as someone who works a blue-collar job, we tried this in one of our larger auto repair shops and it was a hillarious disaster.
The layout is simple, the back of the shop handles repairs, maintenance, customer orders and such for things like oil changes, and the 'front office' handles your paperwork and such. our owner decided (after a TED talk and one too many martinis at the motel wet bar) we needed to be more open. We tore down dividers and pushed all the desks together and after six months, we'd made nearly everyone insane. invoice printers (impact style) drowned out most of our sales calls. accounts and finance often took their laptops into the garage bays for peace and quiet, which meant laptops littered all over our workbenches during their lunch break. Insurance cited us for having them in the work shop. Some customers...well most...mistook us frequently for a bank, or an adjacent business. our dock/shipping delivery clerk was now hammer-stamping bills of lading right next to one of our senior managers and had to hike back to the docks every 20 minutes (his fitbit tracked 10k steps in 4 hours one day.) The whole thing fell apart when a parts manager accidentally kicked over a waste urea tank fluid container and sent two gallons of rancid liquid into the waiting room carpet.
thank you for this entertaining and educational story!
the spilled urea tank is a particularly interesting element. it seriously seems like this kind of disaster could be used to get other offices to move away from the open plan.
hmmm. what might be the "spilled urea tank" moment in a software startup's office? maybe something related to the CEO's personal information being leaked.
what might be the "spilled urea tank" moment in a software startup's office? maybe something related to the CEO's personal information being leaked.
Yeah probably this. The number of people who I observe walking away from their machines without locking the desktop on a daily basis is terrifying from a security standpoint.
The layout is simple, the back of the shop handles repairs, maintenance, customer orders and such for things like oil changes, and the 'front office' handles your paperwork and such. our owner decided (after a TED talk and one too many martinis at the motel wet bar) we needed to be more open. We tore down dividers and pushed all the desks together and after six months, we'd made nearly everyone insane. invoice printers (impact style) drowned out most of our sales calls. accounts and finance often took their laptops into the garage bays for peace and quiet, which meant laptops littered all over our workbenches during their lunch break. Insurance cited us for having them in the work shop. Some customers...well most...mistook us frequently for a bank, or an adjacent business. our dock/shipping delivery clerk was now hammer-stamping bills of lading right next to one of our senior managers and had to hike back to the docks every 20 minutes (his fitbit tracked 10k steps in 4 hours one day.) The whole thing fell apart when a parts manager accidentally kicked over a waste urea tank fluid container and sent two gallons of rancid liquid into the waiting room carpet.