GDC Follow-Up: The Open Office Dilemma

Okay, so I lied – I did not post all kinds of content in the week (or month) following GDC (it is still coming, please be patient).  However, over the past month, while catching up on the lovely piles of paperwork greeting me upon my return to the office, I have been reflecting intently on the feedback I received during GDC. 

Now I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to realize the degree to which the subject matter of my talk was desired and valued.  Members of the game development community, it seems, are quite eager to learn more about how their work environment impacts their performance and creativity. 

But even more fulfilling for me was that, due to the format of the poster session, I was able to interact directly with the attendees of the talk, hear their stories, answer their questions, take immediate notes on their feedback, and build connections with those interested in learning more through collaboration.  Thankfully, any fears of chirping crickets were immediately abolished as I realized, GDC attendees are not a shy bunch when it comes to feeding their insatiable hunger for knowledge or leaving a speaker happily hoarse at the end of a talk.

Across the many stories and questions I heard, a select few themes resounded above all the rest.  I’ll attempt to address all of these one by one and answer any questions that may have been raised and left unanswered during the hectic 2 hours of the session.  I’ll begin by calling out the most contentious element of the presentation, namely: the infamous OPEN OFFICE DILEMMA. 

Simply put - we all might hate cubicles, but not everyone buys into the open office environment.  This is particularly the case with engineers and programmers who appreciate the productivity boost they experience when working in more enclosed spaces with minimal interruptions.

And who can blame them?  I myself have been struggling with this over the past month as I attempt to reign in and tame my workload while simultaneously dealing with the interruptions of coordination issues and distractions made by other teams and co-workers around me.  At the end of the day I look back and think: what in the heck did I actually accomplish today? 

The reason for this lies in the cooperative nature of our work.  We can’t achieve our project or professional goals unless we communicate, learn, share and interact with one another.  Furthermore, our work is such that cooperation and coordination are characterized by inconvenience.  We need to deal with things as they arise, not necessarily when it is most comfortable for us to deal with them.  Indeed, "productive" work is often put off in order to walk halfway across the building for an in-person problem solving session, to send a brief e-mail that quickly turns into an endless string of replies, to sit in on a spontaneous conference call with a virtual team, or to grab your Nerf gun and join in on impromptu office war games. 

While there is real value in our efforts to communicate and connect, it is largely intangible and feels a little (or a lot) empty when we approach the end of the week and still have the greater part of an immovable and seemingly insurmountable backlog of work looming menacingly over our shoulders.  Closed office environments, due to their tendency to formalize and separate the two activities of functional work and collaboration, often aggravate this feeling and condition us to feel more at ease within the cozy confines of a cubicle, avoiding communication or coordination in favor of the comfort zone of flow.

The open office environment, on the other hand, tends to facilitate communication, interruption, and peripheral distraction.  In doing so, it encourages us to integrate communication processes holistically with our work processes, norms, and team structures – making them nearly indistinguishable from one another.  Thus, we not only become more efficient at communication and collaboration, but we embrace them as integral parts of the whole of our work to produce games or building designs or whatever creative endeavor we might be pursuing.

But I'm not writing this to talk about the perceived benefits of open office environments (although if you have questions about this, please feel free to contact me).  The thing is – the programmers and engineers of whom I speak make an excellent and entirely valid point.  Open office environments are not a panacea and there are real challenges and pitfalls to making them work.  If implemented incorrectly, a company may quickly find that any potential benefits offered by the open office are overwhelmed by the negative consequences of ineffective deployment and misalignment with company processes, culture or strategy.  Needless to say, if you are choosing to make the significant capital investment to build or renovate your workspace, you are going to want to make damn sure you do it right – that the resulting office design is worth both your time and your company’s money.

To this end, what follows are some design and design process strategies which I have found to help mitigate and deal with the previously mentioned challenges.  I must stress once again that none of these strategies alone will solve all of your problems.  But they should help to stimulate thought and hopefully guide you towards a more effective and integrated solution.

WORKFORCE ENGAGEMENT

At the end of any building design project, the most salient measure of success I have is the degree to which my clients feel like the authors of their own space.  If my clients can look at their completed projects and say to themselves, “this is my domain, which I created,” I consider it a job well done.  The point of holding this goal to such a high standard is to ensure that I am working to achieve my client’s success.  But because I don’t know precisely what success may mean for them, nor do I know as well as they do how to achieve it, I need to involve the client intimately in the design process and ensure I have their buy-in every single step of the way.

Likewise:  there is no more certain way to improve the outcome of a workplace design project than to involve the users of the workplace in the design process and give them a feeling of ownership over the final product. 

It may seem obvious, but this paramount strategy is overlooked, ignored, and outright denied by organizational leadership more often than anyone would expect.  The reasons for doing so range from rampant egotism, to fears of indecision and constant change, to the perceived costs of getting an entire company involved in and excited about workspace design.  But no matter the reason, as a leader, if you are not involving your workforce in the decision making process - or worse, involving them only to have their voices over-ruled or ignored - you are greatly underestimating the value of their engagement.

There are several reasons for seeking to engage your workforce:

• You gain valuable feedback on the design of the space relative to the user’s preferences, needs, and how they expect to use it.

• You improve your understanding of and ability to anticipate the needs and preferences of the users of the space.

• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you gain the buy-in of the users of the space, making them more likely to embrace it, less likely to complain about it.

Leaders can justify it however they like, but the reality is: the more an individual feels in control of his or her own space, the more emotionally engaged and attached he or she will become with it, and the more productive he or she will be.  I will follow up on this topic further in a future article.

