Open plan offices are a nightmare
jonblack.org
jonblack.org
As I write this the person next to me is on the phone having a distracting conversation (about one of our projects), someone is engaged in a dramatic battle with the nearby printer, two guys across the aisle are making jokes about a difficult vendor, some guests arrived, and it also sounds like someone is playing frisbee with plates in the kitchen, without much success.
At the moment my headphones can't help and serve only a symbolic function. Instead of fighting the waves of distraction I decide to roll with it an refresh HN...
In a previous job my desk was next to the printer. You can imagine how that was.
I work for a co-working space in London, which is like an open plan office taken to the extreme. Before that I worked in a variety of environments (I'm in my 30s), including public sector 'one-office-per-person' through to agency '3-people-per-desk' type situations, and working from home as a freelancer.
Criticisms about working space often come down to 'the garden on the other side of the fence would be easier to work in'. If you work from home, you miss having people to have coffee with at lunch. If you work in a crowded office, you miss having 2 hours of unbroken flow. So the best offices try to combine a bit of everything - quiet space, play space, etc.
Some people talk about the 'email-only' office like the Holy Grail of Offices. But it's not - it's cold, impersonal and unfriendly. It often results in unnecessary arguments resulting from people misinterpreting something. So a culture of "speak, don't write" is definitely a good thing, as long as there are some rules about when it's OK to talk to someone.
The problem is whether people respect the rules. We try to follow the headphone rule - if I'm wearing headphones, don't interrupt me unless the building is about to burn down. The corollary - if I'm not wearing headphones, feel free to walk up and talk to me.
So it's as much about culture as it is architecture, and that's something that often gets overlooked.
You're right that shutting yourself away is impersonal, and I would certainly never want that.
Yeah, I think the key to understand is that it's 'open-plan ONLY' offices that are the nightmare.
Even in workplaces where everyone has a separate office, if the culture doesn't have a way of saying "this person is busy, don't talk to them" then it doesn't really help.
I worked with a bunch of about 8 other developers in the basement, and it was fine. Some suggested rules:
* Turn off ALL notification sounds. This includes vibrate functions on phones, which still makes a sound when it rattles on the desk.
* No phone calls or conversations at the desk. Take it to the kitchen.
* No talking, screaming, or muttering to yourself. Nobody cares about your problems, they're trying to solve their own.
* If someone has headphones own, they're trying to concentrate. Send them an email saying you want to talk to them.
Yep.
There are 150 people on our floor, all open plan. The partitions are only 1m high. It's not a problem. Some people cope fine without even needing headphones. I probably wear headphones 50% of the time. It's relatively quiet but I've learnt to zone out of the background noises.
Likewise I've worked from home, worked in cramped "5 people to 2 desks" conditions, in vast cube farms in the US (with 8ft high cube walls) with 400 people per area. All have their pros and cons. Distractions come in all forms, IM software, street noise, email notifications, people having conversations right next to your desk, other 'phones ringing, etc.
You just learn to adapt to what you've got and cope with it.
There's also an element of the cultural perceptions of offices. "Important people have their own offices. I want to be perceived as important. Therefore, I must have my own office."
Unfortunately, there is also the corollary: "You can't have your own room because you aren't important enough." Even though several rooms were completely empty. Glad I quit that job.
The problem though is that in chaotic environments, open plan offices are disasters waiting to happen, or maybe they are disasters constantly happening. You have no insulation from anything else and so no ability to be productive and take real control.
On the whole the fact is that distractions come in different forms and all forms of distractions have pros and cons. A fully isolated environment is productivity-killing. We need some socialization to be productive. On the other hand, open plan offices very often are too social.
On the whole I prefer working from home. Sure there are distractions, but on the whole, my productivity is best there. I can insulate myself often from the distractions and break time with family members is a wonderful perk.
It's quite startling to turn your chair around a few degrees and suddenly find there's 3 people standing an inch away from your staring over your shoulder.
Personally I don't even like to wear headphones in the office, because then people will sneak up from behind and scare you. Like someone said here, there's a lot of emotional and social factors that are disturbing your flow, not just the obvious audible and visible distractions.
IMHO, the optimal office should make it harder to socialize, by giving each person a real sense of privacy and immunity while working. But when you want to socialize, the office should make that easy by providing the related facilities and relative proximity of people.
My managers think you are lazy if you don't go up to the colleague on the other side of the room and have a face2face, even if they are wearing headphones
There are offices available, and if you want to you can put your desk in one. Few people do; the social environment is _really_ important.
Mobility and choice make a huge difference. People are smart and know the difference between environments that are supportive of cooperative work, and simple cheap-ass accountancy coupled with power games.
