> “People are coming in to do occasional big meetings, but really the rest of the time, they want a quiet private spot to get on a Zoom call,” said Witting, a partner at the company. “It’s weird.”
It's not weird. Before we had open concept hellscapes, and the cubicle farm, people had actual offices. Four walls and a door you could close.
WSJ seems to have the memory of a goldfish if they can't hark back to a time before offices became a free-for-all for noise pollution.
Surprise, surprise, people want a quiet private space to do most of their work, and will gravitate toward those [limited] spaces in a modern office.
In my experience, 90% of the modern office was never fun. It was finding a floating desk, putting on noise cancelling headphones, and trying to ignore the constant interruptions to do your work. The only fun part was socialising during lunch/coffee with colleagues, but the rest of the experience was a huge net negative.
The culture of the company has to match the culture of the space. If focus is important it needs to be in the physical design of the space and the culture it supports.
I don't know if newsrooms started open concept but they had it easily for a long time.
As a design, "open concept" in part was less construction costs and more profit for the lease.
Of course, it is pushed as being open/collaborative/innovative. It was an innovative way to openly oversee collaboration, or whatever the acting required to look busy was. :)
> Before we had open concept hellscapes, and the cubicle farm, people had actual offices
It is true, but the move to cubicles and in the end open halls was necessary because rent in prime employment centers of the world has gotten so high, and companies seem to be requiring ever more people and we cant afford to give everyone an office nowadays. Modern office is definitely better in some ways socially, I dont think you will be really motivated to go to work if all you had was one room to sit and close the doors to not see anyone. These days, You have more people to talk to if you want and sometimes its a good and safe environment to discuss things. If I had to sit in an empty room to work and then it wouldn't be any different than working from home.
> I dont think you will be really motivated to go to work if all you had was one room to sit and close the doors to not see anyone
You're describing an office like it's solitary confinement. I'm describing somewhere where you have the option to choose silence and solitude, not the obligation.
> and sometimes its a good and safe environment to discuss things
And the rest of the time? A free-for-all for managers trying to build their own fiefdom-- sorry, "team."
> If I had to sit in an empty room to work and then it wouldn't be any different than working from home.
Which is precisely why so many people are resisting the RTO mandates. Not only do they have a pointless commute after working for years remotely [1], but the office they're coming back to is not even an empty room, it's an open-plan office with all of the downsides I described in OP.
I don't think the average office has ever been fun. If the average work someone did was fun then there wouldn't be a strong "slacker" culture. I think a lot of people romanticize "the good old days", like over technology, most things are worse than you remember them being, and you just remember the nicer aspects, unless it was genuinely awful and traumatic.
It's like early transistor amplifiers and radios, the first ones were shit. They sounded harsh and thrashy. They got better quickly, but they were expensive to buy and paled in comparison to their valve counterparts for a long while. Even my old man romanticized them until he encountered one in the present day and remembered how bad they really were. I think he just remembered enjoying good songs, thus the quality was secondary to the music itself.
Could be worse. Rather than a pod you could have a random hotel seating seat packed in like an industrial chicken coop back to back face to face side to side with people you don’t know that are randomly assigned to a seat for 10 hours a day. Be sure to clear out any person belongings and put them in a locker at the end of the day!
Bring your own device saved enterprises millions of dollars a year. Bring your own office will save hundreds of millions. There’s no way return to office will last. It’s unpopular with many folks, people are commuting to telecommute on zoom at the office, the serendipity isn’t happening, and the cost of warehousing bags of mostly water is going to draw more and more board and shareholder scrutiny. As leases expire and tax agreements lapse, expect to see corporate real estate divesting en masse.
At a lot of places teams were built in a way that they are not co-located. We have people in India, Europe, and every US time zone. When CEOs make these pronouncements they just ignore this and then the office is just a different place to take a Teams/Zoom call these days.
A lot of it simply comes down to management being butt hurt because they signed up for a 20 year lease on office space in Expensive City.
That said, I think more focus should be on making remote nicer and productive as possible rather than fighting it. More actually listening to employees and making it work. Making having get togethers in person every so often.
It's not weird. Before we had open concept hellscapes, and the cubicle farm, people had actual offices. Four walls and a door you could close.
WSJ seems to have the memory of a goldfish if they can't hark back to a time before offices became a free-for-all for noise pollution.
Surprise, surprise, people want a quiet private space to do most of their work, and will gravitate toward those [limited] spaces in a modern office.
In my experience, 90% of the modern office was never fun. It was finding a floating desk, putting on noise cancelling headphones, and trying to ignore the constant interruptions to do your work. The only fun part was socialising during lunch/coffee with colleagues, but the rest of the experience was a huge net negative.