Wide open spaces

A friend recently asked me about my take on open space work environments. He was prompted by this article. Here is my response:

Overall I agree. I'll end up restating a number of the points the author makes.

 

I'll start by saying that this is not Google's fault on any level though. The open office push, I think, gained steam because successful startups (primarily in tech?) were using it. I don't think it was so much an ideological thing, but rather a money thing: open offices are cheap because walls cost money. Also, as you hire more people, walls make your space less flexible and it's harder to scale it bit by bit (and/or revising those walls costs more money).

 

But, all out-of-touch managers saw was "these hip new companies all use open spaces! and that's what new hires expect! we have to adapt!" (I literally heard this from management at my work). Microsoft has mandated-ish that buildings be converted to open spaces because "that's the future!". So, I've bounced in and out of them as our group has moved from space to space. Mostly the open spaces are implemented as relatively large (20-50, roughly) grids of desks in a room, with some meeting rooms attached. The premise is that as the people you work directly with change, you just pick up and relocate to be around them. Then as you work, you automatically collaborate more, and collaboration is good! Our current space has offices, but we're encouraged to work in "team rooms" which are basically meeting rooms set up for 3-6 people working together on a project. I'll talk about my experiences in these later.

 

There's an inflexion point. I actually just talked to someone from Google a few weeks ago about this. Their model (at least at his office in Seattle) is different, they had rooms for 4-5 people. He said that was actually pretty nice. Then they grew and now there are 10 people in a room. He said the qualitative experience has totally changed: it's packed, too noisy, too many conversations: it's over-collaboration. More accurately it's not collaboration anymore, it's just noise.

 

Another anecdote: when open spaces first came up, another team took a straw poll. 23 of 25 of their developers said they did not want to be in an open space. 2 didn't vote because they were on vacation. What I've found is that developers tend to like it a lot less. Designers, PMs, marketers like it a lot more. The key difference is that developers spend much more time in deep, analytical thought, whereas the others spend a lot more time just trying things out, getting micro-feedback, etc. Our PMs, as a whole, seem to like open space.

 

My experience is similar. Our first foray into open space was about 4 years ago. 8-10 of us moved to an experimental space for two weeks. It was a lot of fun, but, there were certain tasks I could not get done because I couldn't go more than 10-15 minutes without an interruption. The bar for asking for help goes way down: people will just ask things they can look up easily, questions devolve into conversations, and context switches/interruptions end up making up the whole day. We then tried a second time a year later in a similar-sized space and my experience was the same again. And it's been the same in our team rooms. When I actually have to get real work done, I want to retreat into my private office and make it harder for people to talk to me.

 

There's a notion that social contracts develop, and that these rampant interruptions will normalize, but! This is often accompanied by people trying to cocoon themselves into noise-canceling headphones, or just agreeing that "we don't talk right now". In other words, virtual office boundaries get set up and even though we can all see each other, we've now canceled out the claimed benefit of the open space. The claim that the open space increases collaboration has never held water for me, as I've always told my managers: "having offices has never stopped me from being able to ask the right people the right questions".  

 

Another fun anecdote I heard is from an interior designer. They said "the hallmark of a well-designed space is that people just function naturally in it". In the open space, people actively have to take on tasks to make the space functional (headphones, social contracts, ... ). I actually kinda like this best as a simple reminder that it doesn't actually _work_, rather, we can _get it to work_.  

 

I really think this last paragraph is my favorite way to sum it up and really gets to the root of the issue: when you have to fight your environment, it's not an ideal environment.