Designing the workspace

At IBM Research, we had private offices. The norm for new tech companies is the open space - -lots of desks and chairs, abutting.

I envision companies just launching, with a cadre of 10 people all feverishly inventing, developing, and discussing what needs to be done out of the proverbial garage.  The interaction is frequent, and collocation is key.

Fast forward to startups that are no longer startups, and now have thousands of employees.

Hundreds of people sharing the same open space are no longer all collaborating with one another, non-stop. It gets harder and harder to collocate all of the people that are working on a particular project; some of the team might be in a remote office location. So now people are abutting desks and chairs with others that may or may not be working on the same projects. Overhearing their conversations and issues becomes a distraction to your own work.

Even if people are all working on the same project, we aren’t always talking and strategizing; sometimes we need the quiet time to actually deliver. That is harder in a noisy space. It is also harder when you are just “out there” and so any random person that sees you might come over and start a conversation.

The solution? Headphones. You will see lots of people working with headphones on. They are either listening to music while they work, or they are creating a “signal” – like a closed door - -“I am working now, knock first if you want to interrupt.”

When you are going to have a meeting with a few people, or even a videoconference call, you can’t do it at your desk; you will disturb the others around you that are not working on the same project, or not working on the same phase of that project at this particular time. So you need to find a conference room. The open space model assumes that you do most of your work in a public space, and separate off into a quiet conference room space when you need to have lengthy conversations with other people.

I also think about the growing population with attention deficit disorder (ADD). Some estimates claim that this is 11% of the population, and that most of these are male (the dominant gender in tech companies.) Placing people to work in these bustling shared spaces is probably not ideal to get highest productivity. Unless we have inadvertently found a “cure” for ADD, through an immersion process..

I don’t suffer from ADD; our house was always rollicking and chaotic and so I can function just fine in that sort of setting. But I do miss my own office –with all of the personal touches of life around me; pictures of my family on the wall, and all the other nick nacks – that make your office feel more like the second home that it really is.