I've worked in a variety of settings, and my favorite is a small team in a conference room/tiny open office. 3-8 people.
People tend to be respectful of each other's concentration at that number of people. And since you're in the same team, most interruptions are likely to be useful to other members of the team. But if we wanted to just bother 1 specific person, we would just use instant message.
Our manager worked in the same conference room too. But he would step outside for any calls he had to make.
It also gave an exiting "small startup" feel for me, even when working for a large company.
I guess I'll be the exception here. I'm in a psudeo-open workspace right now which is pretty much what you're talking about except that we're not in a room, it's what the company calls a "pod" with high walls and a single doorway. I would say 90% of all distractions etc. come from inside the pod. Moving us into our own room would make no difference. It does get pretty loud sometimes in the building, but it's mostly white noise and easy (at least for me) to ignore. The only way to work mostly without distractions here is to wear headphones, which generally signals to others that they should leave you alone, but even then people will still just wander over and bother you because you're right there. For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird.
The most productive times I have, hands-down, are when I work from home.
> For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird.
This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes off his headphones and looks up at the person.
It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change. Apparently humans in group spaces just really, really, really want to verbally speak to other humans in those spaces and there's no amount of "hey guys I'm really trying to work here could you keep it down" that doesn't come across as rude or condescending.
I guess part of it for me is there seems to be no escaping from the noise of life any more. At least at work I used to have an office with a door that I could close for a couple of hours of solitude and heads-down real work. Now, after the building redesign, there are 950 people in the building and a pittance of conference rooms and phone rooms and "team rooms" (little conference rooms supposedly shared between just two or three teams sitting in larger "pod rooms" but, in practice, squatted in by one or two people all day). I've spent twenty minutes walking around my building and the adjacent one just trying to find somewhere to do a phone screen for an interview candidate.
Combine that with the rest of the world getting louder[0] and it's becoming a little frustrating.
0 - Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.
> Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.
Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form.
Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
> so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
To be 100% clear, I still love living in the dense city where I do and I have no plans on moving away from it. But I don't think employers have yet figured out that taking away the quiet(er?) spots at work does a lot of harm because it means loss of hours of quiet.
I also readily admit that a good chunk of this is on me. I am increasingly a curmudgeon, probably because of changes at work, and so I take it out on the other parts of my environment by quietly being frustrated.
I've lived in the middle of nowhere before and hated it. I've lived in the "quiet" suburbs and hated it. At least living in the city, with the attendant noise, I get more out of it than I lose; I'm just still frustrated at my employer (and my industry) for taking away my office door.
It'll be interesting to see if SpaceX's Starlink LEO internet service will spur remote workers to spread out even further into places like Montana. We've already had to deal with some remote workers relocating to developing countries and in one case, even an active warzone, without telling the company first.
Remote work is still challenging though. The nature of not being able to get person-to-person time (regardless of how good video calls get) will always remain a challenge in its own right.
The space issue is fundamental: there just aren't that much space around cities as they stand today. The only pragmatic solutions are:
1) Build up. Everyone wants to live in these areas, so build as tall of buildings as possible and just spread out upwards. Doesn't solve the personal office problem though since Tokyo is super dense but I don't think anybody has a private office?
2) Build new cities. America is big, and there is still plenty of space left to build. But it looks to me like a combination of power-law economics, plus locale desirability, and political willingness to invest into infrastructure is pushing most ordinary people right back into the clutches of 1).
> Remote work is still challenging though. The nature of not being able to get person-to-person time (regardless of how good video calls get) will always remain a challenge in its own right.
Even as a remote worker, I used to think this was true.
I no longer believe this is the case.
In remote video calls each human is like an augmented cyborg integrated with their computer and the internet.
The nature of IRL meetings tend to disrupt the augmentation aspect. Above a certain number of people perhaps augmentation becomes more obstacle then advantage though.
The above is anecdotal and your experience may differ.
Work life in Japanese cities is difficult to compare with it in the United States because Japanese culture is so much different. Diversity is not prized, conformity and harmony are. A large open space with 300 workers in Japan operates very differently than an open space with 300 workers in an American city.
Build new cities, you're on the right track though I doubt it will happen from scratch like in China. Rather mid-tier cities such as Huntsville and Boise will grow into larger cities.
Remote work has its up and down sides. I've been doing it for two years. Most of the time it is better but there are occasions when collaborating on some idea or document would work better in person at a whiteboard. But those get fewer all the time and the remote collaboration tools get better over time. I'd love for all of us to have Surface Hub whiteboards but they're still too expensive to have a reasonable ROI. Over time though, the price will go down, as will that of other high fidelity collaboration tools.
>It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change.
Presuming you're not the only one who's experiencing this it seems like this could be surfaced to the entire team and some norms could be established around when it's appropriate to approach someone. E.g. "If they're wearing headphones then they don't want to be interrupted, so send an email/IM/whatever instead."
I agree. I found cubicles a bit soul-sucking and private offices too isolated. An open plan in a small area is fine for me, but 200 people on a floor is too many. If you're pair programming, you can get away with a lot more noise around you than if you're trying to concentrate by yourself. Also, people are less likely to interrupt a pair that is obviously hard at work than they are to bug an individual.
This is by far the most effective workplace environment and arrangement I have experienced as well, for teams and large companies - almost like physical 'pod' structures
Same! I worked in a setting like that and it was by far the most productive environment I've been in as far as pure work volume and concentration. Basically people were in tiny open offices sorted by teams (i.e. frontend, backend, copywriters). Our group kept the room pretty dark and no one talked, we just messaged each other. I realize that description can sound a little creepy, but it was blissful.
Open office-wise the best was getting a desk that was in a corner around a pony wall. So I had a wall (conference room) at my back, a pony wall at my left and a desk facing towards me, which is almost like a wall in front. Also the people I was sitting near could control the lights on our side of the wall. We kept only half on and it was super helpful. I think bright fluorescent lighting is a little distracting. Maybe not distracting, but not awesome.
Same, best setup for me was quads of corner desks with high exterior walls, making a sort of open room of four that were faced away from each other but within earshot. The cubes had sliding frosted glass windows between quads that you could open to talk to the adjacent team.
Also high natural light with moderate ceiling lights and good task lighting on ample desk surface.
This was at a premium EDI firm in the 90’s. It was awesome.
People tend to be respectful of each other's concentration at that number of people. And since you're in the same team, most interruptions are likely to be useful to other members of the team. But if we wanted to just bother 1 specific person, we would just use instant message.
Our manager worked in the same conference room too. But he would step outside for any calls he had to make.
It also gave an exiting "small startup" feel for me, even when working for a large company.