Well no-duh. You can't have a private conversation with anyone outside of emails in those kinds of offices. As an office worker myself, I can tell you that everyone is always worried about offending someone else because it can directly impact their job, so conversations only naturally form when there is a small group.
Now, this isn't always the case, occasionally there is an event where the whole office comes together and that's fun and people talk, but being in that atmosphere at all times has to be oppressive.
Open-plan offices are the bane of modern productivity. Academia is especially vulnerable for it. In my previous job we had enclosed near-soundproof telephone boxes where you had to go if you had to take a call. Talk for more than 10 minutes and the air inside get really hot and bad. Was awful.
When I worked in research I worked in an open plan office but it wasn't too bad because we weren't crammed in like sardines. I had generous desk space, and my nearest colleague was a few metres away. But generally I see no real advantage to that arrangement over more traditional office space because the much vaunted benefits never materialised in all my time working there.
Whether it helps breed collaboration or not, I have noticed, both in school and in my workplace, that it has helped breed a friendly and collegial environment. Even if you aren't talking to somebody, you still seem them around and it opens up the possibility of talking to them more.
Interesting article, I think the ideal would be to have a diversity of types of office spaces (just like a school campus has a bunch of different study areas), and allow people to move freely between them. (Especially if they had a mix of standing and sitting desks, etc. I get so tired of my sitting desk, but in an open office environment (especially a designed one) it would feel weird being the only one standing all the time.
Open office plans are disgusting. They exist to minimize space and individuality of workers, remove any privacy so that everyone can see what everyone is doing at all times, and give managers the ability to always be watching and scrutinizing every moment of a worker's life while they are there. It maximizes paranoia of the workers because you are literally always being watched, if not by management then by other workers who are just too damn nosy and care more about what others are doing than their own behavior. Open office plans are worse than even cubicle layouts about reducing everyone to just worker drones.
Out of touch managers implementing pop-psychology procedures from the comfort of their private offices has a detrimental effect on their employees?
Well colour me shocked.
Outside of our daily standup I have almost no social interaction at work because all communication is done via slack even though my coworkers are 25 feet away
I may be a weirdo because I actually like cubicles, then again I'm an introvert so that's probably why. It's also easier to slack off a little when you have no actual work to do with a cubical. I find it oddly relaxing to walk around a traditional office space.
I feel it really depends on the actual work environment. I've had jobs where an open plan would have been a disaster, and my current job has them but it works very well with the environment and attitude the owners try to foster/hire people fit for.
I think open offices work better for more creative companies, e.g. game developers and whatnot; makes it easier to collaborate (esp if your desks are on wheels and whathaveyou)
IIRC Valve have a similar policy with 'hotdesking' etc and it is disastrous.
Case in point for how it affects Valve releasing content: A mapper was making a TF2 map to be one of the launch maps and left the team. He came back over seven years later to finish the map and ship it, then
probably left the team again.
Wouldn't that be more to blame on Valve's structure as opposed to a more hierarchial structure and moving around to work within your team
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