Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
(OP)
Hello all.
I will start off by saying this will be a very open ended question and I'm more after sparking discussion than getting a concrete answer.
At my workplace there are three main offices. Finance, who I'm not interested in. Design, where I work and Technical, where everyone else works, be it manufacturing, production management, quality, team leaders etc.
The planning office is a narrow, open plan office with staff sat in rows 2 desks wide facing each other. The design office is a similar size but with an irregular layout, half the staff but with half height dividers between staff facing each other, we can see either the persons head over the divider, or their back. We also have a breakout room at each end, which the other office does not have and we do use them regularly.
I'm interested in somehow documenting the positive and negative effects each office layout has on productivity. For example, the design office layout has the effect of keeping people quiet and focused on their own world, whereas in the technical office, people are always chatting about ideas etc. but I find the environment stressful.
Does anyone have any views on the pro's and cons of an open layout, a closed layout or the sort of half and half layout created by putting up barriers but not totally enclosing people and any ideas on how I can investigate these and compile some kind of report.
There are plenty of redundant meeting rooms which could be re-purposed as offices to relocate some of the technical office staff to create a layout similar to the design office but it's hard to put forward ideas without facts and I don't want my bias to play too much of a part.
I will start off by saying this will be a very open ended question and I'm more after sparking discussion than getting a concrete answer.
At my workplace there are three main offices. Finance, who I'm not interested in. Design, where I work and Technical, where everyone else works, be it manufacturing, production management, quality, team leaders etc.
The planning office is a narrow, open plan office with staff sat in rows 2 desks wide facing each other. The design office is a similar size but with an irregular layout, half the staff but with half height dividers between staff facing each other, we can see either the persons head over the divider, or their back. We also have a breakout room at each end, which the other office does not have and we do use them regularly.
I'm interested in somehow documenting the positive and negative effects each office layout has on productivity. For example, the design office layout has the effect of keeping people quiet and focused on their own world, whereas in the technical office, people are always chatting about ideas etc. but I find the environment stressful.
Does anyone have any views on the pro's and cons of an open layout, a closed layout or the sort of half and half layout created by putting up barriers but not totally enclosing people and any ideas on how I can investigate these and compile some kind of report.
There are plenty of redundant meeting rooms which could be re-purposed as offices to relocate some of the technical office staff to create a layout similar to the design office but it's hard to put forward ideas without facts and I don't want my bias to play too much of a part.
Designer of machine tools - user of modified screws





RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
Earlier this year, I sat next to a space planner who didn't try to defend the horrible space I'd been put in. She asked me a bunch of questions about how the group worked and how we interacted and described an open-concept plan that would have been a wonderful place to work. She said that what she had just described to me would have cost less than the cookie-cutter BS that HR had shoved down our throats. Her biggest complaint was that the affected groups are always too busy to send anyone with a clue to the planning meetings and they send the slug that the group can most easily do without. They end up with a space that the slug thinks would be "cool" and that never works for the people in the group who make the group work. She said that if Engineering groups would treat their own space like they treat their projects they would not hate open concept at all. I don't know if she was right or not, but I would have liked working in the space she sketched out.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.
The plural of anecdote is not "data"
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
I've had private offices, low cubes, high cubes, open plan, bullpen with desks, bullpen with workbenches, even a remote office in a back corner of the factory above the stock rack for a CNC punch press. I absolutely cannot associate any such 'furniture' issue with productivity, however you choose to measure it.
I can assert a strong correlation with general morale, and the presence of strong leadership.
I can assert a weak correlation with noise level, but not in a direct way. I think everyone needs a place in which conversation is encouraged, in order to keep all project members on the same page. ... and that everyone also needs access to a really quiet place in which to organize thoughts, compose reports, do calculations, and conduct other necessarily solitary activities.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
People are very adaptable, and can adapt to most environments.
TTFN

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RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
http://www.nceng.com.au/
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
"But look how much more work gets done in the same space!"
It's worth noting that we dont work on large group projects here, its a large number of small projects which have minimal at best input from others and all of which are internal. Nobody really needs to have a big group discussion about anything, its best if people are happy because they are not isolated but the layout sufficiently disrupts peoples desire to engage in chatter.
Designer of machine tools - user of modified screws
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
When I was in the cube farm, I was told that it would increase my productivity and improve communication between departments. The reality was that not only was I faced with all of the normal distractions, but every time anyone else near me also was facing these distractions, they became my distractions too. The guys catching up from the weekend, the guy who uses his speaker phone without hesitation, the two engineers haggling with a contractor about a field issue...they all became things I had to become involved in because I was listening to them happening and keeping me from getting done what I needed to get done.
Even though my office is supposedly an environment that the "experts" claim doesn't promote productivity, I am much more productive being able to focus on my own work...and you know what, when I need to collaborate I get up off my behind and walk over to coordinate with someone! Still being productive, still communicating...just not having to deal with everyone else's distractions too! Quite a concept I suppose.
PE, SE
Eastern United States
"If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death!"
