Another Stupid Money Saving Idea

Yesterday the Mercury News ran a story about reducing office space in Silicon Valley. The gist of it is that companies are making their knowledge workers work in bullpens (large open rooms without even cubicle walls), "iCafes", or unpersonalized offices (aka hoteling).

Making people who think work in open spaces is stupid. Ever since Peopleware was published, managers have had no excuse for not knowing that leaving their knowledge workers undisturbed as much as possible improves their productivity.

If your phone rings twice a day, you lose two 15 minute periods of work, because it takes you 15 minutes to get back to the mental state of "flow" in which you do your best work. That's 30 minutes lost. If you are in a room with 15 other people, each of those people loses those 30 minutes as well, so that's a total of 8 hours lost. If each of those people's phones also rings twice a day, you're not getting much good work done at all.

So the companies which are doing this in a straightforward and stupid way are saving money on their real estate bills and losing money on the productivity side. And that's not a guess, that's a certainty.

Comments

[Chris Paduan]

What I thought was interesting about this article was that if you take this to its logical conclusion, why have people come in to work at all? Everyone could telecommute, except when face to face meetings are required. Then they could _really_ save space. Doubt they'll replant the orchards they levelled to make office parks, though.