

Cornell Study Favors Open Plan Offices - abalone
http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf

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sorincos
The premise of this remarkable study is:

"The officeʹs primary (not only) value, we believe, is as a place for
face‐to‐face interaction: a place to meet co‐workers and managers, to inspire,
coach, be motivated, share information, debate goals and objectives,
socialize, make friends, and so on. It is as much or more a social setting as
it is a refuge or technical or information center."

The above doesn't sound to me anything like going to work for... you know,
working. True so: work didn't even make it to the values list. Now I don't
know about you folks but I certainly don't get any pay for socializing, as
much as I'd love to. Cornell somehow confuses the office space with cafeteria.
That, or it makes the case for an open-floor cafeteria, which I fully approve.

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prawks
"... the more open the ʺopenʺ plan office environment, the more conducive it
is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are
critical elements of the work process. Few jobs or professions donʹt qualify."

If those are the criteria, then I would agree that a shared office space's
primary value is certainly to facilitate easy communication. There's very
little point in going in to a shared office building if you are not going to
be physically communicating with anyone there.

Put another way, and to address your point: you can do (office) work anywhere.
A quiet space at home is just as good as one in a shared space for blocking
out distraction and doing "heads-down" work. But the differentiating factor in
the cases concerning this study (and many tech companies) is effective
communication between team members. The study makes the case that open plans
are better suited for that.

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sorincos
I see your point. In my environment communication makes only so much of a
day's time and depending on how high this share is, an open office can boost
or kill productive work. There's this concept of time slots which is
completely failing in an open office environment - you can't honestly dedicate
say 4 hours time at once for doing a certain task. Point is, an open office
gives on one side (communication) while taking on another side (productivity
time) and a certain company's mileage will vary way too wildly between these
extremes. One compares always these schemes in terms of individual
productivity vs. team productivity, but honestly said, all arguments seem to
me completely random. There are no "standard" humans and when one will suffer
from too much disturbance, its team will suffer too. And when one project will
suffer from too little communication, the team will suffer too. What's the
middle ground then? I strongly believe the "team room" is the sole setup which
can be justified realistically.

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gtirloni
I see my more "communication" inclined coworkers talking all the time in our
open floor office. They talk about work for sure, but also jokes, women,
soccer, etc. This is very good for socialization and building relationships
but it's terrible when I'm trying to find out the root cause for a difficult
issue.

It seems the has been too much emphasys on the socializing aspects of open
floor offices and not the equivalent attention to concentration and flow
required for the type of tasks we're assigned to.

~~~
sorincos
I'm working on the same open floor with people from another company with
completely unrelated duties. I fail to see how this socialization is helping
my own team's work (incidentally my team is NOT colocated). Nevertheless,
officially we're happy open office users.

