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Engineering efficiency in open plan vs seperate offices

Andy Millar
Just for once I'm working in an open plan office *. I've been, from my point of view, very lucky (or rather, very determined!) - for the last two years I've worked from home, and for 15 years prior to that I have had a succession of private offices (in a company where the official policy was that only the president and VPs had private offices!)


HOW DOES ANYONE GET ANY WORK DONE IN AN OPEN PLAN OFFICE??? Sorry, that just burst out smiley


Now, thinking back to a LONG time ago when I was working in development teams of maybe 2-3-4-5 engineers it did actually seem to work well for us, we could share and bounce around ideas, however when I started managing the same team in a large office space it was clear that those discussions were also extremely disruptive to anyone else in the same office area **. The best arrangement I've worked in for team engineering was probably when we had 5 of us in a single (fairly soundproof) office.


Equally, having been involved in business management, I am very well aware that large open plan offices are cheap and flexible, but personally I'm suspicious of the impact on overall productivity, at least for engineering functions.


I haven't even started discussing getting the air conditioning set right for everybody...


Does anyone here have any views? It's a serious point.


Right, I will stick my headphones on, play some brown noise, and try again.


Cheers,


Andy


* Our company Mentoring scheme is being audited by the IET today, hence the fact I've been asked to work at HQ and prepare to be quizzed by the IET!

** I led a raiding party and commandeered a soundproof space away from anyone else where that team could work, before any actual murders occurred. I ignored the suggestions from the rest of the engineers that it should also be made airtight...
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    In my experience definitely by project. But you're right it is a problem. As an example, in the electronics product team I described as successful (form a working environment point of view) we were lucky enough to have a "tame" mechanical engineer on the team, subsequent projects I've worked on / managed had mechanical design as a pooled resource, and it did lead to communication difficulties. But probably no worse than if there'd been no team clustering at all.


    It's interesting seeing the different perspectives.


    The "isolation" point about individual offices is a good one, I suppose I had the best of both worlds in having an office to myself while the rest of the team didn't, so I could lock myself away when I wanted and wander around (without having a specific reason to talk to an individual) when I wanted. I know an office well where all the development engineers work in rooms with one or two people in them, and the project communication is - frankly - awful.


    Cheers,


    Andy
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    In my experience definitely by project. But you're right it is a problem. As an example, in the electronics product team I described as successful (form a working environment point of view) we were lucky enough to have a "tame" mechanical engineer on the team, subsequent projects I've worked on / managed had mechanical design as a pooled resource, and it did lead to communication difficulties. But probably no worse than if there'd been no team clustering at all.


    It's interesting seeing the different perspectives.


    The "isolation" point about individual offices is a good one, I suppose I had the best of both worlds in having an office to myself while the rest of the team didn't, so I could lock myself away when I wanted and wander around (without having a specific reason to talk to an individual) when I wanted. I know an office well where all the development engineers work in rooms with one or two people in them, and the project communication is - frankly - awful.


    Cheers,


    Andy
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