059 Open Office Spaces: Are They a Productivity Enabler or Disabler? – ProductivityCast

We all intuit the importance of our spaces in being and staying productive throughout the workday. Yet, companies and management have different goals and objectives when it comes to how they structure those spaces. In today's cast, we discuss the topic of open office spaces, and whether or not they are a productivity enabler or disabler. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/059 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Open Office Spaces Ray Sidney-Smith Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Open Office Spaces Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Basecamp “The Open Plan Office Is a Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Idea” “Library Rules - How to Make an Open Office Plan Work” Slack Hipchat Trello Asana Evernote Varidesk “The Essential Workplace” “The future office is here” Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 Welcome one and all to productivitycast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Francis Wade 0:23 I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 And welcome everybody to this episode of productivity casts where we will be discussing the topic that is quite complicated in terms of management and physical layout, and so on so forth. It's the idea of open office spaces, and whether or not their productivity enablers or disable errors. And this topic came up because I came across several articles from the gentleman who started the company base camp, formerly 37 signals. And on their medium blog, they have been writing about the idea of Open Office plans, Open Office, open plan offices, and whether or not they're good or bad for staff generally. But more importantly for us here today is about productivity, how productive our employees in an open office plan environment. And there are pros and cons to both sides. And I wanted us to have a discussion about that topic today. So let's, let's kind of start off with each of our perspectives on the Open Office, space design concept, and what our various experiences have been in them. Art Gelwicks 1:37 I have been painfully clear over the years, I am not an advocate fan or otherwise, endorser of the Open Office movement, I don't think it's a good design. I don't think it's practical. And I think the rationale used to justify it does not hold the proverbial water. That said, there are reasons why you could have colored elaborative workspaces, which is a different thing entirely. But the idea of taking your entire staff and putting it putting them basically in a giant warehouse style room, no walls, no isolation, no opportunity to to focus, no privacy, just to be completely flies in the face of how people think how people operate, and how people basically spend one third of their lives because they're spending them at work. If I Francis Wade 2:28 saw look back at my own experience, I've never had the the pain of suffering in an open office environment. I've only really worked for extended periods in some private office environments. So I think I've been lucky, and I've escaped the bullet. Because I've seen clients in these environments suffering and just unable to get anything done because they're so distracting on all levels. And the kind of work that should be their best work comes from I'm staying at home or hiding in the hiding in the closet or staying in their car, they actively tried to escape their environment. And I'll do the best work. But I've been lucky so far. Art Gelwicks 3:13 Yeah, open offices really lend themselves to this idea of management by walking around, which is, to me, again, drives me bonkers because anybody who's working in these environments usually winds up trying to do one of two things. They either go hijack a conference room to try and get something done. Or if they have the opportunity, they disappear to someplace else in the building, or even stay home and do the work. So this should be a screaming red flag to anybody who's setting up an implementing these kinds of spaces that you know what, this just doesn't work. This this concept of come in here, everybody I worked in, I've worked in several OpenOffice plant environments, some more open, if that makes any since then others I've been in ones where literally, there are no walls, just monitors on desks, and everybody's basically looking at everybody else that will drive you bonkers. And you think about trying to get any sort of focused work done in that environment. And the most important thing becomes, where are my headphones? Why? Because I need to create artificial focus, because they've taken away all the opportunity for me to have real focus. Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:30 I like you, Francis, I have never thankfully had to work in an environment that was that was, you know, of the Open Office layout. That being said, Today, I spend a lot of time working on the road, where I might be in CO working spaces, or other kinds of open spaces, like a cafe, where there are a lot of things going on around me. And there are no walls for privacy and that kind of thing. So I'm probably going to take a little bit of the middle ground here today, with regard to how office design should really be thought through which I think that there's likely a hybrid, I think by my argument today with you both is going to be is there is there a middle ground where we can have open spaces that facilitate collaboration, facilitate the kind of interactivity that we want, potentially reducing costs, because let's be honest, a lot of what drove the Open Office design plan was the fact that the build out for it was so dramatically easy, in the sense that you got a Florida building, and you threw a bunch of desks and chairs in them. And for all of the people out there who make the argument that there was more space design than that, in terms of flow, and so on so forth. I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. I think that there was a there was a clear understanding that if we could not have to buy cubicle dividers, if we didn't have to build offices, there were there was going to be a huge real estate benefit to that. That is reducing the the overhead and the cost of having to do that build out and became popular for at least partially because of that. On the other side to that those I've seen several co working spaces now that have provided a mixture, open space design, with these kinds of conference rooms and other clothes space designs that give both options to people when they need to work in, in a closed setting where they need privacy. And then in an open collaborative setting when they want to work and kind of have a little bit of ambient noise around them. While they're doing that. There's also a lot of really great technology, a friend of mine works setting an accounting firm, and or it's a consulting firm that does a lot of accounting. I'm not quite sure what that means. But the idea is behind their Open Office design is that they use technology, they use noise cancelling technology that is embedded above all of the desks. And so if I'm sitting next to you art, and then next to you, Francis, if I'm talking at my desk to you, and you're standing next to me, you can hear me, if you step about two feet outside of my desk zone, you can no longer hear me, because the acoustics are designed with the technology and you know, implemented such that there's constant noise cancelling happening around my desk and every desk in the space. It is very, very cool technology. And I can see that being potentially useful in that environment still doesn't reduce the visual distractions, and potential stress that comes with constantly seeing stimuli. But at least from a sound perspective, that's pretty cool. Art Gelwicks 7:54 That's really cool technology. But it's also really rare technology. And it's also really expensive. Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:01 Oh, nope, no question, no question that it's not only going to not be not proliferate among all offices. And it's primarily because of cost. And, you know, if you have a power outage, or anything like that, you know, you're you're pretty much dead in the water. Anyway, I want to discuss some of the things that if we can all agree that open office is not for everyone all of the time, what are some of the guidelines that you would prefer, in developing productivity, enabling office design, what are the good principles that we should take into account as it comes to laying out an office. So this is somewhere I've actually had the obligation and honor of having to do many times in my career, which is, we're going to open a new office. And now we need to design the office. And in multiple cases, it's been an empty brand new building, or a space that has been dilapidated to the point