By the time people are in their 40s and 50s, work-related health problems aren't things people joke about during an annoying project. They're things that actually happen. Your typical competent 45-year-old sees an open-plan office and says, "No thanks", knowing from experience that such environments are not only unproductive but dangerous (cardiac issues, anxiety disorders, digestive problems).
Also, it's not only the noise that makes open-plan offices hell. It's the social overload of being visible to other people. (Open-back visibility, which causes vertigo and neurological problems, is especially bad.) People are bad at multitasking-- men are especially bad at it, but suffer from a Dunning-Kruger effect-- and having to dedicate a constant slice of brain-space to the appearance of productivity, in addition to actual productivity, means that a person is forced into a state of ineffective, frustrating, and just plain stupid multitasking for over 8 hours.
But what in the world does an open office plan do to make cardiac issues more dangerous?
Well, I would flat-out walk away from a company where a 20-minute break led to that. It's not the explicit rules that are the issue. It's the stuck-up subtle shit people never tell you about. If you are passed over for a promotion or a good project because you wear headphones too much or don't appear productive, no one will tell you this because (a) it's subconscious and, (b) even if it were conscious, they wouldn't. In an open-plan office, irrelevant stupid shit can raise or lower your social status over the long term, not immediately but minute by minute. You're not aware of the up-and-down drift when it is happening, but you're always being watched.
One thing I used to hate that I now think is good (if done properly) is the daily status meeting (standup). Why good? Because it concentrates the Brownian motion of an employee's social status into a small part of the day and allows him to focus on impression management during 10 minutes instead of the full 9-10 hours.
Having an office doesn't compensate for shitty culture, but it means you only have to manage impressions during some parts of the day instead of all day, so it's less load overall.
I don't doubt that many people have anxious reactions to the background noise and panopticon level visibility and that long term mild stress is very bad for health. That's nothing compared to the damage done by sitting for 8 hours a day over that same period.
Luckily we've got standing desks at work and I'm getting one put-in at home. We've also recently upgraded our office with natural lighting and natural spectrum artificial lighting which is another thing that has been shown to have huge effects on stress levels.
I'm only working from the office two days or so a week, and most of those days are spent doing inherently social activities so I don't mind our mostly open plan offices. (we do have some small single occupancy offices that we use if we want a few hours of quiet work).
The next thing I want to get is a portable standing desk set-up that I can take with me to client sites.
Even if you're not aware of it, your brain is dedicating resources to the latter of these jobs. Over 9 hours, that wears you down. You may not notice it. You may attribute your end-of-day fatigue and digestive problems to aging even though you're not actually old.
There is no greater weapon for a knowledge worker than one solid hour of focused, uninterrupted work.
Most great knowledge workers are introverts. I don't mean 'introverts' in the pop culture way, I mean the scientific description - people who think deeply and internally about things and work best with focused solitude.Most people think introverts are shy, repressed loners but that's not accurate. There are athletes who do tons of interviews, very well, who are introverts.
There's a place for extroverts, but it is not in this kind of specific work. And extroverts work differently - an open office is great for them and they can't understand why anyone wouldn't want to work that way.
Whenever I see companies (usually start ups) who have their coders all working in a bullpen, I secretly think ('not hardcore coders'). Just my bias, but over a career that has now spanned nearly 20 years, I've come to trust it.
I work in an open plan office ...
> By the time people are in their 40s and 50s [...]
That isn't necessarily true, we've had a couple people we have looked at hiring that were interested in working with us because they were tired of being cooped up in small cubicles. Our execs are all over the age of 50, and part of our programming team is over the age of 40. We all share the same space.
> Also, it's not only the noise that makes open-plan offices hell.
There are days when the noise in an open-plan office bothers me, but a pair of good headphones helps sort that out ... generally.
> It's the social overload of being visible to other people. [...] brain-space to the appearance of productivity, in addition to actual productivity, [...]
And this is where I have to disagree with you. This comes down to culture. At my office you can spend the entire day coding and push 800 new lines of code to out git repositories, but at the same time we also all understand that every so often you need to switch off. If you spend an entire day reading Reddit, Hacker News and Wikipedia it may not even be an entire day wasted (especially if stuff on those sites relates to work), but it can help you get out of the singular mindset of work, and have you thinking of other things, and thus help relax.
When it is expected that you can't work 8 hours a day on the same programming project that fear of being "caught" not being productive goes away. There is a mutual understanding that doing those things for a week on end isn't right, but at the same time we also understand, the execs understand, our boss's understand that everyone needs some down time.
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Apologies to those trying to access the article.
In my old co's cube-farm, they even had a paging system where service/tech-support calls to certain individuals were blasted over the whole building. So, every 5-15 minutes you'd get a (BEEP - "Rick/John/Dale/Pam/etc, line 2" click). The paging-lady was very proper too, so she always used people's first and last name.
