
An Office Designed To Keep Employees Working From Home - kirpekar
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678967/an-office-designed-to-keep-employees-working-from-home
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jacques_chester
It will definitely keep people away, just not for the reasons the bean
counters expected.

1\. People like having their own desks.

2\. With enough space to actually work on.

3\. Where they can hear themselves think.

I feel like it's time to carpet-bomb management and B-schools with
_PeopleWare_ again.

A few years ago I did a 3-week internship in the consulting arm of a Big 4
accounting firm. They had hot-desking in their office -- you were supposed to
book it on the day. In practice certain folk had "ins" with the space and
planning staff and so certain desks were never "available".

The practical upshot was that you had to wander around the vast office for 20
minutes trying to find the desk you booked from home that morning. And
meetings were a pain. "Where are you? Red battleship 27 omega-B? I'm in pink
rubber ducky 14 sigma-epsilon-J".

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learc83
>just not for the reasons the bean counters expected

>People like having their own desks.

The lack of assigned desks was explicitly mentioned as one of the changes
designed to keep people away.

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jacques_chester
A much simpler way would be to simply close the office. Cheaper too.

Accidentally creating a poor working environment out of ignorance is one
thing, but _deliberately_ doing so borders on madness.

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learc83
It does seem to be a round about way to do it, but I was just pointing out
that it _was_ intentional, not agreeing with it.

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tobtoh
My previous company tried to encourage more support teams (sysadmins, dbas,
storage etc) to work from home and a lot of people embraced it. However the
company discovered an unfortunate side effect - teaming broke down.

When our customers had critical incidents, our ability to respond and resolve
the issues became worse and worse. The effect of working from home caused the
teams (and even people within the teams themselves) to often fail to see the
problem holistically. They would check their specific area and then pass the
buck to another team.

Telecommuting definitely has benefits in the right situations, but if your
work requires groups of people to collaborate closely and quickly,
telecommuting can have a very adverse effect on your performance.

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tallanvor
People regularly underestimate the benefits of a team working in the same
office. I don't care how effective people feel they are when working from
home, the team as a whole will function much better with everyone in the
office.

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jrockway
Distributed teams are an anti-pattern. It's much easier to work with someone
when you see them every day and perhaps have a few drinks after work from time
to time. When everyone is just a name attached to an email or a voice on a
noisy phone line, you're probably not going to feel too motivated to help them
much. And without teamwork, why have a team?

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mcantor
I downvoted you because I believe your comment reflects a much more
problematic anti-pattern that colors this debate: some companies have 100%
distributed teams who deliver work and are happy with their jobs. Some
companies have 100% on-site teams who deliver work and are happy with their
jobs. _Clearly_ , both of these systems work. Dismissing the entire practice
of distributed teams as "an anti-pattern" is leaving a huge body of discussion
on the table. It's obvious that this works in some situations and not others.
You're assuming facts not in evidence: " _When everyone is just a name
attached to an email or a voice on a noisy phone line..._ " The article
specifically says that there are high-quality screens installed _all over the
place_ to address exactly this concern. Please, let's stop repeating the same
scripts and talk about what's really going on!

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dredmorbius
It's the mix that doesn't work particularly well.

 _Especially_ a mix in which certain team members are perpetually "outside"
the main group. The remote participants simply don't have access to the same
side-channel discussions office residents do. Location, bandwidth, and multi-
channel communications (sight, sound, and even touch) matter.

The places I've seen this work well (very rare) involve people who travel
frequently between locations (expensive and personally disruptive), and in
which work and participation are forced onto the same channels remote workers
use (chat/IRC/voice).

And sadly, in 2011, speakerphones and audio conferencing still sucks
massively.

If you've got a very strong, very cohesive, very long-lived team, _with a
history of strong direct interpersonal relations_ , you may be able to get
away from this.

Another factor I suspect has a strong bearing on this is a team in which
members are chosen by merit (or at least on a broad-based acclaim, not by a
single hire/fire entity), and who cannot be easily shed. Scientific
communities, some forms of government collaboration, and much of the Free
Software community operates on this basis.

Knowing your job is NOT at stake for any given mistake, error, or political
misstep you make does a great deal for such activities to engender stronger
and better participation.

In my experience.

