h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Think of hot-desking.
Humans like to have their own territory where they can pick up work where they left off the previous day. Starting each day at work by having to set up all your physical and IT preferences from scratch is tiresome to say the least. An inefficient waste of time which leads to a feeling of being a cog in the machine rather than a valued employeee, at worst.

Then there's the onging fashion for open plan offices. Call me old-fashioned but I like walls and doors. Walls and doors are great; quite apart from important things like shielding you from annoying laughs and other distractions, they make the building and sub-sections easier to heat/cool and give employees greater privacy and again, a little bit of territory they can make their own.

But no, current business mantra is that everyone will perform better if they know that their every breath and movement can be monitored for time wastage. Um, no

There are many, many more example I could think of, but you get the gist. Why then do so many business practices and company procedures actively try to fight against millions of years of human evolution and force as into uncomfortable and unnatural working conditions?

Why have so few businesses (apart from the likes of google and a few enlightened others), cottoned onto the notion that happy and comfortable employess = productive and loyal employees?

When i had my own office a few years back, it became a home from home, and I would often put in a lot of unpaid overtime because I felt I had privacy and comfort at work. Where I work now it's all hotdesking and open-plan as far as the eye can see. I grudge working an extra second I don't have to.

" Starting each day at work by having to set up all your physical and IT preferences from scratch is tiresome to say the least. An inefficient waste of time which leads to a feeling of being a cog in the machine rather than a valued employee, at worst." [winnoch2]

Treating subordinates decently gives them too much leverage. There's a pecking order, and the managers want to have the most toys when they die, since that means they've beat out all the other managers. For what it's worth, this is a question of incentives for the managerial cadre, so it is very much in keeping with human nature, though in a narrow sense.

"Then there's the onging fashion for open plan offices...
current business mantra is that everyone will perform better
if they know that their every breath and movement can be
monitored for time wastage."

There are two layers to this: the fashionability of particularly novel approaches which show their flaws when viewed with hindsight, and the concern for making every cent spent on office space count. Actually, I can think of a third layer: where your company is in terms of newness and size. A new start-up with exciting prospects will very likely have to make do with a tiny office, but it's worth it because the head honchos work their tails off and encourage the rest of the workers. It's only with greatly increased size and stratification that things get so impersonal and demoralizing. In the country I live in, there are eight or nine million companies. The vast majority are very small, and there is immense variability in terms of their attractiveness to potential and existing workers. Maybe there's a small company that is doing everything wrong in theory, but the personalities involved are able to counterbalance
this.

Hot-desking is well known to be counter-productive. It's done to save cost when people are cheaper than space.

Open plan is more prouctive than small offices because it is in line with millions of years of evolution. We like to work in packs and open plan ecourages this. If weve a problem ee can talk about it to yhe people around us. It's nothing to do with monitoring.

Perhaps it's something to do with getting people out of their "comfort zones" or something, as I believe there is research to indicate that open plan offices are better for productivity.

I can see it both ways - when I worked in an open plan office, it was noisy and uncomfortable, but I could keep up to date with the news. Now I am in a small office I can concentrate much better, but I can go for whole days without seeing anyone, which affects my productivity in a different way...

Hot desking is not about employees, as desk setups are very personal, but it is about saving money as a company doesn't need as many desks when people share, so can occupy smaller buildings, etc, even though it costs in terms of productivity as everyone has to set up pretty much from scratch every day...

Yes, exactly, my productivity is affected because if I have a problem, I often have to spend time working things out by myself whereas there may be someone else who would know the answer more quickly.

"Perhaps it's something to do with getting people out of their "comfort zones"
That's an example of what i'm talking about. Why should work be anymore stressful and uncomfortable than it has to be? I like being in my confort zone as a matter of fact. I suspect the majority of people do. Humans seek out comfort zones so they can expend their energies on more important stuff, rather than constantly having to re-adjust to new working environments or conditions. When did it suddenly become undesirable to feel settled?

It reminds me of another bizarre and counterproductive policy which our place, but I dare say many others too have; shuffling staff around teams pretty much for the sake of it. We can't have people becoming too comfortable at work now can we? I know let's shake things up, break up working relationships and force our employees to settle into a new team every year or so, just for the hell of it

I'm afraid i disagree on open-plan being more in line with our evolution. To a certain extent its helpful and beneficial to work with others yes; I'm certainly not proposing that a large organisation should function with everyone working in individual offices. But groups should be small; rooms for each team or department. That is in line with the way humans have worked for thousands of years; small groups of people doing similar things.

