The real walls from the open plan office
The idea of an open place office, should you not work in a corporation, might seem strange to you. I first saw an open plan office back in 2005, when the company I was working for had a contract with a large Romanian bank.
I can still remember the strange feeling I had stepping in their quarters, nothing else but a huge hall with hundreds of desks, separated from time to time by cardboard walls or stacked cabinets.
The idea of an open place office, at least from a marketing standpoint, is very generous: the lack of barriers of any kind should foster transparency, encourage collaboration and interaction between employees, take down the hierarchies made out from dedicated offices with better light or position and unify the social behavior of the employees through better adherence to social norms generally accepted in public spaces.
What the marketing fails to tell us is that the open plan office is a very efficient way for the landlords to optimize their spending with the offices. And consequently, the rents for such offices is better since one does not have to customize the insides of the building. And fewer walls mean fewer installations, easier cleaning operations, heating and cooling are a breeze, lightning, disinsection, repairing — everything is cheaper and easier in an open plan office.
But what is almost never openly discussed are the real walls from these offices. The elephants in the room. The painful truths. Here are some of them.
No intimacy. In an open plan office, you have zero intimacy. Anyone can look at you, at any time, and see what you are doing, how you are sitting, and even judge your state of mind. You are practically naked, judged, observed and indexed by all the people around you. A kind of a public square, where you meet with the same people over and over again, in a strange social experiment. And as a consequence, everybody develops all kinds of tactics to fight back the lack of intimacy: some heavily personalize their desks, and most of the people use headphones to get back the feeling that somehow they are not naked in the public square.
The common denominator for light, temperature, humidity and air flows. DOES NOT EXIST. In the open plan office, these will provoke endless discussions. People will work their will with the thermostats, will turn the light on, others will turn the light off, during summers it is not cold enough and during winter it is not warm enough. Friendships can end on such quarrels, and people spend a significant quantity of energy and time trying to level up on such topics.
Being creative is difficult. When people innovate, they demonstrate very peculiar habits. A friend of mine takes very long warm baths whenever he has a difficult problem to tackle. His record is a 2 days bath, but he almost never steps out of the bathtub without a solution. Of course, typical open plan offices do not have such facilities, that is not the point I want to make, but I wanted to give a plastic example on what kind of a weird stuff people do when they need to get creative. And the open plan office is for sure not a good place for weird stuff.
The flu flies free in the open plan office. Yup, you cannot run away from flu in such office space. As soon as the school starts in the autumn the best of the viruses start to make their way in the office space too. You can see the flu progressing from one row of desks to another. People are coughing in a choir, and it is almost impossible to avoid catching it yourself too — whatever preventive actions you take, from vitamin enhancing your resilience to garlic cloves inserted in your nostrils.
You cannot avoid toxic sheriffs and idiots. Do you have a toxic sheriff as a boss? Is he or she the type that counts how many times you left your desk or the type that gives you a deadline and then keeps asking for a status every 5 minutes? Or the type that shouts stupid and inappropriate jokes, and then laughs by himself? Too bad, in an open plan office, without physical barriers like walls or doors, it is almost impossible to get out of their way.
Are you a newcomer? Socializing is a nightmare. In an open plan office, when you onboard a new project or company, the first few months are a real nightmare. You get to work with only a few from the tens of people from your close proximity, but at the beginning is very difficult to map out who is who and what names and role have each and everybody. And the worst part is when you waste time in the first few days because your laptop is not ready while everybody is heavy lifting around you and looks at you with really not friendly eyes.
And you might ask me what is the alternative? Well, there isn’t, not a good one, anyway. I worked before in a small office and spending time with 4 or 5 people in a small office is not at all nicer. You get other types of problems, and quarrels are typically worse and longer lasting.
I’d stay with the open plan office, but tackling the elephants from above. Almost all the problems mentioned are solvable, under the condition that we keep the discussion open about them and look for reasonable solutions in a creative way. And we have to, as almost nobody builds any other than the open plan ones. Adopt and adapt, as the service management philosophy suggests since in the coming years these offices and their problems will stay.
=======
I also publish (in Romanian) here and my professional profile is available on LinkedIn here.
