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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...
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member
    I work at IET HQ in an open plan office. Broadly, I like it, although the noise can be a little distracting at times. I think it's ok as long as your colleagues aren't really noisy or smash their keyboard with more force than is necessary to make it work wink. I also like that it encourages people to just come and talk to me rather than send me 10 emails to resolve something that would take a 2 minute conversation. 


    Before this I did an internship at a music magazine where we had metal blasting 8 hours a day and I liked it, which I certainly appreciate is not for everyone! I also worked in a factory with noisy metal cutting machines and full of extremely boisterous and often obnoxious individuals. So, the IET's open plan office feels relatively quiet compared to what I am used to!
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    David Houssein:

    I also like that it encourages people to just come and talk to me rather than send me 10 emails to resolve something that would take a 2 minute conversation. 



    Ahh but David, an office doesn't have to be 'open plan' in order to encourage colleagues to come and talk to you. I think good communication is more to do with personalities rather than an office environment. Some people will get up, come sit on your desk and talk to you whilst others would prefer to send you an email even though they're only two desks away... wink 


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    When our offices were refurbished in the late '90's, we got what were quickly dubbed "pig pens" by the workers.  Each "pig pen" is a cluster of L-shaped desks, surrounded by a partition perhaps 1.6 to 1.7m high. The desks and partitions can be moved around to provide separate areas for each team. It works better than a truly open-plan office, though the partitions offer very little in the way of soundproofing.
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    David and Lisa,

    Fully agree. However when you are in an open plan office with non-assigned desks and have to pick a vacant desk you don't necessarily know where that person is sitting. It often is necessary to email them or phone them to ask where they are. Of course if you don't know them well and phone them, only to find it is the person sitting next to you who answers, it does get a bit embarrassing....

    Alasdair
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    I'm not sure that I'm fully comfortable with the thought of working in a non-assigned desk environment.  A previous employer tried to implement something similar many years ago but it failed spectacularly! Employees would continue to bagsy 'their' desk and woe betide anyone who dared sit in it! (Bit like unassigned car parking spaces where some continue to park in the same spot day after day and get very upset if you park there instead... wink)  You also had little 'cliques' form with particular people sitting together and ostracising anyone new that sat close by.  Here's a link to some research that says hot-desking and activity based working environments aren't all they're cracked up to be


    Now where I can see this kind of arrangement working well is within a team of people who, for the main, work from home or are on the road most of the time. What is the value in having a permanent desk for them if they're not sitting at it for 80% of the time? 


    I'm also a great believer in the ability to personalise your desk space. We spend more time at work than we do at home with family (if you discount the amount of time we're asleep with only our dreams for company) so having an environment you're comfortable in and that makes you happy then the more productive you are! In my opinion anyways... 


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

    fc23ebd57debee048078c7fe406d14c9-huge-desk.jpg

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    Lisa,

    I am aware of the research, but are the employers?

    My previous employer set up an arrangement as I described but it was a compromise. Each department has an assigned 'neighbourhood' but there was what we called no-mans land between the departments which could be used by either department, depending on the attendance on the day (i.e. how many were not working from home/out on business). Also visitors from other offices could pick any of these desks. It did also allow people to move to an area between other departments to get away from interruptions as anyone wanting them would go to their departments neighbourhood, and find they were not there. In terms of how people dealt with it, some were happy to work from a different desk each day, others would always use the same desk. The one thing missing was the opportunity to personalise the desk environment.

    Alasdair
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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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    Andy Millar:


    <Snip>

     
    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. 


    <Snip>



    I suspect my corporate security would get upset with me if I posted a photo of mine, however... I can recommend a few years in a military project office where you soon learn to keep a very clean desk (or find yourself explaining to security when they confiscate things that you left overnight).


    I can match your Thunderbird 2, plus I have a large Lego Mixel, Nixel and a Dilbert omnibus book on mine ;)

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    Andy,

    Many thanks for sharing about Bob Pease. I used to have a colleague who was about half way there, but we used to have too many office reorganisations requiring packing up the desks to move, which seriously hampered his style.

    Alasdair
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    Mark Tickner:



    ...they confiscate things that you left overnight



    Year ago I was furious (as was my line manager on my behalf, which was really nice of him) when our overall engineering manager cleared my desk for someone to use while I was on holiday, and threw away the very impressively bent con rod from my old Renault 4 which I kept there as a paperweight. Did teach me - as I always said to my own staff - that you never take into work anything personal which you don't mind losing. Even so, it was a naff thing to do. (To be fair, the manager concerned did apologise. A bit.)


    Much more recently I had a fantastic admin assistant who would tidy my office while I was on holiday and very pointedly put everything in sensible places. When I got back she would peer at me over the top of her glasses and just say "notice anything different?". Every office needs a Karen.


    Talking of holidays, and the problem of team arrangements in non-hot desked open plan offices - including friends wanting to sit together and enemies wanting to sit apart - the only time I semi-successfully solved this one was the last office move I "managed" where the move happened while I was holiday. (This genuinely was a coincidence!) Having managed several moves previously I told my team, of about 12 engineers, that this time they had to decide between themselves how the desks were to be arranged and who was sitting where. Some were rather grumpy, as they wanted me to referee, but actually in the end it worked very well - and I noticed on a recent visit there that they are sitting in basically the same places four years later. Not relying on a "management decision" meant they had to consider for themselves, and hence appreciate, the pros and cons of different arrangements.


    Cheers, Andy

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