~Code of Hammurabi
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
My speaker phone allows me to attend a webanar and still do work (less thinking work however). But the office walls make it difficult to yell a question to my coworkers (engineering is a colabration after all).
The office walls also make the fire alarm requirements different (what I can't hear you we are having a fire drill). Also having office walls means the automated light switch often turns the lights off on me. The window means glare on my computer screen (only one of the two).
When I remove the chars from my office I have fewer lounge lizards, and I get more work done.
I also can't reach one of my office drawers, so it remains empty, even though my desk top is full. I also don't have a sit-stand desk, so I take more breaks to streach my legs.
The best thing is my office is away from the main door, so I don't hear people coming and going.
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
If you hire independent, self-motivated people, you need to give them at least SOME privacy, a place to store a few personal effects- and for us old folks, a few BOOKS, paper files and vendor catalogs (I have many whose contents never made it onto their websites- worth their weight in gold). I also have an examples shelf: when mentoring, having something physical to look at, i.e. show and tell, is worth at least 10,000 words. Having to leave your desk every time you need to make a phonecall isn't conducive to productivity either, nor is being disrupted every time someone else needs to make a call.
The Les Nessman door on my cube regrettably doesn't keep people from barging in when I'm in the middle of a calc or a drawing. Yeah, those informal interactions are great and necessary, but I have too many of them and they're too frequent. I work from home one day per week, and that has improved my productivity greatly by removing external distractions, i.e. unscheduled distractions generated by others. Any task that requires an extended period of focused thinking, I save until that day when I have the environment which permits me to succeed at that kind of work. For undisciplined people it has exactly the opposite effect.
How do you measure this stuff? Search me- I have no idea. Work environment is very personal. Suspect that if you have people leaving in droves and they all bitch about the office environment in their exit interviews, you may have a problem, but beyond that it's a difficult measurement problem.
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
The conundrum of engineering is that we must communicate to get our jobs done and at the same time we and those around us need to shut up so we can get our jobs done.
I will echo what others have said that productivity is affected by more than just the office plan. The people around you, the work, distances between team members, the overall environment, etc all contribute. In addition, people working in the same environment will react differently.
I have worked in low-wall cubes (4' to 5' walls) in mixed engineering/drafting rooms with 5 to 10 other people and I have had my own private office. I spent about 6 years total in cubes and about 27 years total in a private office office. My first year out of college I had my own office, but our ONE Teletype computer terminal was on my side table and about 20% of the time another engineer was in my office using the terminal, which was noisy. I greatly prefer a private office over cubes.
My experience is this…
[1] My eyesight is worse than average, but my hearing is better than average (both frequency range and minimum decibel level detected; my wife would say that my hearing is good, but my listening is not so good
[2] I work on projects that involve just me; just me and one drafter; all the way up to me leading a team of about 10 engineers and drafters. Fortunately, except for a few weeks here and there when I was loaned out to another office, the largest office I have ever worked in had less than 40 people. These offices were small enough that having a private office was no worse than cubes or an open plan as far as communication goes. On the other hand, the ability to close my door for a private conversation with a client, with a member of my design team, or even personal is a major benefit to a private office.
[3] I am very particular about my work space, how it is laid out, and how it is decorated. I work best when the space is mine and not the brain fart of someone else. The furniture in cubes is usually fixed, while furniture in private offices can usually be moved around. The cubes I have worked in had insufficient space to lay out a D- or E- size set of drawings; even today I keep a drafting table in my private office for this purpose. Unlike private offices, cubes rarely have sufficient wall space for hanging photos, and I like to hang photos and astrophotos I have taken.
Years ago, I was transferred to an office run by an excellent engineer who was also a very rigid thinker (his nature, reinforced by time spent in the military). I started off in a cube in the drafting room, but two years later I was assigned a private office. All of the private offices except his (which was bigger) were laid out exactly the same, but I didn't like the layout at all. So, the first thing I did was rearrange the furniture to a more efficient layout. My boss threw a fit and told me to move everything back (I didn't know at the time that he was the one who had originally done the space planning). I asked him if this was to be his work space or mine. He said mine, so I said he should trust my judgement as to the layout that worked best for me. He backed down.
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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
In the 90's I had the worst seat in the house, close to the mailbox. Members of the department would stop by, and as i tend to be an outgoing guy I ended up talking to all of them most of the time.
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
Unfortunately, the grapevine says that we're about to lose our office furniture in favor of "cookie cutter" modular crap in a building-wide standard layout put together by the big boss.
I currently have an awesome weighs-a-ton-plenty-of-drawers-and-slideouts 1950s steel desk with the 3-level full-width wooden hutch some facilities guy built (probably in the 1960s) with an undermount desk light and outlets for my phone, etc. Matching extra-deep, 2-drawer filing cabinets and a credenza (again, facilities-built wood) are going to vanish too, apparently. Dunno where the heck I'm going to keep all my reference books, files, samples/demo items, standards, et cetera.
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
How big is the storage room or basement?
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
Just as a reference they call these guidelines "deregulation".
RE: Measuring the effects an office environment has on productivity etc.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.
The plural of anecdote is not "data"