a thing that most companies have grappled very poorly with is making offices actual collaborative spaces, because if they’re not, it’s very hard to understand why you should be in them - ThreadSky

golikehellmachine.com • 31 days ago

a thing that most companies have grappled very poorly with is making offices actual collaborative spaces, because if they’re not, it’s very hard to understand why you should be in them

Reposted from Cooper Lund

One thing that I don't think we've really grappled with is how much more lonely work is now. I'm in an office and I still have spent a shockingly low percentage of today talking to people because everyone else is remote, and it's clearly bad for me.

Comments

danifroom.bsky.social•31 days ago

My office has decided to just move everyone closer together, so it's louder, tighter, and smellier - that's teamwork!

gravelinfluencer.bsky.social•31 days ago

My nonprofit opened a new space in October 2020 (great timing), and we deliberately designed it with collaboration in mind, and with an eye towards home visiting staff who often need hoteling/meeting space. And guess what, staff are in there all the time and use the space.

ck3po.bsky.social•30 days ago

I fear that Zoomers who perhaps started their working careers remotely will never understand the value of in-person collaboration (I’m not a diehard RTW guy; I think flexibility is good, but I also think offices are useful)

afab-acab.bsky.social•31 days ago

This is such a good point!

And (to be selfish and make this thread all about ME for a second) it makes me understand why a past job change was such a disaster for me. I went from a truly collaborative setup to an isolated "parallel play" siloes setup and was MISERABLE. But not quite sure WHY.

afab-acab.bsky.social•31 days ago

I knew I felt lonely but I hadn't been super close with any of my past co-workers (we weren't friends outside work or anything).

But now I can see the job environment was set up to make sharing information, collaborating on projects, and socializing all inherent in the workday.

afab-acab.bsky.social•31 days ago

That would probably be torture for some people, haha. But it worked for me!

(Also explains why when I was able to return to that job, but had to work remotely, I was DESPERATE to get back into the office even though I am a big champion of fully remote work as an option for people in general.)

afab-acab.bsky.social•31 days ago

Okay, thanks for letting me give myself a therapy session in your comments, GOLIKEHELLMACHINE! I am done <3

emoscientist.bsky.social•31 days ago

The answer is simple: cubicles for semi-privacy plus a breakroom where you can hang out. Much like apartments, too much of America has forgotten this simple technology.

zvanjali.bsky.social•31 days ago

Also as someone who loves wfh, I viscerally oppose the idea that socializing is one of the functions of the workplace. I like my colleagues but I have to go to work to earn a living, that shouldn’t be made more burdensome to facilitate socialization.

mdpoppa.bsky.social•30 days ago

💯

scribblegurl.bsky.social•31 days ago

AMEN.

golikehellmachine.com•31 days ago

ironically, given, well, everything, this is the kind of thing that DEI groups think about all the time and have a lot of actionable insights on

golikehellmachine.com•31 days ago

this is not an easy thing to solve, i will add, it is genuinely pretty difficult to figure out how to encourage people to work collaboratively in a productive way.

beatorganizer.bsky.social•31 days ago

Nonverbal, synchronous communication is easier in person but otherwise the challenges of creating collaborative physical spaces aren't that different from collaborative digital/remote spaces.

In-person just feels like it's removing a barrier but it really comes down to group culture, style, etc.

twoandseven.bsky.social•31 days ago

I worked at a place that installed shoulder-high cube walls so that everyone could see each other & get peoples' attention. It was hellish. Lots of tallish plants on the top shelves.

Another place had glass-walled offices. Post-Its & calendars & pictures solved that idiocy.

How not to do it.

digitaldraco.bsky.social•31 days ago

I like the idea of a big open space in theory but every bit of data, anecdotal and research, says it’s counterproductive.

twoandseven.bsky.social•31 days ago

It's a concept with lofty goals, all brought down by That One Guy who only uses speakerphone.

grappler.bsky.social•31 days ago

I'm not sure the goals are all that lofty. I think it basically comes down to cubes being cheaper.

grappler.bsky.social•31 days ago

Cubes and open-space office plans generally, I mean.

erikgunderson.bsky.social•31 days ago

I hear a lot of complaints about meetings. Meetings are supposed to serve a wide variety of purposes, but from what I can see they mainly serve the purposes of attendance checks and venting of management's frustrations. Not for nothing do people complain, "That meeting could have been an e-mail."

erikgunderson.bsky.social•31 days ago

Granted, you should bear in mind the lens through which I, and employment attorney, am given information about other peoples' workplaces. Usually the information comes from people who have been fired, suspect they are about to be fired, or are considering quitting.

golikehellmachine.com•31 days ago

tbh i think a lot of the problems with meetings is that most people are bad and lazy at organizing meetings

golikehellmachine.com•31 days ago

if you can pull together an agenda that you send to people in advance and take good notes that you share out afterward, they’re much more effective and if you can’t do that, it’s worth asking what the point of the meeting was

mmacleod.ca•31 days ago

I am terrible at taking notes, even as I agree in their value. My brain just can’t participate in a meeting and take notes at the same time.