It's this melting pot of tens or even hundreds of people all working in one huge room that I object to, and consider to be an unnatural and even unpleasant way of working.

Before our office was turned into a barn / call centre, we were encouraged to visit another site to see what it was like. We were told that it was popular amongst our colleagues there.

So we visited. Our colleagues said, 'This sucks'.

Lesson? Management are unable to hear what they don't want to.

So the deed was done. It isn't hot-desking. It must be referred to as 'flexible working'. (Actually, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck.....)

However, it was justified by the nature of our work. Yes, we spend periods of time out of the office with clients (but less and less so because our record keeping system demands an increasing amount of time in front of a computer recording data).

Lesson? Recording data is more important that treating mental illness because if we don't record the data, the organisation doesn't get the money to buy the computers to allow us to go and treat people and come back to the office to feed the beast some more.

Other people may want to use the desk whilst you are out. So every time you leave the office, you have to clear your desk and put everything in a drawer. When you come back, you have to get it out again.

The large banks of drawers have convex tops so that you cant put things on top like plants. This was stated specifically.

The office is littered with bits of discarded leads, rests and general debris that people have abandoned choosing to go without it rather than putting it in and getting it out of drawers like Eeyore and his balloon.

It isn't a great place to work. Team identity is destroyed by the constant churning of staff because nobody wants to stay and for an organisation responsible for treating mental illness, management appear to have a very tenuous grasp on how to look after their staff's well-being.

PP.

That's actually a really sad, but excellent post PP

I would wager a fair wad of cash that the genius's who dream up these new and improved working practices, don't actually experience them, themselves.

Like the managment in our place. They specified an open-plan office with hot-desking, but guess what? They each have their own offices tucked away in corners of the main open-plan office.

Can't have the plebs finding out how little the chiefs actually do, can we?

Just had an thought though PP. You should super-glue pot-plants and stuff to the curved surfaces. Might be a hassle but probably worth it for the looks on the faces of managment

"Like the managment in our place. They specified an open-plan office with hot-desking, but guess what? They each have their own offices tucked away in corners of the main open-plan office. Can't have the plebs finding out how little the chiefs actually do, can we?" [Winnoch2]

It could go either way, of course. They might do a little or a lot. Plus, they are lightning rods for criticism. First rule of management: when you're in charge, everything is your fault. And when the topic of reimbursement comes up, well, you're paid to suffer. The yacht and the summer house are there to alleviate the suffering, I guess.

Our managers sit in the open plan area along with everyone else. We have little glass meeting rooms with three chairs which anyone can use for private conversations or phone calls.

We have a mainly open plan office, set up in islands of 4 (quite large) desks. But the design of the whole space means that at one end we have a large archive room in the middle, creating 2 almost-offices of 2 2-desk islands. I'm right up the corner of one of them, a position I hold on to because I do salaries so need to have a degree of privacy. No-one can pass my desk without actually intending to come and see me. So I love the office layout . I would absolutely hate to be stuck in the middle somewhere, even at home I have to sit against a wall (I'm a bit weird like that).

We have a couple of hot desks, but they're specifically for 3 or 4 people who come into the office once or twice a month so it does make sense.

And our managers , whilst in their own little glass offices, have their doors open for most of the day and work really hard.

But I do work for an exceptionally employee-friendly company, which is probably why I've been there for 19 years.

Deb

Thanks, Deb.

My company polled its managers recently with the question: "What is your greatest asset?"

"People" came in 47th, one place below "Stationery".

"We like to work in packs ... "


I don't.

There's a lot of conflict in modern methods. On the one hand, they want people to sit together in open-plan, with maybe a few small breakout rooms for private conversations. This means that we all have to suffer the non-private and generally irrelevant conversations.

Then they want to be "flexible" and "matrix managed" and have virtual teams across multiple locations - maybe in different territories, maybe working from home. But then they insist on rapid productivity techniques (like Agile/Scrum in the IT environment) which are only designed to work with co-located and dedicated teams.

"We like to work in packs ... "


I don't."

no,me neither. I'm the least social worker you'll find; teamwork=compromise in my opinion. I have always worked best on my own. I get self-concious and make mistakes when others are around and listening to me.

(of course I don't say this on my CV or atjob interviews

The wise manager will notice what work modes best suit employees and assign tasks accordingly. But maybe there aren't enough wise managers to go around?

I like the idea of "Scrum" as a work technique. If I don't like one of my colleagues' ideas, I'll take him down with a Rugby tackle.