Open Office Time Wasters.

I find myself agreeing with this article on the Archdaily recently. It’s attempting to answer why, in a face of counter evidence, the open office reigns supreme.

I related to this article this week because I just put in a submission for a company that boasts a 4 people to 1 desk strategy. It's the hottest hot desk office I've every worked on. The company is the sort of giant organisation that uses the word ‘synergy’ A LOT. They provide strategic consulting and I’m not even entirely sure what that is. Anyway, part of the brief was to ‘open up’ the office. The people on high want the people on the ground to come out their offices in to an open workspace so they can squeeze more people on the floor plate. I’d be interested to find out some numbers about their employee satisfaction and productivity, because while open spaces prompt collaboration in creative companies, I can’t help feeling that their interiors also are created in a comfortable homely style because the employees are in the office for longer. Certainly, the to-do list takes so much longer to get through when you’re constantly getting interrupted.

Mr P remarked the other day that he wondered what people did to waste time at work before the internet was invented. We could only conclude they did their work and got to the pub on time. I suppose that the same can be said for open plan office…