If businesses insist on boiling the planet’s freshwater for genAI, letting the machine do most of the labour of note taking is my only desired use case.

catfrat.bsky.social•31 days ago

I’ve never been so mad at work as when I drove an hour to go to a 3-hour meeting starting at 9 am and the organizer started it by asking “well, what should we talk about today?” I DONT KNOW ITS YOUR MEETING

noghiri.bsky.social•31 days ago

in my own ventures, i gave been doing agendas more and more often and it helps so much

golikehellmachine.com•31 days ago

like, it’s a really fundamental thing that’s gone completely by the wayside in favor of, like, daily stand ups, which aren’t necessarily bad but also aren’t appropriate for a lot of situations

polyparadigm.bsky.social•31 days ago

My employer is genuinely trying, but recently had an own-goal with a policy intended to enable collaboration: https://bsky.app/profile/polyparadigm.bsky.social/post/3lgghhnnq5k25

scribblegurl.bsky.social•31 days ago

I mean, I work in television, which you'd think would be pretty highly collaborative, and all that open space is absolute hell, with zero collaboration.

dissenterbedamned.bsky.social•31 days ago

There is no such thing as healthy socialization in a place where you're forced to be.

dissenterbedamned.bsky.social•31 days ago

"Making money for the shareholders" is not a meaningful endeavor. Not in a community building sense nor in any other sense.

ohdeerthermos.bsky.social•31 days ago

The best I was ever in had decent semi-privacy. Private enough to not feel on the clock but public enough not to feel isolated

ohdeerthermos.bsky.social•31 days ago

Lots of places try and have collab/community spaces but that just ends up making them very public "work" vs "not work" spaces

mexxxitwunk.bsky.social•31 days ago

What did that look like, physically speaking?

ohdeerthermos.bsky.social•31 days ago

Normal office with rooms for 2-6 people with doors. No cubes, very few individual rooms. No collaboration space outside of the rooms, just a hallway

ohdeerthermos.bsky.social•31 days ago

So nothing crazy, but definitely better then most of the newer age office setups I've been in

mexxxitwunk.bsky.social•31 days ago

So in the rooms with 2-6 people they just had 2-6 individual desks or more of a meeting table kind of situation?

ohdeerthermos.bsky.social•31 days ago

Individual desks. My team was split between two: four in one, two in the other. I was in the smaller, which to be fair, was an closet at some point.

mexxxitwunk.bsky.social•31 days ago

That does sound much better than either individual cubicles (booooooring) or full open-plan (incredibly distracting and lacking in privacy)

jeninmotion.bsky.social•31 days ago

I shouldn't be in one, except maybe for quarterly strategic meetings for my team and the annual division in-days. My main dev team is a thousand miles away from me, and the other handles Slack requests better. My boss lives states away. The end.

penguinguy.bsky.social•31 days ago

Also compounds with an over-reliance on meetings (to coordinate increasingly global teams). It sucks if I go into the office and all the people I would have wanted to collaborate with are in meetings all day!

cooperlund.online•31 days ago

I'm in a row of five people, in a big room with 10 rows. Everyone has headphones in when they're in the office and people don't really talk because then 50 people hear your conversation.

philcatelinet.com•31 days ago

We have cubicles with low walls and a lot of us are here today, so our zoom call(s) are a lot more distracting. But most of the IT department is remote (either WFH or in other offices) so I’m not sure how to solve this problem other than private offices for all.

potatolicious.bsky.social•31 days ago

It really does feel like a cultural change. When I started my career people would hop from desk to desk all the time - getting a second opinion, a quick review, etc. (it wasn't always good for productivity)

Now... I sit in the same kind of "pod" but it's just ashen silence 99% of the time.

jrobie.bsky.social•31 days ago

Cubicles were in some ways worse, because you knew that people could hear you but you couldn't see who was listening.

ecarney.bsky.social•31 days ago

Someday the managerial class will invent a workspace where they can see you but you can't see one another.

nemusicdb.bsky.social•31 days ago

Operating model also matters.

If the workday is one long scramble drill, then there is no time for those supposed organic collaborations.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply