I’ve shared offices with one other colleague, cubicles with a dozen+ colleagues, and an isolated windowless room.
Cubicles are noisy and a great distraction if one needed quiet to concentrate or needed privacy to discuss confidential information with colleagues/supervisors who “needed to know”.
Personally I prefer sharing an office with a few colleagues rather than a cubicle area with dozens of folks or an isolated windowless room. The latter two are opposite extremes I found wasn’t my cup of tea.
The worst place I worked ( in many ways) was where I sat a a long workbench type counter. There was someone to the right of me, someone across from me and someone directly behind. That was really awful. Did I mention that the person to my right, the person behind me and I processed payroll? And it was a very complicated payroll with about 70 commissioned salespeople. We had to do that with NO privacy. Yes I quit that one after 6 months.
My office is a combo of offices with doors and windows - the number and location of windows convey status – cubicles and open plans. I have a cubicle that I’m fine with. The firm did a spectacular job with lighting in my area. Not so much in others. There are certain corridors that are lined with glass-fronted cubes. The lighting there is very dim because the plan was that the corridors would be lit by the lights inside the cubes. The cube-dwellers have all (every one on every floor) created walls of their own by stacking boxes to the ceiling (this is a law firm, so many boxes) creating a situation where the corridors are so dark that it’s possible to bump into things and not possible to read. So that was a pretty big fail!
Before the move, there used to be a small vestibule inside the bathroom doors with a second set of doors, but that was done away with, and now people sit right outside the door and look and listen right in with no privacy for anyone when the bathroom doors are opened. It actually is like having an open plan bathroom in the middle of the floor. The finishes are gorgeous, though.
Some of the administrative functions are in massive open bullpen areas with very low partitions. Since everyone and their brother has a standing desk now, they are all standing in each other’s faces ALL DAY LONG. The noise level from people standing and speaking is staggering.That would drive me insane.
The new open offices with the long tables remind me of the bullpen setups we had when I first started working except those desks had storage and you were tethered to your desk by a landline.
H gave up his corner office with a balcony to join a start-up last year with the open office concept. They have motorized desks so you can sit or stand at your workstation.
I wonder how it feels to sit between two standing coworkers. Would that be claustrophobic?
Back in the old days, people just worked next to each other in row after row after row of desks. Very dehumanizing. Cubicles were supposed to provide some privacy and be more like mini-offices. Now, of course, they’ve replaced offices in way too many situations.
At this moment, in the cube next to me, a co-worker has a financial adviser discussing a family financial plan with her - her personal family - I can hear every work, $ figure, strategy, etc. - seriously?! We have a couple small conference rooms - why wouldn’t she - for her sake - take him in there to chat? He is apparently associated with our uni in some way, but I do not want/need to hear of her financial situation! Earbuds in…
The cubicle space was seen as some sort of employee award. At a former workplace new grads started in a four-person cube. With each promotion you worked your way up the cubicle rank. Next was a two person cube, then a two person cube with a partial divider, then a single!
I’m glad its not just me. I too think its somewhat generational - my boss is the “creative” type so thinks our new space will be ultra cool. I did fight to get finance and real estate (where I work) to be somewhat removed from the younger, social, community engagement folks who by nature of their work are chatty friendly youngsters. Removed however means we are now 10 feet away from them instead of directly next to them. As mentioned, kitchen will be open with a few tables right in the middle and my chatty friendly colleagues seem to have never been taught indoor voices when younger because you’d think meal time was party time. I feel like the biggest debby downer but I’m like 30 years older then them and really need to concentrate on my work (except when I’m on college confidential during the day and my ideal work setting would be a deserted island - lots of light and few animals to make noise…
I see lots of working from home in my future.
I’m impressed that so many of you seem to have it as bad or even worse and have stuck it out for so long. Hope your bosses know how lucky they are!
One of the reasons I’ve been at the same job for 16 years is my office with a window that looks out onto trees. My office door is glass, so there’s never total privacy, but that’s OK with me. I could never function in a cube or open office. What I don’t get is that if everyone is wearing earbuds and/or instant messaging how the setup is conducive to the team work it’s supposed to promote.
