I’ve worked in a few jobs that had open offices and generally enjoyed it but the size of the groups were fairly small (maybe around 5 people) and it wasn’t like people were just chatting all the time. I could see if you’re in a room with a ton of people all contributing to a din it might be distracting. But in those limited situations it was pretty good for communications.
I will say my current situation is going the other way. We got a whistler…
Experience informs me that every client/user feels their own perspective is the major. What I am saying does not mean that people who might enjoy an open office environment also happen to have a job that would benefit from a quiet private workspace. Or that somebody that is an introvert does not force themselves to not only cope not only with open work stations, but cope with collaborating on work tasks when they don’t like it. I’m just saying the convergence of introversion and a compatible job description is infrequent. I stand by my ratio.
Plus, in the absence of the ability to quantify employee performance, people frequently cherish the idea that the worthless slackers will slack less if you deprive them of protective cover behind which to slack.
Yeah, it’s basically an attempt at Taylorism for ‘knowledge workers’; but even lousy ideas have fans.
But not one so ‘good’ that they’ve been able to transition from designing useful buildings to winning design awards as their primary professional focus.
Down that path lies very expensive madness.
If possible, find an Architect that does not pursue design awards as policy.
The hospital I work in is closing with everything moving to the opposite side of town in a brand new development. It is open plan. This is despite much information on the shit-ness of this plan being submitted to the management.
I’m a psychologist and our service also has social workers, nurses, occupational therapists, physios and psychiatrists. We will all be in one open space, with all the other health staff that already work at that site such as orthopaedic surgeons and other surgical specialities. So about 100 people in a big room with no partitions. Apparently they are going to group us by profession, so all the docs go together seated around a circular table facing each other. There are going to be some small single person size cubicles with phones in them that people can book for quiet work. But apparently it won’t be noisy. They haven’t explained how this is possible. I can only imagine how noisy it will be with huge numbers of staff routinely making phone calls to patients. How the heck am I supposed to write a neuropsyc report in that environment? I suspect I’ll be taking my industrial ear muffs in. Fuck them so hard! Only the managers get their own office, of course!!
What you ought to do, is take all the administrators to your local high school during lunch time. Drag them into the cafeteria, and ask them if this level of noise is conducive to doing solid work.
Facts and evidence is all well and good. But nothing beats a lesson into the brains of an idiot better than 15 year old children screaming, and fighting, and throwing shit and running by at top speed, and trying to steal shit out of your bags, and trying to use you as a distraction so they can sneak off campus.
Aside from the inability to get work done, I’d be digging in my heals over patient privacy issues and the potential the office arrangement creates for running astray of them. I know what documents and laws I’d be throwing at management in the US, but you’re in New Zealand, correct? Is there any way to make a case for how this could undermine privacy regulations there, or is it not so strict?
Nice idea, except I live in New Zealand and we don’t have cafeterias in schools 
Yes I’m in NZ. I expect they would say that any delicate privacy situations are adequately provided for by using the small bookable cubicles, and that other than that privacy expands to the people in your clinical team, i.e. those sitting around you, and thus this shouldn’t be a problem. Of course I think this is bullshit and so does everyone else.
They’re willing to risk expensive law suits, then further expensive fixes to this later? Over what? An office plan that is directly observable to fuckup everyone’s day?
What a pile of morons.
You have my condolences.
Thanks for your condolences. We don’t really do law suits here in NZ. I’ve not heard of anyone trying to take the health board to court for privacy breaches. That kind of think usually gets dealt with through the health board complaints team.
Us psychologists had a special psychology testing room incorporated into the building designs. Maybe we can hide out there while everyone else is in the big room. One of the psychiatrists pointed this out to me as the other psychiatrists were feeling envious. Perhaps the psychologists will finally get one up on the psychiatrists! It’s about time, they already get paid three times what we do!
You couldn’t get any sleep in a place like that.
My experience is that open offices are pretty variable. They can be OK if the density is not too high, if there are ample meeting rooms, and desk phones are absolutely forbidden. I don’t generally listen to music while working, but I can if there are distractions going on, but I know other people find that just as bad. On the other hand, overcrowding can cause it to get really bad fast.
Overall, I prefer being able to see outside from my desk to having an enclosed office, and realistically those are (at best) the alternatives for most offices.
You inverted that.
Why do you starve children?
Don’t be concerned, NZ is only just behind the US in obesity rates.
heh, I was just reading up on Automaticity, because it seems that, while I can drive the exact same route to work competently, I can’t handle taking alternative routes at all. The study cited on wikipedia had n=15 for each scenario in the study on Automaticity as a means of influence… There’s a meta thought. What if the study runners ran so many participants through they could do a much more rigorous study without even breaking a sweat, mentally?
They had different views of boundaries back then.
Don’t I know it. Management doesn’t trust staff and staff know it. Of course in reality the more you treat people like children the more they behave like children, but people seem to think that office workers crank out ideas much like factory workers crank out widgets and that all that is necessary for productivity is to keep those asses in the seats.
