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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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    Lisa Miles:


    Here's a picture of my desk at the IET to illustrate wink




    Hi Lisa,

    I wouldn't dare post a photo of my desk, the state of which has been famous throughout several organisations since I first had my "own" desk in 1985. In fact I still have on my desk the mini dustbin I use as a pen and pencil (and slide rule!) pot which I bought in 1985 following comparisons of my desk to...well I expect you get the idea wink

    I do, of course have the equipment on my desk of a safety process engineer working primarily on documentation review: oscilloscope, soldering iron, power drill, torch, box of useful screws, stress ball etc. And then a few other attributes that I brought home from my previous company desk before I was home based: Dalek, Thunderbird 2, a couple of (toy) kittens. (I do now occasionally have a real cat sitting on the desk as well. I pull out one of the top drawers and put something soft on there so she doesn't walk across the keyboard and make an embarrassing edit to a Safety Case Report.)


    Actually, seriously, the odd thing is that with the work I do now, which is all PC based, I now can hot desk (as I was doing on Tuesday when I started this thread). Other than typically only having one or two monitors - rather than the three I have set up here - there's no difference. But when I was doing engineering development and management I did gather a lot of stuff around me which I genuinely did use. So it is very role dependant. To greatly oversimplify, it's probably much easier for a systems engineer to hot desk than a product engineer..


    A great loss to the engineering profession was Bob Pease. For those who don't know about his desk see here: http://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/what-s-all-messy-office-stuff-anyhow I particularly like photos 5 and 7. However I would not recommend 99.9999% of engineers to follow his (or even my!) example. But without going to that extreme, I wonder if there is a positive correlation between a personalised desk and job satisfaction / employee retention? I'd guess (based on no evidence whatsoever) that there is.


    Cheers,


    Andy

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  • 0

    Lisa Miles:


    Here's a picture of my desk at the IET to illustrate wink




    Hi Lisa,

    I wouldn't dare post a photo of my desk, the state of which has been famous throughout several organisations since I first had my "own" desk in 1985. In fact I still have on my desk the mini dustbin I use as a pen and pencil (and slide rule!) pot which I bought in 1985 following comparisons of my desk to...well I expect you get the idea wink

    I do, of course have the equipment on my desk of a safety process engineer working primarily on documentation review: oscilloscope, soldering iron, power drill, torch, box of useful screws, stress ball etc. And then a few other attributes that I brought home from my previous company desk before I was home based: Dalek, Thunderbird 2, a couple of (toy) kittens. (I do now occasionally have a real cat sitting on the desk as well. I pull out one of the top drawers and put something soft on there so she doesn't walk across the keyboard and make an embarrassing edit to a Safety Case Report.)


    Actually, seriously, the odd thing is that with the work I do now, which is all PC based, I now can hot desk (as I was doing on Tuesday when I started this thread). Other than typically only having one or two monitors - rather than the three I have set up here - there's no difference. But when I was doing engineering development and management I did gather a lot of stuff around me which I genuinely did use. So it is very role dependant. To greatly oversimplify, it's probably much easier for a systems engineer to hot desk than a product engineer..


    A great loss to the engineering profession was Bob Pease. For those who don't know about his desk see here: http://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/what-s-all-messy-office-stuff-anyhow I particularly like photos 5 and 7. However I would not recommend 99.9999% of engineers to follow his (or even my!) example. But without going to that extreme, I wonder if there is a positive correlation between a personalised desk and job satisfaction / employee retention? I'd guess (based on no evidence whatsoever) that there is.


    Cheers,


    Andy

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