<story><title>Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction</title><url>http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fishtoaster</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they&amp;#x27;re harder to get right.  What you need is:&lt;p&gt;- A a decent cultural protocol around it.  One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you.  Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t bother me&amp;quot; signal.
- A reasonable number of walled-off rooms for anyone to use.  Need to take a phone call?  Have a quick 1-on-1?  Debate something loudly with 3-5 people?  You need to have rooms, of varying sizes, to handle these use cases near at hand.
- Minimal noise that&amp;#x27;s not related to collaboration.  Eg, no loud ringing phones.  No phone-based customer support department in the same room as the devs.  No kitchen (full of dishwashers, coffee grinders, etc) area facing the open workspace.&lt;p&gt;Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work.  Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction.  I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abalone</author><text>You mentioned headphones. Headphones seem to be an essential part of open plans. Not only do they send a don&amp;#x27;t-bother-me signal, they also drown out the noise.&lt;p&gt;But that&amp;#x27;s also a really annoying part of it. I don&amp;#x27;t want to have to put on headphones all the time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction</title><url>http://theconversation.com/open-plan-offices-attract-highest-levels-of-worker-dissatisfaction-study-18246</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fishtoaster</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they&amp;#x27;re harder to get right.  What you need is:&lt;p&gt;- A a decent cultural protocol around it.  One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you.  Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t bother me&amp;quot; signal.
- A reasonable number of walled-off rooms for anyone to use.  Need to take a phone call?  Have a quick 1-on-1?  Debate something loudly with 3-5 people?  You need to have rooms, of varying sizes, to handle these use cases near at hand.
- Minimal noise that&amp;#x27;s not related to collaboration.  Eg, no loud ringing phones.  No phone-based customer support department in the same room as the devs.  No kitchen (full of dishwashers, coffee grinders, etc) area facing the open workspace.&lt;p&gt;Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work.  Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction.  I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aimhb</author><text>&amp;gt; One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you.&lt;p&gt;A little bit off topic, but I too have experienced this, and I have to say, it&amp;#x27;s awful for productivity, team building, and team assimilation. As a new hire, I would send my mentor a question and it might be ten minutes to fifty minutes before I would get a reply. By then, I&amp;#x27;d all but forgotten what I was asking about in the first place, since I had moved on because of not knowing how long I&amp;#x27;d have to wait. That led to wasted time and an overall loss of focus.&lt;p&gt;No matter the environment, text-based and asynchronous communication just aren&amp;#x27;t very effective compared to spoken communication, even when considering the interrupted party momentarily losing their flow.</text></comment>