Office spaces

WE are moving offices next week. The new area is very nice – right on the waterfront. It is considerably closer to the central train station, which is good for me. The whole company will be in one location; something that I haven’t seen since I started with them over 9 years ago. And, of course, a change is always good to get people focussed again.
So what’s the catch? The new layout is ‘architect designed’ – which means, of course, that a lot of time and thought has been put into common areas such as the kitchens, meeting rooms, even offices for the senior management. You know, those places that you spend about 20% of your time in. The parts of the office where you spend 80% of your time has had very little thought at all, except to minimise the personal space as much as possible.
The architect has designed a fancy kitchen (which will be very dated in a few years time) and break-out chairs (which are in full view of the rest of the office – and away from the windows). The server room is significantly smaller than we currently have but we design and maintain software – why would we need many computers? There is no storage space apparently – so if you do a stint at a client site you had better take home anything that you might want to keep. You can’t guarantee that you desk will not be re-assigned and the contents thrown out before you get back.

DeMarco and Lister pointed all this out in “Peopleware” over 20 years ago and very many people have addressed the point since.
Every study ever made into office layouts has shown that productivity increases directly with the amount of privacy each person has. In fact, lower level workers do not interact as much as more senior people and therefore require MORE privacy. So we have a situation where the office is just a sea of desks – it’s a big open space and will be holding a lot of people. The outside desks, near the windows, have been allocated to the managerial types – the ones who need to talk to everybody. While the programmers and analysts, who need quiet and isolation, are clustered near the high traffic areas. Has anyone actually thought about this?
The broacher that our ‘move team’ have put out says that the space has been designed “to allow a connected and integrated working environment that encourages teamwork and community”. Connectivity and integration in an software company come from providing the right tools on the desktop – Web 2.0 and all that. Teamwork and community come from engaging people in the company and making them feel valued. Treating them as cattle or battery hens, as interchangeable (and not very important) parts in the grand machine, simply demotivates everyone and makes it harder to actually achieve anything.

We haven’t actually moved in yet, so I am getting ahead of myself somewhat. I am trying not to be cynical (at least not in public, this blog does not count) but, based on the amount of thought given to staff here, I am not confident. I do think that the idea of having everyone at least near each other is good. The argument for combining was the travel costs between offices (taxi and tram fares) but I suspect the increased communication will have at least as big an affect on work – if the office layout does not let us down.