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ams6110
_And sadly, in 2011, speakerphones and audio conferencing still sucks
massively._

I do some work at a large university where they have abundant bandwidth and
the latest "telepresence" hardware, and as often as not you are still dealing
with laggy audio/images, freezes, dropouts, echos, individual participants
having technical issues or ignorant of how to use the systems, etc. It just
doesn't work smoothly enough to be a pleasant experience, and often times is
such a distraction as to render the entire exercise a waste of time.

~~~
jrockway
We have a couple million-dollar Cisco telepresence setups where I work, and
the experience has always been pretty great.

One time, it was 2am and my friend and I had just been kicked out of a bar
near our office. There was also a severe thunderstorm warning in effect (with
a lot of lightning) so we decided to go back to work instead of riding our
bikes home in a tornado. Being rather inebriated, we did not do much work.
Instead, we wandered around the building and found the telepresence rooms. We
wondered, "how do we link these up and have a conference". There was a phone
in each room, and they had some digits on them, so I went to the other
telepresence and punched those digits into the phone-like device there.
Connected! We then had a conversation for a good hour or so; it was so much
like real life that it wasn't worth the effort to get up and walk back to the
other room to have a "real" "in-person" conversation. There was no latency.
Eye-contact was eye-contact. Everything was the right size. The displays may
have even been Retina Displays; I didn't notice any pixels like I might when
watching HDTV.

So all in all, not bad when done right. It passed the "wait out a tornado
while drunk test", which I think says a lot.

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dredmorbius
Well, duh: two highly engineered rooms proximally located with high-speed data
links (presumably) between them.

So: being right next door was practically like being ... right next door.

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HeyLaughingBoy
The point is that the hardware works quite well. I don't remember who makes
our telepresence system, but connecting to a branch office over 1,000 miles
away, the audio & video quality is still "like next door."

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ericfrenkiel
A good office should attract people and by extension, serve as a recruiting
tool.

Their modern facade of bright colors and "hip" furniture doesn't conceal the
fluorescent lights, low ceilings, and berber carpeting.

Imagine the opposite - 20-foot ceilings, lots of natural sun light, and
hardwood floors - and you can feel it's much more conducive for working.

~~~
dredmorbius
What's the advantage of hardwood floors, if I may ask?

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ericfrenkiel
They're much cleaner than carpet and reduce allergies.

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nsxwolf
My company has had this setup for the past 12 years. We have a small office
with desks and conference rooms anyone can grab if they are free.

It works well. I work from home 99.9% of the time, but sometimes it's nice to
go into the office for a change of scenery or when the cable goes out. There's
usually one or two random people also in the office at any given time and you
get to have interesting randomized social experiences by going out to lunch or
dinner with them.

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citricsquid
This fits the startup way of thinking but not the real way of thinking. If you
can't draw a line between your work and personal life you'll burn out a lot
sooner.

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corin_
Plenty of people nothing to do with startups work from home, whether because
they are self-employed, or aren't willing to relocate, or their company
doesn't have a physical location.

Some people may have trouble with it and find themselves working too hard,
others may find it hard to focus and are instead too lazy. Neither of these,
however, are a requirement of working from home, plenty of people manage it
fine.

~~~
citricsquid
My point is that those that do work from home and do it successfully (at least
in my experience) have a separate work area for work that is _not_ considered
"home" but considered work, this is a concious decision people make to deal
with working from home and not being distracted. If someone has an office to
go to but also works from home they will often not consider creating _another_
workspace at home and that will result in their home life and work life
"merging". For a startup having your home life and work life being one and the
same is relatively normal (again in my experience at least) but with a
"normal" job most people don't want that. They go to work, they come home,
work is done. If the line between home and work is merged as much as the
article proposes without people making sure to create a separate work
environment at home they'll have problems.

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Loic
I have been working from home for the past 6 years. I have a dedicated room
for my office. Work can be done only in my office, not even on the kitchen
table. This is a hard rule and it is really good. You can enjoy a nice evening
with wife and kids without thinking about working because work is only in the
office.

If you start to allow yourself to work here and there with the kids playing on
the side, you totally blur the lines between your activities and you end up
being inefficient. You cannot fully focus on work and you cannot fully enjoy
your time with your family and friends.

Note that this is only my personal experience.

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rhizome
It was called "Hotdesking" 10+ years ago and it was a failure then, too.
Architect Rem Koolhaas ran his office with it, and people hated it.

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9999
Didn't Sun also employ this strategy to somewhat better effect? I can see a
group of architects hating something like that due to the nature of their work
and the proliferation of tools they need at their desk, and for some types of
software development, I can see the same problem with hotdesking (makes it
harder to run a really crazy workstation with a lot of monitors for one
thing). I suppose now you can just get away with a laptop and a huge EC2
instance for heavy lifting...

Anyone here work at Sun during their Nettop hotdesking phase? What were some
of the pros and cons?

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dredmorbius
Yes, they did, though I don't know about "to better effect".

Chiat Day was another notorious hotdesking failure.

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kylemaxwell
At first, I misread this and thought it was designed to keep employees _from_
working from home.

Glad to see I was wrong.

ObOnTopic: I try to work from home once or twice a week. In those bursts, I
can get a lot of work done that requires concentration and nobody bothering
me. But the rest of the time, I make sure to be in the office, partly for the
serendipitous connections ("oh hey, I've been meaning to ask you...") and
partly for the easy back-and-forth with my team mates.

~~~
dredmorbius
WFH for occasional productivity bursts is fine.

But it's also pointing out a major failing of your office design.

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buss
Should be titled "An Office Designed To Keep Employees From Working"

