The Code Whisperer

There are a couple of things left out of yesterday’s post I wanted to follow up on today.

The most productive environment for thought based work is adequately sized, quiet, individual offices. However there is a negative aspect to this, the reduction in the feeling of being part of a team. With open plan offices and, to an extent, the cubical layout, teams tend to be clumped together, which gives them a sense of group identity. The identical nature of open plan working spaces means that it is relatively easy to move people around as projects finish and a new team is assembled for a new project.

With individual offices comes ownership and personality. The incumbent of a new office will move things around to their liking and have personal items such as photographs and the ubiquitous pot plant that identifies the workspace as their own. This is good and should be encouraged as the more comfortable the team member is the more productive they will be and likely to stay with the company longer.

If teams change, moving individual offices is not straightforward and you could end up with a team spread over several floors or even buildings. From a team bonding angle this isn’t ideal. In my opinion team bonding isn’t the project being worked on or the company, it’s the personal interaction between the team members, formed by agreement and disagreement on subjects aside from the project and office. It may be an Apple v Windows discussion, last night’s football results or who should be evicted from the Bug Brother house next Friday. It’s trivia, it doesn’t really matter but it bonds people together, or not, but then you have a more serious problem that would need addressing in any case.

With individual offices you lose the team bonding that happens by virtual of being in the same working space, so it’s important that it is recreated in other ways. I worked at IBM’s Hursley locations for a while in 1993. The office environment there was mostly small offices, but contained more than one person and some had almost no natural light so can’t be considered ideal. To overcome the segregation the team generally had lunch together and morning and afternoon tea and coffee breaks at set times, something I haven’t seen since. Now 30 minutes coffee drinking time a day may seem unproductive, but this wasn’t the case at IBM and if you add up the time taken with ad-hoc coffee grabbing and having to spend time getting back the train of thought, 30 minutes a day is a bargain.

So if individual offices are the best environment why isn’t every company doing it? It’s easy to carry out a cost benefit analysis on the additional floor space and furniture against increased productivity, but it’s deriving the amount of increased productivity that becomes the issue. Values exist in books and from studies, but until a company makes the change it won’t know whether it will be beneficial for their project and team member mix. In addition there is a “out of sight, out of mind” worry for managers. If you have passionate, motivated team members, enjoying their work they will continue to work in an individual office. The team members that use the privacy of an office to play games and surf the Internet all day will be as unproductive in an open plan office or cubicle, it’s just that it won’t be as obvious the passing management.