Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc. 4

[TED7]

Hello all.

I will start off by saying this will be a very open ended question and I'm more after sparking discussion than getting a concrete answer.

At my workplace there are three main offices. Finance, who I'm not interested in. Design, where I work and Technical, where everyone else works, be it manufacturing, production management, quality, team leaders etc.

The planning office is a narrow, open plan office with staff sat in rows 2 desks wide facing each other. The design office is a similar size but with an irregular layout, half the staff but with half height dividers between staff facing each other, we can see either the persons head over the divider, or their back. We also have a breakout room at each end, which the other office does not have and we do use them regularly.

I'm interested in somehow documenting the positive and negative effects each office layout has on productivity. For example, the design office layout has the effect of keeping people quiet and focused on their own world, whereas in the technical office, people are always chatting about ideas etc. but I find the environment stressful.

Does anyone have any views on the pro's and cons of an open layout, a closed layout or the sort of half and half layout created by putting up barriers but not totally enclosing people and any ideas on how I can investigate these and compile some kind of report.

There are plenty of redundant meeting rooms which could be re-purposed as offices to relocate some of the technical office staff to create a layout similar to the design office but it's hard to put forward ideas without facts and I don't want my bias to play too much of a part.








Designer of machine tools - user of modified screws

 

[zdas04]

There are no facts. Every individual responds differently to any environment. You can also spend more money on an open-concept than you spend on offices. I was in one cube-farm where they demolished 65 offices to create 62 cubes. Nothing about it made any sense and the guy in the next cube to me insisted on using his speaker phone. We lost all in-space storage capability (I went from 3 5-drawer file cabinets in my office to one file drawer and one utility drawer. My guest chair became a pad on the rolling drawer unit (the powers that were determined that two file drawers would be too tall to sit on so we got a file drawer and a utility drawer and no side chair).

Earlier this year, I sat next to a space planner who didn't try to defend the horrible space I'd been put in. She asked me a bunch of questions about how the group worked and how we interacted and described an open-concept plan that would have been a wonderful place to work. She said that what she had just described to me would have cost less than the cookie-cutter BS that HR had shoved down our throats. Her biggest complaint was that the affected groups are always too busy to send anyone with a clue to the planning meetings and they send the slug that the group can most easily do without. They end up with a space that the slug thinks would be "cool" and that never works for the people in the group who make the group work. She said that if Engineering groups would treat their own space like they treat their projects they would not hate open concept at all. I don't know if she was right or not, but I would have liked working in the space she sketched out.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.
The plural of anecdote is not "data"

 

[MikeHalloran]

Were you assigned this impossible/thankless task because of some misdeed? Apologize profusely and offer to do _anything_ else.

I've had private offices, low cubes, high cubes, open plan, bullpen with desks, bullpen with workbenches, even a remote office in a back corner of the factory above the stock rack for a CNC punch press. I absolutely cannot associate any such 'furniture' issue with productivity, however you choose to measure it.

I can assert a strong correlation with general morale, and the presence of strong leadership.

I can assert a weak correlation with noise level, but not in a direct way. I think everyone needs a place in which conversation is encouraged, in order to keep all project members on the same page. ... and that everyone also needs access to a really quiet place in which to organize thoughts, compose reports, do calculations, and conduct other necessarily solitary activities.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[IRstuff]

Facebook uses an open bullpen, with computer carrels for each person. Certain projects may require everyone in a separate room, but that's about it. Zuckerberg hangs out mostly in a conference room, but if he's coding, he's in the bullpen.

People are very adaptable, and can adapt to most environments.

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529

 

[rowingengineer]

Temperature to me plays a big role, if we didn't have air con in our work place, we wouldn't have very many people at work.

http://www.nceng.com.au/

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."

 

[TED7]

Sounds like I better put this can of worms back where I found it! Mike, I inflicted it upon myself, but as of now, nobody knows I'm looking into it so I can still back out. The reason I'm looking into it is because in the past, someone decided to rejig the offices but went at it with the idea of maximising space utilisation. As a result everyone would have lost a third of their desk space, much of the walkways would have shrank and the everyone would have been squashed up so the middle managers could have a 'fish tank' office at the end of the room, which they didnt want either. This disaster thankfully got pushed aside by a different project which is still ongoing but I can see it coming up again and for the sake of everyone would like to head it off with some sensible research rather than the 'look how well we are utilising floorspace' return on resources way of thinking which would have made a cramped office even more cramped and noisy.

