

Two Approaches to Employee Productivity - cwan
http://businomics.typepad.com/businomics_blog/2009/12/two-approaches-to-employee-productivity.html

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pkaler
Square footage of office space is a step function. You have to move office
space whenever you outgrow your current office space. It's the move out and
move in process that is expensive.

That's usually why companies jam employees together. The space starts at 8x8
for each employee and shrinks over the years because the company can afford
the incremental cost of adding headcount but can't afford the big cost of
moving to a new space.

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icefox
At one place I worked thy shrunk everyone from 8x8 to 8x6. I never really
understood why especially after seeing it could only save around $400. It took
on average a few days to pack up a cube because it was also used as a
declutter time (IT goes a few hundred unused computers out of it) The company
paid someone else to move our boxes to the wall, convert all our cubes to 8x6
and then move us back. The company had to buy all of the 6x5 foot cube parts
(as we had all 8x5). And and in another lost day for unpacking. Moral was low
because 1) you got a much smaller spot 2) the promised common areas never
came, 3) there were now huge open areas where they didn't put in new cubes
reminding us that we have less space. And the kicker? When we started there
were already free cubes from layoffs...

Edit: The company owned the whole building so shrinking the space we used
didn't reduce our rent.

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diN0bot
i don't think cutting costs by reducing office space has anything to do with
employee productivity....it has more to do with cutting costs.

it is still a good point to optimize where it matters.

~~~
selven
It's true in programming and its true everywhere else: don't optimize before
you find the real bottlenecks. Otherwise you'll have a 1% gain but all sorts
of unforeseen consequences start popping up.

