work

It's Official: Open-Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time

A new study from Harvard reveals that open-plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration.

So asides from reducing productivity, open plan offices also apparently reduce face-to-face collaboration, which is literally the one thing they’re supposed to increase.

Technically, I currently work in an open plan office, but it’s small and there’s usually not more than about six of us here at any one time (the impacts of “open plans” start to kick in at about eight-to-twelve). Whenever I have to go on client site and end up in the middle of a floor of a hundred, I’m once again reminded why I do not miss it…1

1. Incidentally, I once left a job because they were going to take away my office and put me out on the floor of an open plan layout. And, okay. That wasn’t the sole reason, but I was in a management role and the idea of having to manage staff without having an office they could walk into and shut the door on? No. So much no. [↩]

Why every office should scrap its clean desk policy

Financial journalist and economist Tim Harford writes about a fascinating experiment to identify the most productive and inspiring office setup.

And very specifically clean desk policies, not clear desk policies (which are about not leaving sensitive materials unsecured). Basically, not allowing workers control over their desk spaces is noticeably bad for productivity. Like, on orders of “having to hire more staff” levels of bad.

See also: Everyone Hates Hotdesking.

Here's another reason to move to France: No after-work emails

French people now have the right to ignore business-related emails that arrive after the work day is done.

Well. Not quite. It’s more like France has decided that working hours are working hours, and workers aren’t obligated to work outside of them without compensation, and that “work” also includes tasks such as answering or writing emails.

The good news is that enforced work-life balance seems to cause no actual drop in workplace productivity–according to such known bastions of workplace inefficiency as, oh, Volkswagen–which just goes to show how necessary all those “urgent” 3am emails really are…

Who left food in the fridge? The rise of the 'Dark Knight' workplace vigilante

Self-appointed enforcers, keen to report colleagues for misdemeanours, are a common – and potentially costly – issue for organisations, survey finds

On workplace vigilantes.

Once upon a workplace, I received a parcel and put the small cardboard box it came in in the rubbish bin. This was one of those workplaces with like ten million bins, each for a limited class of rubbish. I put my box in the “recycling” bin, because cardboard. Anyway, I went to lunch, then came back… and found someone had fished the box out of the bin and left it on my desk (it was a parcel, so it literally had my name on it). No note, but I got the message: I had committed the cardinal workplace sin on Using The Wrong Bin. What was the Right Bin? I had no idea. In fact, I still had no idea three years later when I left that job and left the box in my office cupboard because I’d been too scared to try throwing it out a second time.

In that same workplace, some years earlier, there’d been a Your Mothers Don’t Work Here1 fight over dirty dishes in the kitchen. At one point, a Laws of the Kitchen sign appeared that threatened any unwashed dishes left on the sink would be thrown out at the end of the day. The threat was empty, however, and no one was enforcing it. Because I’m usually the first in the office, I decided I’d be the dishes police. Except I didn’t throw anything out; every morning, I’d go wash all the dirty dishes and then hide them at the back of one of the cupboards. For those few brief, beautiful weeks, the kitchen did actually get a little bit cleaner.

It was never going to last. One of the dirty mugs I’d hidden turned out to belong to A Dude who decided to be exempt from the Law of the Kitchen. Upon finding his mug had been removed, as per policy, he flipped the fuck out, demanding to know who’d “stolen” his mug and tearing apart the entire office to find it. I did not, in fact, confess to being the kitchen fairy, though eventually Dude managed to find the stash of dishes and, thus, his mug. The next morning, the threatening sign was gone and, thus, ended the reign of the Mildly Clean Office Kitchen.

There’s just one more thing, though. I did eventually learn who’d fished my box out of the bin; it had been one of the other middle managers. The same one, in fact, who’d put up the original Laws of the Kitchen sign.

The same one the Mug Dude directly reported to.

Office life really is very petty.

1. … I know. [↩]

No, it's not you: why 'wellness' isn't the answer to overwork

More and more workplaces are turning to the wellness industry to try and solve the problem of overwork.

Yoga classes won’t do squat to fix stress when the problem is toxic work expectations.

When I was managing staff, I had a mix of people who were strict 9-to-5ers and those who were manic 12-hour-days-plus-2am-on-Sunday-remote-login types. The thing that always struck me is that the people who worked longer hours–in a few cases, obsessively long hours–weren’t actually necessarily more productive than the people who did their 40 hours and left it at that.

The difference seemed to be that the overworkers used to be very good at finding work to fill in their time. That is, they’d obsess over tiny details in one project or work-and-rework something ad infinitum. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this is exactly the skill you need. And sometimes it’s just self-directed makework. Meanwhile, the 9-to-5ers tended to be very focused on delivering to the scope of whatever specific task they were delivering on; no tangents, no obsessive rehashing the same thing over and over. And obviously this is one observation from one team, but… yeah. I found it interesting, at any rate.