"But look how much more work gets done in the same space!"

It's worth noting that we dont work on large group projects here, its a large number of small projects which have minimal at best input from others and all of which are internal. Nobody really needs to have a big group discussion about anything, its best if people are happy because they are not isolated but the layout sufficiently disrupts peoples desire to engage in chatter.

Designer of machine tools - user of modified screws

 

[kylesito]

It's going to be said countless times in this thread but I will go ahead and say it, it depends on the individual! I have worked in cube farms and closed offices. And if I had my choice, I would never give up the private, closed office I have now. I am 10X more productive in an environment where I have plenty of lay down space, a bookshelf, walls to decorate, and furniture that I can choose the orientation of!

When I was in the cube farm, I was told that it would increase my productivity and improve communication between departments. The reality was that not only was I faced with all of the normal distractions, but every time anyone else near me also was facing these distractions, they became my distractions too. The guys catching up from the weekend, the guy who uses his speaker phone without hesitation, the two engineers haggling with a contractor about a field issue...they all became things I had to become involved in because I was listening to them happening and keeping me from getting done what I needed to get done.

Even though my office is supposedly an environment that the "experts" claim doesn't promote productivity, I am much more productive being able to focus on my own work...and you know what, when I need to collaborate I get up off my behind and walk over to coordinate with someone! Still being productive, still communicating...just not having to deal with everyone else's distractions too! Quite a concept I suppose.

PE, SE
Eastern United States

"If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death!"
~Code of Hammurabi

 

[cranky108]

It not only depends on the people, but also the culture, and the work the group is doing.

My speaker phone allows me to attend a webanar and still do work (less thinking work however). But the office walls make it difficult to yell a question to my coworkers (engineering is a colabration after all).
The office walls also make the fire alarm requirements different (what I can't hear you we are having a fire drill). Also having office walls means the automated light switch often turns the lights off on me. The window means glare on my computer screen (only one of the two).
When I remove the chars from my office I have fewer lounge lizards, and I get more work done.

I also can't reach one of my office drawers, so it remains empty, even though my desk top is full. I also don't have a sit-stand desk, so I take more breaks to streach my legs.

The best thing is my office is away from the main door, so I don't hear people coming and going.

 

[moltenmetal]

I live in a cube farm with only a few private offices. Our sister company has the bullpen idea. Bullpens are great when you have a project manager or leader who wants to micromanage everyone's activity every second of every day. I personally don't call that collaboration, I call that a slave galley, but to each their own I guess.

If you hire independent, self-motivated people, you need to give them at least SOME privacy, a place to store a few personal effects- and for us old folks, a few BOOKS, paper files and vendor catalogs (I have many whose contents never made it onto their websites- worth their weight in gold). I also have an examples shelf: when mentoring, having something physical to look at, i.e. show and tell, is worth at least 10,000 words. Having to leave your desk every time you need to make a phonecall isn't conducive to productivity either, nor is being disrupted every time someone else needs to make a call.

The Les Nessman door on my cube regrettably doesn't keep people from barging in when I'm in the middle of a calc or a drawing. Yeah, those informal interactions are great and necessary, but I have too many of them and they're too frequent. I work from home one day per week, and that has improved my productivity greatly by removing external distractions, i.e. unscheduled distractions generated by others. Any task that requires an extended period of focused thinking, I save until that day when I have the environment which permits me to succeed at that kind of work. For undisciplined people it has exactly the opposite effect.

How do you measure this stuff? Search me- I have no idea. Work environment is very personal. Suspect that if you have people leaving in droves and they all bitch about the office environment in their exit interviews, you may have a problem, but beyond that it's a difficult measurement problem.

 

[fel3]

Star for kylesito.

The conundrum of engineering is that we must communicate to get our jobs done and at the same time we and those around us need to shut up so we can get our jobs done.

I will echo what others have said that productivity is affected by more than just the office plan. The people around you, the work, distances between team members, the overall environment, etc all contribute. In addition, people working in the same environment will react differently.

I have worked in low-wall cubes (4' to 5' walls) in mixed engineering/drafting rooms with 5 to 10 other people and I have had my own private office. I spent about 6 years total in cubes and about 27 years total in a private office office. My first year out of college I had my own office, but our ONE Teletype computer terminal was on my side table and about 20% of the time another engineer was in my office using the terminal, which was noisy. I greatly prefer a private office over cubes.

