Tip of the day: Ditch your office cubicles
Our good friend Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal has published a great piece today explaining why more and more tech titans, including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and now Intel, are beginning to mimic an organizational principle more common to Web 2.0 startups: They’re ditching their office cubicles!
In place of the old-school, upholstered grey boxes, Intel will apparently be implementing far more open, social office layouts that “include tables where several users can plop down with laptop computers, multiworker desks, and lounge-like settings with armchairs.”
Why? Well… as Don reports, through testing these new, more community-friendly work environments, old school managers have finally come to accept that “Dilbert-style cubicles have many shortcomings.”
1) For one thing, [cubicles] tend to block visibility without blocking much noise from other cubes.
2) Paradoxically, in cubes, people are often unaware of how much noise they are making, compared with workers in open-seating plans.
3) Cubicles can prompt odd behavior… It is hard to see if colleagues are busy, so some cube-dwellers will send emails to a neighbor about a simple question that could have been answered more easily in a conversation.
4) In an internal survey, 50% of employees said Intel’s cubicle scheme didn’t promote innovation. (According to Neil Tunmore, Intel’s director of corporate services)
5) Corporate bean counters [tend to] seize on the expense of office space that is often empty, as workers spend more time traveling, telecommuting or meeting with colleagues….
So, while comedian Conan O’Brien, observed in a visit to Intel headquarters in May that “[Intel's cubicle-org] makes people feel that they are all basically the same, that there is no individuality, there is no hope,” tests show open-planning has many benefits:
1) Contact and collaboration boost productivity for many employees. Rather than make isolation the norm, employers should provide quiet zones for when they are needed, he said.
2) The rise of wireless networking has made [modile work] easier for workers with laptop computers to be productive while dropping in at unassigned desks or open tables.
3) An Intel survery showed many workers want more common spaces</strong… they also wanted less noise; in cubes, people are often unaware of how much noise they are making, compared with workers in open-seating plans.
4) Cisco, which began adding open-desk and seating options in 2004, estimated [that this] improved use of its offices has reduced space-related costs in remodeled areas by 37%.
Conclusion: So, if cubes inhibit creativity, innovation and productivity; and if hey’re also an expense likely to draw the attention of bean counters eager to cut costs, why keep your cubicles? Answer: Don’t!
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As someone that has gone from cubes to a slightly more open-seating plan, I can say that if we’d come to this plan from the outset it would be great. However taking employees used to being in cubes and then removing the walls, as it were, has not alleviated many of the noise and odd behavior problems. In fact people have continued to act as if they do have walls, many hanging memos, calendars, etc. in an effort to regain their obstructed views.
Unfortunately, since we are working in a contractor/client environment, the employees in these new spaces had no say in their layout or design so in effect it feels as if the only kind of “office” we had was taken from us. So I’d advise companies thinking of this to at least gauge the reaction of their employees before making such a drastic change. My co-workers and I have been sharing it for about 6 months and if you took a poll, people would still say that they hate it and miss their cubes. :-)
The above read innovation is already started for the last two years and the results are favorable to this time.But it has nothing to do with web2.0.
It can be tricky, though. I used to work in a room with 4 desks. It worked great for 3 of us, but the fourth (not me) almost went crazy daily listening to the others chit-chat. OTOH, the big office I worked in where everyone had their own rooms was an interpersonal disaster- no one ever talked live.
Personal space definitely varies by person. There’s no way to get it right for everyone all the time.
Cubicles can prompt odd behavior… It is hard to see if colleagues are busy, so some cube-dwellers will send emails to a neighbor about a simple question that could have been answered more easily in a conversation.
That’s a GOOD THING.
A colleague coming around to ask a “simple question” will destroy hard to built concentration, and pop one out of “the zone”.
The same question in an email can be answered when *I* have time to answer it.
I guess if your job is about *brainstorming* all the time, this is fine. But for programming and hard sciences even cubicles are not enough isolation. Separate offices are way better.
Oh, if only! To even be away from printers, fax machines, and the constant whir of the fan that cools my cube would be an excellent start. I wonder what the girl in front of me would do when she couldn’t whisper all day on the phone while she thinks nobody can hear her. haha
As it is now, a co-worker that sits 2 cubes up from me communicate back and forth via Google Chat. How ridiculous!
I came here from my Global Dashboard. Congratulations on your successful blog!
That is dumb. Totally dumb. If anything, as a programmer, I need individual offices. Maybe this will work for big companies where people aren’t doing any creative work most of the times [I work for a big company], but in a startup setting [my startup was acquired by a big company] you HAVE to zone out and work.
You really have to focus on your work and not be distracted. Good work happens when the developer can zone out and hold the code in his head. Ask Paul Graham or DHH [37 signals]. DHH doesn’t even come to work on most days. 37 signals has this rule where for half the day no one disturbs anyone else, and it is a 10 person company.
In a big company like HP or Intel, there would be no creative work done in such a setting.
In 1979, at A-dec in the rural suburb of Newberg, outside of Portland, Oregon, I worked for five years in an open plan office with the 15 or so other members of the marketing department. This was a plan that worked great for marketing and the noise was much lower than the 10 years I spent working in cubes at Intel (Hillsboro, OR) from 1996-2006.
Seems the cycle has come full circle on this trend.
As far as programming is concerned, see how your team works. Some teams are more collaborative where open plans are good and some are more individual oriented where a private office is good.
The important thing is that cubicles are bad for both. Neither do you get privacy, nor are you able to collaborate.
An interesting setup is the ‘caves and commons’ setup where you have one area for collaboration (commons) and one area for private work (caves).
One thing with open plan is to separate out functions based on noise. For example, put noise generators like printers, sales dept etc in a different area from programming.
I recently gave a presentation on this topic at DCamp in Bangalore. I’ve put the notes here – http://www.silverstripesoftware.com/blog/archives/69