6.4 KiB
| layout | published | title | date | tags | image | share-img | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| post | true | Open Office Floor Plans are Saving Your Job's Ass | 2018-07-14 |
|
/img/lumburgh.jpg | https://adriano.fyi/img/lumburgh.jpg |
Do I have your attention? I'll come clean — I actually don't have very strong feelings about open office floor plans, but with so many people waxing hyperbolic about them, I felt that it was time someone weighed in with a contrarian point and matching hyperbole. DHH's article above essentially reduces the decision of having an open office to the idea that they look good to managers signing leases who will inevitably use the office as a backdrop for media interviews. These managers—so the thinking goes—don't care what impact an open office has on employees' day-to-day lives because managers need not directly live with the decision. What with their corner offices and travel-heavy schedules. This argument is highly reductive and doesn't honestly portray the multitude of reasons that companies may choose to have open offices. I think I understand one of those reasons.
Disdain for open offices is becoming technocrats' newest and laziest trope. A lot of digital ink has been spilt cataloguing the ways in which they'll be the demise of modern work. And a lot of digital ink has been split torturing this ink-spilling expression for the digital age. Let's not dwell on that; let's talk open-office floor plans.
Open Offices
At companies around the world, there exists a relatively small, but very vocal minority of people who despise the open-office floor plan. Let me just say this to you — your antipathy is completely valid. There are plenty of great reasons not to like open-office floor plans. They're loud, not conducive to deep work and thinking, they breed anxiety, and most importantly they're absolutely full of distractions that preclude productivity. I work for a company with an open-office floor plan and at any time of day, if I'm not listening to music or white noise to drown it out, I could probably listen into three to five different conversations. We've even turned these conversations into a series of Slack channels spanning multiple floors and offices: #heardinsf, #heardon3rd, and #said-it-on-2nd. Hands-down these channels are the best thing about our open-office floor plans.
My recent personal favorite:
But with that said, no business has ever failed because of their decision to have an open floor plan. I'd like to say "full stop" here, but I'd also like you to continue with the ostensibly false premise that I'm not a complete asshole. The thing is, open-office floor plans are pervasive for a very good reason: they're cheap, and saving money is not a bad thing. In order to explain why they're so cheap, I should probably have some knowledge of commercial real estate (of which I have none), but I'll do it anyway because the gray matter that affords me a modicum of critical thinking would like to have a moment.
Let's look at the two most common alternatives to open-office floor plans. I'll spend a little bit of time on one—denegrating it—and a bit more time on the other reflecting on what it means for your company's balance sheet.
Alternatives Floor Plans
- Cubicles — 😱I'd like to say, "'nuff said", but I suspect that many of the people who are currently castigating companies for their open-office floor plans perhaps have never worked in a cubicle farm. So let me just say this: cubicle farms, muted by the monotone hum of white noise piped in through A.C. vents from a recessed ceiling, are one of the world's greatest soul-crushers. I've never been more unhappy on a day to day basis than when the majoirty of my time was spent in such an environment. I suspect Office Space would not have been the success it was without it's cubicle farm setting. It's the only setting that properly fits the crushed-soul Office Space narrative. Let's go ahead and, sort of, move on to the next topic.
- Custom floor plans — They're great. They're fantastic. They're the best. Office managers get the opportunity to design a space that works for you and your company, taking into account all of your quirks and excentricities. The problem is, they're really fucking expensive. And I'm not talking about the buildout alone; I'm talking about what it means for your commercial lease.
Imagine you're in real estate for a moment. You have a space that lends itself to various business types that are compaitble with open-office plans, and it'll easily fetch $40,000/mo. Now let's imagine that a prospective lessee would like to build out a custom floor plan in your open space. They may occupy it for one to three years, as they're a fast-growing company, but eventually when they leave, you'll be left with their floor plan decisions. Do you still charge $40,000/mo? No. You charge more. A lot more. Because in all likelihood, the next company interested in leasing your space will be a lot less interested in living with the previous tenent's floor plans that were predicated on their unique company quirks and excentricities.
Chances are, for a large enough space, the price difference between a custom and open floor plan would pay your annual salary and maintain a full keg of millenial juice (cold brew) on tap. So maybe that open-office floor plan you hate is saving your job's ass. But who am I to say? Pop in some noise-cancelling headphones, lobby for quiet spaces/times, and figure out how to make your open-office work. I would argue that nearly every issue people have with open offices can be fixed, or at least mitigated to a large degree. Unless your company is insanely profitable—in which case, I hope you get that custom floor plan and stare down your nose at the rest of us plebes sharing space and making sensible business decisions—you probably have no place building out a custom office floor plan. The money saved might just materialize as your next pay raise. Buy yourself a better pair of headphones; or take a writing class to hone your management-lobbying skills for that quiet space. I don't really care — just please stop parroting this trope du jour unless you you're offering a better, afforable alternative.