I would have liked to see some studies on actual productivity level fluctuations based on these moves.
Otherwise, it's simply another variation of "I'm not used to it, so it's bad."
Personally I have seen private and public ways of working succeed for different styles of projects which seems to be the newest trend i.e. having mix use spaces.
The best model I've heard about is "work rooms" for everyone, with facilities to move to when you're collaborating.
I'm mostly asking to see those studies & have a nuanced breakdown of them (rather than simply saying they exist or (as the author did in their piece) saying they had a bad experience)).
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413...
[2] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/255498?uid=3739696&uid...
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...
It's the same as the "I can work 60 hours productivly" brigade. All the studies, for over a century (yes, century, not decades) have shown otherwise. They are studies that show that people delude themselves into thinking they are more productive than they are. And yet, no matter how many articles and papers you post, nope.
HN insists.
They are ingrained memes on HN that won't, despite all the evidence you ever post, go away.
So why bother? You can google it yourself, and then promptly ignore all the professional studies and still believe in open plan offices. It's simply not worth the effort.
Interesting.
For some reason working conditions and working hours are incredibly emotive subjects, similar to women in tech, that tend to bring out the irrational side of otherwise lucid HN posters.
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But seriously, how can NOT putting large number of people together for long times not cause diseases? That's one of major reason flu starts during the winter...
Not the author of the comment you're replying to but elsewhere in this thread (in response to someone else looking for studies) I provided links to numerous articles that each cite/link multiple studies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9611091
But to be helpful, http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Open+office+plans+productivity
I would like to see the studies that show ANY positive benefit from open office plans, other than: "They are cheaper to built and run".
"data suggest that creating collisions—chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization—improves performance"
Just one of many notable quotes from the article.
It isn't a formal study but it is pragmatic i.e. "Managers might be tempted to simply build big social spaces and expect great results, but it’s not that simple. Companies must have an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve (higher productivity? more creativity?) before changing a space"
If you're a company with hundreds of worldwide branches, then the potential benefits make asking questions like this a worthwhile endeavour. Very large companies actually try to design their buildings around what will lead to the greatest productivity.
If you're a smaller company, then you might want open plan offices for very different reasons (a perception of cohesion etc). Data can and is applied to this, but it typically isn't because the companies aren't large enough for it to matter too much in terms of productivity; the benefits start to be dwarfed by more pressing matters.
http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_13
Tom de Marco quotes Cristopher Alexander, his first rule is that there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution :) but there are patterns :)
Alexander identifies the need for all three of
- a communal space
- a semiprivate/team space ("war rooms", etc)
- a private space
Also: "Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space and each individual needs protected private space."
They also say that:
"enclosed offices need not be one-person offices. The two- or three- or four-person office makes a lot more sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align with work groups. Even in open-plan offices, co-workers should be encouraged to modify the grid to put their areas together into small suites. When this is allowed, people become positively ingenious in laying out the area to serve all their needs: work space, meeting space, and social space. Since they tend to be in interaction mode together or simultaneously in flow mode, they have less noise clash with each other than they would with randomly selected neighbors."