[Coworking] Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/18/open-plan-offices-bad-harvard-business-review Putting this out there because I suspect what gets posted is generally filtered toward the coworking positive. While cubicles are the worst, this article is about shortcomings of open-plan offices more generally. Putting aside the obvious fact that even if open-plan offices aren't for everyone, they're certainly preferred by many of us, my existing bias has been that most independent workers would do better (in terms of psychological health as well as productivity and work quality) over the long run in a social work environment than in a private/enclosed office. But articles like this make me wonder if that really is just my own bias. Most of the findings suggested are contrary to what I would expect for independent workers, and I wonder how much the results here may be contingent on working in an organization (where being in an open plan office also corresponds to being lower in the work hierarchy and where many of the people you're working alongside are implicit competitors). Thoughts? Where does this article go wrong (other than suggesting one size fits all)? Does it suggest that ideal coworking space design would work include ample opportunities for more private work and more isolated collaboration? Will -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: [Coworking] Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
1) if you're good for everyone, you're great for no-one. 2) earlier this year, noise levels came up as an opportunity for improving Indy Hall during one of our own internal research projects. Curious for more details, I followed up with a subsequent line of questions: where so you believe the noise is coming from? Is it people on their phones, people talking to each other at their desks, people talking to each other in nearby common areas, or something else entirely? The results of that question were evenly spread across the options (ha!) but the real answer emerged: WAY more people than had mentioned noise issues spoke up and said Please don't make Indy Hall more quiet. I come here for the noise. I love that buzz. I can't get it anywhere else. If I wanted silence, I'd stay at home or go to the library. 3) I've worked on several projects now re: open floor plan implementations in corporate settings. Every time it looks like this: * company spends a boatload of money on design, architects, and furniture * everybody hates it, rebellion, etc (not unlike the article) * Alex's phone rings, why isn't this working? My first question is, well what did you change? The answer is ALWAYS environment. It's NEVER anything related to culture, management or communication. That's the problem. The environment needs to match the culture, the management, and the communication. Two concrete examples: A) manager cites that she likes the flexibility of choosing different areas to work, but...there's a new problem. I never know where my team is. I spend half of my day hunting them down. The communication and leadership techniques were never given to the team on how to effectively check in and report to each other. It's not so much about flatness but a network style of communication rather than a hub and spoke style. B) employees hate the open floor plan. Cite all sorts of things like in the article. So I start to dig into the specifics. A common pattern emerges: trust. People don't like having people able to walk by and see what they're doing. They feel like their manager is hovering more (which she may or may not be - the point is the feeling). Someone's always looking for a way to get a leg up, or take credit. Again, a culture issue. Zero work is being done by management or staff to build or reinforce trust in the workplace, or worse, they actively do things to chip away at trust (this is a huge systemic issue that repeats across basically every project I've worked on). Without trust, open isn't possible. And that goes far beyond floor plans. That's just a sampling of my own research. I, too, have had my personal biases challenged a lot during this work, but continue to discover that the root problems are consistent - and have VERY LITTLE to do with space design (a few exceptions, I could talk about those another time). The issues are nearly 100% caused by pre-existing cultural problems that the space exacerbated, and/or a very poor approach to cultural change management to get it in line with the new space long before the millions are spent on furniture. -Alex -- /ah indyhall.org betterwork.co On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 4:56 AM, Will Bennis, Locus Workspace wmben...@locusworkspace.com=mailto:wmben...@locusworkspace.com; wrote: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/18/open-plan-offices-bad-harvard-business-review Putting this out there because I suspect what gets posted is generally filtered toward the coworking positive. While cubicles are the worst, this article is about shortcomings of open-plan offices more generally. Putting aside the obvious fact that even if open-plan offices aren't for everyone, they're certainly preferred by many of us, my existing bias has been that most independent workers would do better (in terms of psychological health as well as productivity and work quality) over the long run in a social work environment than in a private/enclosed office. But articles like this make me wonder if that really is just my own bias. Most of the findings suggested are contrary to what I would expect for independent workers, and I wonder how much the results here may be contingent on working in an organization (where being in an open plan office also corresponds to being lower in the work hierarchy and where many of the people you're working alongside are implicit competitors). Thoughts? Where does this article go wrong (other than suggesting one size fits all)? Does it suggest that ideal coworking space design would work include ample opportunities for more private work and more isolated collaboration? Will -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: [Coworking] Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
And this is not that surprising. It is much easier to change a floorplan, which merely involves throwing money around, than it is to change a culture, which is a lot of hard, and frequently uncomfortable, work, on the part of everyone from the CEO on down. It is hard because it means changing ingrained habits, and uncomfortable because it forces people to admit that possibly they were doing it wrong in the past. On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 7:35 AM, Alex Hillman dangerouslyawes...@gmail.comwrote: 1) if you're good for everyone, you're great for no-one. 2) earlier this year, noise levels came up as an opportunity for improving Indy Hall during one of our own internal research projects. Curious for more details, I followed up with a subsequent line of questions: where so you believe the noise is coming from? Is it people on their phones, people talking to each other at their desks, people talking to each other in nearby common areas, or something else entirely? The results of that question were evenly spread across the options (ha!) but the real answer emerged: WAY more people than had mentioned noise issues spoke up and said Please don't make Indy Hall more quiet. I come here for the noise. I love that buzz. I can't get it anywhere else. If I wanted silence, I'd stay at home or go to the library. 