If they’re looking at TikTok part of the time, it’s all about the results to me. I’m a big believer in judging staffers by the quality of their work. This is not what you want your valued employees to think. They’re interchangeable and untrustworthy parts in a corporate machine-just like the cubicles in which they crouch. And, as Lindsey Kaufman put it in The Washington Post, “ Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing, and unlimited personal cell phone use isn’t occupying billing hours.”Īll that open air gives your workers another message: They don’t matter. It also lets bosses watch people more easily. The very idea of being in a hot-desking, open-space kindergarten tickles my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard.īut there are other reasons why companies like the idea of an open office. I found cubicles annoying enough back when I still worked in offices. When you’re trying to concentrate, you’ve got Joe and Anne yacking behind you and George doing an interpretative dance about his PowerPoint problem in front of you.Īnother 2013 study found that nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the noise and lack of sound privacy was a real problem for them.
They actively discourage people from working together.Īnd why wouldn’t they? Any conversation becomes a public discussion. The reality is, as a Harvard Business Review study found, that “ face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly 70% after the firms transitioned to open offices.” Let that sink in. Indeed, one 1984 study found that open offices would engender a sense of shared mission and increase collaboration. Open-office proponents promise that, in them, your employees will be better able to collaborate with each other and form close-knit teams. To be clear, my disdain for open offices predates COVID-19 open offices have always been a bad idea. No wonder, with a pandemic going on, no one wants to be packed into an open-air petri dish. Omicron's reproduction number (R-value) is 3.47. By the end of the day, almost the entire office-and bathrooms, doors, and breakroom-were contaminated. In a study from a few years ago of an open office, a harmless virus was placed on a single door. As it turns out, the easiest thing to share in an open office are viruses.
Innovation would flourish, friendships arise, and work wouldn’t feel like work.
Remember, one of the supposed great virtues of the open office was that we could share ideas with coworkers sitting nearby. That’s especially true with Omicron dumping us right back into the COVID-19 work blues.
0 kommentar(er)