FUNCTIONAL CO-LOCATION

There is little doubt; the different functional groups in the office (e.g. programmers, artists, designers, producers, etc.) have varying communication and work processes and norms – not to mention altogether different cultures.  Thus, one simple way to remedy the challenges faced by the open office is to simply locate each function in the same general area of the office, in other words co-locate your functional teams.  After all, if all programmers desire the same insulated type of environment, they should have no problem sitting next to their coder cohorts.  Each group could be allowed to customize their area of the office, specific to their needs and preferences, within which they would be most comfortable working.  By offering ample workspace and meeting rooms for coordination work, you create the necessary resources for cross-disciplinary interaction.  In this way, your office design can ultimately facilitate self-optimization by group type, as well as offer a means for disciplines to symbolically reinforce their identity and status, further strengthening workforce engagement.

There is, however, a huge catch I must point out.  This particular strategy is very organization and team specific and will definitely not work for every workspace.  Some companies simply cannot or will not co-locate all of their functional teams.  For instance, from what I have learned about it, SCRUM teams are designed and organized cross-functionally and indeed work best when the entire project team is co-located.  In this case Functional Co-Location is definitely not the answer.

The point you should take away, and this goes back to the Organizational Ecology quadrant of the model illustrated on my poster, is that you absolutely must design your workspace to be holistically integrated with your workforce, organization, and culture.  Functional Co-Location can work and quite effectively so, but if your workforce, your processes, and your teams will not support it, you may end up doing more damage than good.

FUNCTIONALLY DEDICATED SPACES

A growing trend in many workplaces in the U.S. is the use of hoteling space, or desks and individual workspaces not specifically assigned to any one particular employee.  The underlying logic behind this strategy is to allow workers more flexibility to work when and where they please without being tied down to a desk.  While hoteling does offer such benefits as cross-pollination of ideas (passive information transfer) and a potential reduction in operating costs, it leaves individual employees with fewer means to express their identities and roles while also robbing them of the more critical and functional tool of simply having a well known space to store and document their work.

There is also, however, a hybrid approach by which you may assign a desk to each employee, but have neutral unassigned spaces for particular types of work.  For instance, a company could co-locate its cross-functional project teams with each team member assigned to a specifically "owned" desk.  Adjacent to the team workspace they could then have alcoves or 'chapels' of a sort; quiet insulated spaces wherein a person - coder, artists, designers, and producers alike - would be able to bring up their work and just WORK for a stretch of uninterrupted time.  As stated above, these flow-zones would be entirely unassigned and accessible by any staff member as needed, all within the bounds of a set of resource allocation norms agreed upon by the team.

Although it would, of course, require greater investment in planned floor space, this strategy effectively addresses several different tradeoffs and challenges affecting the workplace.  Organizations have taken this concept even further by offering unassigned spaces with greater functional specificity, creating rooms environmentally optimal for visual arts, coding, motion capture, sound design, and many other purposes.

SOUND-MASKING

I'm not going to say much about this because I think most people already know, but there are a host of different types of passive sound-masking systems out on the market right now.  Systems can range greatly in price and methods of masking, including those that broadcast white noise via tiny speakers mounted in the ceiling, those that utilize the existing HVAC system to create white noise from moving air, and those that create noise canceling wave forms similar to those found in noise canceling headphones.  I have seen and "heard" many of these and can say, they are all effective and, for the most part, you never even notice it is running until the system is turned off and your ears are assaulted with the ambient humdrum noise of the office.

If you want to go low-tech and not install an office-wide system you can always simply allow your workers to wear their own headphones and listen to music while they work - although, from what I have seen, game developers have already whole-heartedly embraced this strategy.  I have also heard of offices issuing noise canceling headphones to all of their employees or having some on hand to distribute as needed. 

Basically what I'm trying to say is, sound-making is easy and a relatively cost-effective way for your company to address these open-office issues.  If you are okay with the headphones and music and it works for your company, stay with it!  But if you need something a little more robust, talk with your designer about your options for different systems and their costs.  Odds are you'll find something that can work for your office.

CUSTOMIZABILITY

Finally, if you can, always strive to maximize, where appropriate, the modularity, flexibility, customizability, and adaptability of your office plan and design.

If you take away nothing else, I hope you remember this: Nothing is sacred, there are no silver bullets, no matter the design, you are going to find things about it that could work better and you absolutely need to experiment and try different things to find what works best specifically for your organization.

You may need to try hoteling space and, if it doesn't work for your company, ditch the idea.  But you should build your workplace such that to change something like this, you don't have to demolish existing built-in construction and then rebuild it with all new solid walls, electrical systems, and ductwork.  You can save a hell of a lot of money, time, and stress by just using various modular environmental systems which can literally be broken down and re-assembled over a weekend – completely changing your workspace with minimal effort, very little cost, and virtually no additional investment.  These systems include operable walls (DIRTT), raised access flooring (Tate, ASM, etc.), modular systems furniture (Steelcase, Haworth, etc.) and any number of other innovative products intended to allow your space to be configured however you see fit - and then changed and changed again as your organization finds what space configuration works best for it, its processes, and its workforce.  In this way, your company is able to integrate and address the whole ecology of the organization – people, place, and process – through relatively simple techniques in space planning and design.

Please tell me what you think about all of this.  Whether I am right on target or way off base in my assumptions and conclusions – any and all constructive feedback is appreciated! 

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.