3) I've worked on several projects now re: open floor plan implementations in corporate settings. Every time it looks like this: * company spends a boatload of money on design, architects, and furniture * everybody hates it, rebellion, etc (not unlike the article) * Alex's phone rings, why isn't this working? My first question is, well what did you change? The answer is ALWAYS environment. It's NEVER anything related to culture, management or communication. That's the problem. The environment needs to match the culture, the management, and the communication. Two concrete examples: A) manager cites that she likes the flexibility of choosing different areas to work, but...there's a new problem. I never know where my team is. I spend half of my day hunting them down. The communication and leadership techniques were never given to the team on how to effectively check in and report to each other. It's not so much about flatness but a network style of communication rather than a hub and spoke style. B) employees hate the open floor plan. Cite all sorts of things like in the article. So I start to dig into the specifics. A common pattern emerges: trust. People don't like having people able to walk by and see what they're doing. They feel like their manager is hovering more (which she may or may not be - the point is the feeling). Someone's always looking for a way to get a leg up, or take credit. Again, a culture issue. Zero work is being done by management or staff to build or reinforce trust in the workplace, or worse, they actively do things to chip away at trust (this is a huge systemic issue that repeats across basically every project I've worked on). Without trust, open isn't possible. And that goes far beyond floor plans. That's just a sampling of my own research. I, too, have had my personal biases challenged a lot during this work, but continue to discover that the root problems are consistent - and have VERY LITTLE to do with space design (a few exceptions, I could talk about those another time). The issues are nearly 100% caused by pre-existing cultural problems that the space exacerbated, and/or a very poor approach to cultural change management to get it in line with the new space long before the millions are spent on furniture. -Alex -- /ah indyhall.org betterwork.co On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 4:56 AM, Will Bennis, Locus Workspace wmben...@locusworkspace.com=mailto:wmben...@locusworkspace.com; wrote: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/18/open-plan-offices-bad-harvard-business-review Putting this out there because I suspect what gets posted is generally filtered toward the coworking positive. While cubicles are the worst, this article is about shortcomings of open-plan offices more generally. Putting aside the obvious fact that even if open-plan offices aren't for everyone, they're certainly preferred by many of us, my existing bias has been that most independent workers would do better (in terms of psychological health as well as productivity and work quality) over the long run in a social work environment than in a private/enclosed office. But articles like this make me wonder if that really is just my own bias. Most of the findings suggested are contrary to what I would expect for independent workers, and I wonder how much the results here may be contingent on working in an organization (where being in an open plan office also corresponds to being lower in the work hierarchy and where many of the people you're working alongside are implicit competitors). Thoughts? Where does this article go wrong
Re: [Coworking] Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
Best environment I ever worked in was *mostly* open... very low partitions. In our case (Nokia service office), people adjusted and noise of any kind was never an issue. We had glass-walled rooms around the perimeter for meetings, etc. Amazingly enough, we had a high number of introverts (including myself) who Ive usually seen complain about this sort of setup-- none did. I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see other human beings instead of being surrounded by a grey maze. As far as noise, in the tech world you get a lot of people talking OVER the high cube walls, so... Randy On November 21, 2013 at 3:56 AM Will Bennis, Locus Workspace wmben...@locusworkspace.com wrote: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/18/open-plan-offices-bad-harvard-business-review Putting this out there because I suspect what gets posted is generally filtered toward the coworking positive. While cubicles are the worst, this article is about shortcomings of open-plan offices more generally. Putting aside the obvious fact that even if open-plan offices arent for everyone, theyre certainly preferred by many of us, my existing bias has been that most independent workers would do better (in terms of psychological health as well as productivity and work quality) over the long run in a social work environment than in a private/enclosed office. But articles like this make me wonder if that really is just my own bias. Most of the findings suggested are contrary to what I would expect for independent workers, and I wonder how much the results here may be contingent on working in an organization (where being in an open plan office also corresponds to being lower in the work hierarchy and where many of the people youre working alongside are implicit competitors). Thoughts? Where does this article go wrong (other than suggesting one size fits all)? Does it suggest that ideal coworking space design would work include ample opportunities for more private work and more isolated collaboration? Will -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: [Coworking] Re: Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
Carsten- +1 Like. Joel On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Carsten Foertsch cars...@deskmag.comwrote: When we asked members of coworking spaces in our surveys what bothered them the most, the biggest problem was the noise, a range of 15% and 20%. However, the noise has almost NO negative impact on the popularity of a coworking space. When asking members how much they like their coworking spaces, there was almost no difference between members who have or or don't have a problem with noise. A membership is rather cancelled when a person doesn't like other people at a coworking space. That's an option which most of employees don't have, no wonder why they would prefer a private office in this case. It's a point which was not a part of the discussed research. At betahaus, where we work, the operators once created a silent room as reaction to noise problems. As result, they were less people who worked at this part of betahaus. This room was quite big, probably too big. The operators re-arranged this room again, this time by setting up a normal open space surrounded by some team offices, mainly for those who work for customer support. Btw, there is also a big difference between the sound of a sea, and a jackhammer nearby. Regular noise on a low level is usually less disturbing. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
[Coworking] Re: Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
When we asked members of coworking spaces in our surveys what bothered them the most, the biggest problem was the noise, a range of 15% and 20%. However, the noise has almost NO negative impact on the popularity of a coworking space. When asking members how much they like their coworking spaces, there was almost no difference between members who have or or don't have a problem with noise. A membership is rather cancelled when a person doesn't like other people at a coworking space. That's an option which most of employees don't have, no wonder why they would prefer a private office in this case. It's a point which was not a part of the discussed research. At betahaus, where we work, the operators once created a silent room as reaction to noise problems. As result, they were less people who worked at this part of betahaus. This room was quite big, probably too big. The operators re-arranged this room again, this time by setting up a normal open space surrounded by some team offices, mainly for those who work for customer support. Btw, there is also a big difference between the sound of a sea, and a jackhammer nearby. Regular noise on a low level is usually less disturbing. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