So what’s ideal? To me the idea situation (for someone like me who can get antsy…) is to have options. Ok, I’ll use the dang cube, but give me options…for instance my D1 works for a PR firm - she has a cube but she can also book herself one of many conference rooms - varying in size - to work with more quiet. Or, she can go down to the open cafe and set up her laptop there to have some white noise around her (it’s lightly used non-lunch hour times). Or, she can go to their outside area and sit at a sunny or shady table and work and get both a mental break and work done.
My office jobs have almost always involved reading, writing, and editing, and the cube situation sucks for that. Especially when there are people within earshot who have to talk to clients on the phone a lot–technical support or sales-- or who are doing something that involves working with their hands but allows chatting at the same time: the art department. Argh. They NEVER shut up.
Ironically, I am one of those chatty extroverts. The cubes are if anything torture for me because the socialization is just too distracting, since I naturally want to join in. It was okay in one situation where we were all writers or programmers, so mostly fairly quiet.
As a manager, I always had an office. You just need to be able to talk privately with people. When I had to put my writers in group offices, their productivity plummeted. Too much chatting going on. Single cubes in a quiet area were better.
I cannot imagine a “hot desk” office. There was a similar concept 20+ years ago that was called something else…basically, no one had their own desk or office if part of their job involved being on the road. I can’t recall what they called it.
My first job was the open concept. I didn’t have a reference point, so no big deal…just happy to be employed. My career job was at one company for 28 years. 25 I had a double cube. 12 ft. In length by 6 ft at each end. If we wanted , we could request a longer panel for more privacy on the side we sat in. We never had to deal with other noises in the other cubes, as our company installed white noise. It took me awhile to get used to that. Even before that, it was really fairly quiet, so it didn’t bother me.
I like the privacy in my cube, eating lunch at my desk, no distractions when I work. The downside was being surrounded by grey cube walls all the time…it could feel confining and towards the end a " I can’t believe I’ve spent so much of my life looking at these walls".
As a consultant, I share an office with 2 windows with someone. Employees who aren’t managers are in the open space concept. At first I felt sorry for them…they could not even talk on the phone, eat lunch privately without all their coworkers watching them, or those of us walking by. But I wonder if maybe they don’t feel so claustrophobic.
One big international company in my city did away with cubes, and now everyone can sit at any desk. They clear their stuff each night and put it in a closet. I would hate that.
I am looking at the pile of folders one of our legal secretaries has on her desk… There is no way that can be put away in less than 2 hours! People who came up with the dumb idea of “hot desks” are the ones who imagine paperless offices… Where everyone works with a laptop and a cell phone/tablet, and pens and paper are things of the past. Lol. We all know how that works.
I work for a professional association whose members range in income from barely supporting themselves in their businesses to millionaires. Even in my cube, I know that I’m better off professionally than many of our members, because of the other things my employer provides: two large monitors for every employee, copy-and-print machines, office supplies, and of course, a steady paycheck and good benefits. (But I hope we don’t move to a hot-desk system; that sounds awful.)
I believe the devil himself invented them. I’m a software developer who needs to concentrate to be productive. I fight my environment every day to do my job.
When I worked in a library one of the best things was that there were no phones in there. So peaceful…
I couldn’t even reliably keep my cell phone in my pocket on vibrate because we were adjacent to a defense department site that scrambled the airwaves. Drove H crazy but I loved it!
H couldn’t bring his cell phone into his office building, so it lived in his car. We didn’t get smart phones until the day he retired and then we ALL got smart phones as a family. :-). H did have 3-7 land lines on his desk–it was pretty funny when I saw it but he was fine with it. His desk and cabinets had more phones and phone parts. I’m glad he never had a “hit desk,” he would not have survived!
Here is my issue with most cubes - I really hate to sit with my back towards the hallway… Either there is a stampede behind my back, or I get startled by someone sneaking up on me inadvertently. At one of the places I worked, we turned our desks so we were sitting facing the traffic. Solved a lot of issues.
and my ideal work setting would be a deserted island - lots of light and few animals to make noise…