Community Chat

[minkbunny]

I am very grateful to have my own office.

[stevieb]

Oh yea, it's a monkey see - monkey do kind of a world, so now I guess the trend is for employers to try to model their work environments after the tech and social media giants... whether it makes sense for the kind of office they're running of not... Give me natural light and a door I can close... As a responsible adult, when I think I can benefit from 'collaborating', I'll collaborate...

[JaneMarple]

Many posters are forgetting or do not know that offices were set up like this for decades. Look at old movies or magazine photos, especially after WWll. This is nothing new, anyone recall secretarial pools, travel agencies or newsrooms? All large open spaces.

[proudlyfromNJ]

I have worked in an open office until my last job in the early 2002 when we moved to a new building and got cubes. So for 30 years I worked in an open concept office. Nothing new.

[PamelaSue72]

Our government building has cubes. I work in a cube and I hate it. The workers in certain departments, quite honestly, don't have enough work to keep them busy, so they talk (loudly) and play music (loudly). It is beyond annoying. One morning, a gentleman called in to my office and I was trying to talk to him, but I kept having to ask him to please speak louder as I couldn't hear him over the noise coming from across the hall. He finally said to me, "What's the party for anyway? Is this what my tax dollars pay for?" I explained that it was not coming from my department, but was coming from another department across the room. (It was coming from the voter registration department, from maybe four women. They are beyond annoying.)

That's how loud they are. Those women wouldn't know the meaning of the word "professional" if you smacked them over the head with it. It's very difficult to try to concentrate in that building some days. Complaining does no good. 

[millieshops]

I would be far less efficient in that open atmosphere than I would be in a quieter, more private one.

I was fortunate never to have my classroom subject to the open-environment movement from a few decades back, but I did have to share my classroom which meant having to find workspace for any non-teaching periods instead of being able to work at my own desk without interruptions.  I accomplished way less and that was one of the reasons I was thrilled when I could retire.