The HR people & bean-counters loved it because they got to watch everyone (real-time worker productivity analytics!). They never really understood why nothing ever got done on time; or why some people liked to work late, or come in early.
It was an old manufacturing business run by bunch of boomers, who hadn't been outside in decades, and who thought they'd made it a big (100 employees!) company (but in my mind it was a parody of). Another funny note, they'd built this place in response to growth, and planned/expected more growth. However, the building (new, purpose built) only had additional floor space for a few more cubes, so when the growth happened, they had to wiggle, shove, & stuff people into every nook and cranny they could find. Well, that was therapeutic.
I'm not a programmer (professionally, anyways) but an analyst, which also requires huge blocks of uninterrupted time. Clients don't understand why I don't answer the phone all the time and refer them to email communication for non-major stuff.
I particularly disliked the fact that some people lacking a technical background don't really understand that we often need a distraction free environment. Perhaps it's because their creative spark comes by brainstorming in a more lively environment or they have seen too many people coding at Starbucks.
In a Starbucks, it's loud, but you can tune out the noise without social penalty. No one is going to look over your shoulder or interrupt you in a coffee shop. You can put on noise-canceling headphones and sit with your back to a wall. Only a small percentage of the evil of open-plan offices is noise-related.
It's the emotional load of being visible to people who can fuck with their livelihood for any reason or no reason that makes open-plan offices terrible. People become resentful, competitive, and miserable. Those environments are said to foster collaboration, but have the opposite effect, because most people shut down at a certain level of sensory and social overload, the result being that communication grinds to a halt.
Open-plan offices are said to be egalitarian, but in practice, they increase rank discrepancies and social inequalities, because they reflect an unconditional right of management to harass and monitor subordinates.
The other interesting thing is that there's a lot of evidence suggesting that almost everyone (over 90%) will develop work-related health problems in an open-plan office. The question is how long it will take. Median seems to be about 10-15 years, making open-plan offices a legal way to say, "We don't want to hire anyone over 40".
I mean, come on, over 90%? If the evidence was that clear then you would, for example, expect some worker-friendly country like France or Sweden to have banned or regulated open plan offices. As far as I know, they haven't.
I don't doubt open plan is unpleasant; nor that it can cause health problems; and I accept that the rise in health problems may be hard to measure because most companies moved to open plan. However, what you said about >90% health problems and 10-15 year worker lifetimes oversells and undermines what are otherwise very good points.
The problem is that an open-plan ban is not appropriate for all work environments. One example would be a hospital. If you can't handle the stress of an operating room (and many people can't) then you shouldn't be a surgeon. The job has intrinsic stress, and that's a factor in the compensation.
That's the fundamental problem with regulation and government intervention: it's hard to get the special cases right. An open-plan ban would be a good thing for the vast majority of white-collar office workers, but it clearly can't be applied to all work environments (medicine, military).
If I recall correctly, many countries do have lower limits on personal working space, usually in the neighborhood of 10 m^2. It'd be hard to enact a blanket open-plan ban because the concept isn't well-defined, but work space regulations are already in place.
An additional factor that is hard to regulate: the health load of an open-plan office seems to be a function of the person's age, position in the hierarchy, and the amount of personal space. Open-plan wouldn't be so bad if people had the recommended 200 SF (18.6 m^2) with barriers at their backs. At the typical 50 SF, with the person visible from behind and prone to managerial harassment, it's a catastrophe.
However, what you said about >90% health problems and 10-15 year worker lifetimes oversells and undermines what are otherwise very good points.
Perhaps 90% is high, but the going assumption people make when designing office spaces is that the typical open plan office (< 100 SF, open-back visibility) will increase attrition by about 10% per year for younger people and 20% for older people. How much of this one wishes to attribute to health issues, and how much to less serious garden-variety unhappiness, is somewhat of an open question.
My productivity has fallen by at least half, probably more.
Whenever someone suggests a 'bullpen' or 'open' office, I cringe, because, well, I actually want to get things done.
Can you tell I am not having a happy experience being acquired and working at $BIGCORP?
I'm on a team of about 10 people, mostly developers, with a few QA specialists mixed. 3 are remote.
At my office, we have normal cubes on the first floor. But, we spend 90% of our work hours in a "lab" on the second floor. The lab has one central conference table, so we're all facing each other.
So, if we need quiet time to talk on the phone or concentrate, we go downstairs. But, the default for most of the developers is upstairs. Our analyst splits about 50/50.
I really like this arrangement. I find I'm LESS distracted when I'm working in a group, even it we're just sitting around the table and not actually talking or pair programming.
Of course, we can also work from home should the need arise. Overall, my employer is pretty flexible about all of this.