My experience is this…
[1] My eyesight is worse than average, but my hearing is better than average (both frequency range and minimum decibel level detected; my wife would say that my hearing is good, but my listening is not so good). As a result, I am more distracted by noise than things I see. This primarily affects me when I have to write letters, reports, specs, etc. I can design, review drawings, do math, etc in a hurricane, but I need quiet or classical music (no vocals) softly playing for me to write efficiently. I have a friend (another civil engineer) who is the complete opposite, but his writing skills are better than mine, while my math and design visualization skills are better than his.
[2] I work on projects that involve just me; just me and one drafter; all the way up to me leading a team of about 10 engineers and drafters. Fortunately, except for a few weeks here and there when I was loaned out to another office, the largest office I have ever worked in had less than 40 people. These offices were small enough that having a private office was no worse than cubes or an open plan as far as communication goes. On the other hand, the ability to close my door for a private conversation with a client, with a member of my design team, or even personal is a major benefit to a private office.
[3] I am very particular about my work space, how it is laid out, and how it is decorated. I work best when the space is mine and not the brain fart of someone else. The furniture in cubes is usually fixed, while furniture in private offices can usually be moved around. The cubes I have worked in had insufficient space to lay out a D- or E- size set of drawings; even today I keep a drafting table in my private office for this purpose. Unlike private offices, cubes rarely have sufficient wall space for hanging photos, and I like to hang photos and astrophotos I have taken.

Years ago, I was transferred to an office run by an excellent engineer who was also a very rigid thinker (his nature, reinforced by time spent in the military). I started off in a cube in the drafting room, but two years later I was assigned a private office. All of the private offices except his (which was bigger) were laid out exactly the same, but I didn't like the layout at all. So, the first thing I did was rearrange the furniture to a more efficient layout. My boss threw a fit and told me to move everything back (I didn't know at the time that he was the one who had originally done the space planning). I asked him if this was to be his work space or mine. He said mine, so I said he should trust my judgement as to the layout that worked best for me. He backed down.


==========
"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill

 

[EngineerDave]

I always thought these open offices were designed by the Japanese to create more conversations between employees. They seem to be backfire for Americans who tend to be more social culturally on average. It is distracting and can be a difficult place to concentrate.

In the 90's I had the worst seat in the house, close to the mailbox. Members of the department would stop by, and as i tend to be an outgoing guy I ended up talking to all of them most of the time.

 

[TomDOT]

I really like my private office - I've worked in an open environment, and it worked because there were only 3-4 of us there. I am WAY too easily distracted for most open or cube environments to work for me.

Unfortunately, the grapevine says that we're about to lose our office furniture in favor of "cookie cutter" modular crap in a building-wide standard layout put together by the big boss.

I currently have an awesome weighs-a-ton-plenty-of-drawers-and-slideouts 1950s steel desk with the 3-level full-width wooden hutch some facilities guy built (probably in the 1960s) with an undermount desk light and outlets for my phone, etc. Matching extra-deep, 2-drawer filing cabinets and a credenza (again, facilities-built wood) are going to vanish too, apparently. Dunno where the heck I'm going to keep all my reference books, files, samples/demo items, standards, et cetera.

 

[cranky108]

I think the need for book (and other things) gets worse as you get older. Trying to keep old (relays if you must know)things as training tools to new engineers who may have never seen an elecrticalmechinical device before.

How big is the storage room or basement?

 

[TomDOT]

Storage room? Ha. I'm trying to reasonably fit a bunch of other books and technical reports in there - the bookshelves from our breakroom/library/conference room were just ripped out to allow for bigger meetings.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

At my current job it's an open environment... so open, in fact, that until a few decided the noise was bothersome, we had a foosball table in the middle. I never thought I could handle such a wide open space where I could hear everyone's conversation, but it actually seems to have worked for me. I was able to learn a lot of new things by listening to those conversations, and I could get most questions answered quickly because someone in the room knew the answer (certainly more quickly than if I had to type out a broadcast email). I have also been able to fine-tune my skill for ignoring people... that's invaluable!

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[cranky108]

The problem with the open room concept, for me, is that FERC, has a set of guidelines of what information I can not give to certan people. They also have a list of people who I must communicate with (without e-mail it is difficult to document). So the open room won't work.

Just as a reference they call these guidelines "deregulation".

 

[zdas04]

And they call Obamacare "the affordable heathcare act". Government labels get more obscuring every year.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.
The plural of anecdote is not "data"