I miss telecommuting. I used to get so much more done. Yeah there were the obvious things of oh today is slow lets see what is on youtube… but when I needed to hunker down and get shit done I could do it in relative peace and quiet. Nobody complained about Sun Ra being played when I wanted music. (well other than me as oh god what is it that just came up on shuffle play, not right now please)
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I recall staying home with a sick toddler a day when I really needed to get some things done and feeling I got more done in half a day while looking after said sick toddler than I usually did in a full day at the office.
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But do you notice that private offices seem to be assigned to higher ups? Do many people given an option of an office decline it saying that they’d rather stay at their desk in the open space?
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Kinda makes me wonder what the HIPAA Complience Officer there has to say about it.
That was still early in the game for PCs on individual desks. Most large offices had mainframes and small offices were still using typewriters and word processing machines.
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I would say nothing but “HIPAA” to them in response to anything. Over and over again.
“Don’t you love this new design?”
“HIPAA.”
“How many open cubicles should we have?”
“HIPAA.”
Won’t it be great to talk about your patients with anyone out of 100 who happens to be in the room at the same time?"
“HIPAA.”
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Too bad HIPAA is only applicable in the US. 
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Yeah, sorry, I hadn’t read down to the fact that we’re talking about NZ rather than the US.
Sometimes being a litigious society can actually be helpful!
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I used to work in a private office, and it was heaven. Quiet, secluded, with my music playing, I’d churn through work like mad.
A few years later, we moved to a new office with an open plan, and my boss went to some wacky seminar that gave him the idea that a ‘rowdy’ environment was a key to ‘unlocking creativity’. So he passed out Nerf guns and buckets of darts. Every single day was full of Nerf darts being shot back and forth, people throwing things, and my boss running around saying “louder! make noise! hahaha!”
Six months later, productivity in the toilet, the nerf guns were confiscated and the walls between cubicles extended upwards.
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Aside from the fact that you boss sounds like an idiot, the thing about this that gets me is the unlocking creativity part. People are always talking about that, like we need to be creative all the time. It’s good to have good ideas, but you still have to remember to brush your teeth and have a shower. Large parts of organizations are dedicated to keeping everything running smoothly so that the other parts work (and the larger the organization, the more seems to be dedicated to this). When people talk about fostering creativity where I work, I want to say, “Did it occur to you that we, in particular, should not be creative?”
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Well, this was a design office, and he had the idea that the designers should, I dunno, have crazy creative ideas shooting out of them all the time. I think he envisioned us getting hit in the head with Nerf darts and grabbing pads of paper and sketching out websites, saying EUREKA!! or something. The reality is that 90% of my job involved paperwork, emails, meetings, and client requests, and a rowdy environment isn’t great for that sort of thing.
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I’m in what’s probably the best case for open office - not super dense, people generally programming quietly, I get to wear my headphones all day - you basically could not make a better open office. And I still miss the hell out of my old office, even though that was shared with two other people. I miss having my own space
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We moved offices about a year ago to a modern open concept floor plan with very little privacy - except for the big boss of course who is the only person with a private office.
Ironically, I have noticed his door is closed far more often now than in our old offices where everyone had taller cubes and it was much quieter.
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Oh I wish management would close their doors. I hear their telcons all the time. One is actually down a bit and around a corner I can currently hear his telcon echoing around as he has the phone turned up that loud.
For some reason this came to mind: learn to think creatively.
I feel you because I’m walking at 2.2 mph on my standing desk treadmill in my home office listening to 90s industrial on my speakers while I should be catching up on work bugmail. I have a conference call in 27 minutes.
Insist that they let you go back!
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Speaking as a manager, I can’t have meetings with the six guys I manage or with HR or my own boss, for example, in an open floor plan. You have to have a room with a door for those things (or telecommute and do it via video conference).
Shit I’d take two sick toddlers over a couple of the People I have to work with (the rest are fine, but there’s always one. Or two if it’s a bad day).
If the bosses REALLY think the open concept is so great, why are they still in private offices?
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Actually my workplace did an experiment where even the bosses weren’t in private offices. Of course we then had to book boardrooms every time anyone needed to talk about anything HR or performance related, or talk about anything else sensitive. It was dumb as hell.
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