mess the whole area, instead of being contained to their own area.

But being more flexible on office setup, and minimizing empty desks when costs are tough - really fascinating stuff. I'm going to roll this around in my mind more a bit later.

This article presents a new idea for optimizing dense work environments. A person might find this idea interesting if his business is managing low-productivity workers. In my opinion, the money saved by this scheme will be negligible for employees who create even a modest amount of wealth.

I still think that proper, individual desks are better.

It's easy to quantify, or should be. When a developer comes in in the morning, he or she has to recreate in their own mind the state that existed there when they left the previous evening before they can continue working. Does being able to leave books/notes/printouts open on the desk and windows open on the desktop make this process faster or slower? How much cash is an extra hour spent getting ready instead of doing actual work in the morning worth to the company?

I totally agree... and so does the article.

Hot desking doesn't work for software engineering any more than it works for architecture. The article proposes an alternative to that, which is personal desk space on a "continuous" desk so that your space expands and contracts as your needs do.

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