One thing I notice is in companies where there is individual offices for each employee, the culture is not good.
People don’t communicate. They email the person in the room next to them.
I favor bullpen-type setups with big open spaces. When I bought my main building in 1997, the first thing I did was cut 4-foot square windows in the walls to the bullpen, in between offices, and in the solid doors. Heck in some cases the windows don’t even have to have glass. This includes my office.
If you have to have cubicles make them low or get ones with glass.
Transparency – literally.
In the process you can get natural light from the exterior windows to the middle of the space for everyone.
When people see and talk to each other, they work better, and better together.
Definitely agree with this setup.
100% agree with this, separate spaces destroy teamwork. Even if your people are cramped, it’s worth it to keep the transparency going. In fact, my new bigger space makes it harder to keep the culture tight. I encourage every manager to walk around from time to time to and “check in” on the group.
Definitely disagree. Packing people together builds a culture but not a good one. When I talk to someone and can hear everyone else’s phones and conversations in the background, I think call centre and cut-rate. I don’t think it’s good for business and it is not an environment I want to work in.
Loved to be involved with organization
Feel the love. Organization keeps me thriving
Open office space is valuable – transparency, learning, understanding – but it’s good to provide small, private spaces, too, so employees can get “deep work” done from time to time.
i intensely disliked “open plan” and cubicles in my New York advertising career. Sometimes I had to talk frankly with my clients about things that should not be shared with a big group. Sometimes I even had to speak against my own company and say “We screwed up on that and you should not pay for it.” I don’t think everyone should hear every conversation withing 30 feet of them and degrees of privacy are necessary. And you don’t want to spend your time looking for a private conference room or speaking in the middle of a hallway. If I was offered a job in an ad agency with no private office, I declined that job even if there were positive aspects of it. And I realize that this might be an unusual take in current times, but it was invaluable to me to have more outspoken and freewheeling conversations. And I never found myself cut off from the people I needed to work closely with.
I agree
Open spaces improve relationships and accountability to one another. Yes you may get a little more visiting but its worth the trade off. We have learned to take this a step further and ensure that all computer monitors are facing the room or walkway and not the wall. In this day and age there are enough distractions with the cell phone without compounding it with monitors that become private.