Tech Companies Challenge 'Open Office' Trend With Pods (nbcnewyork.com) 112
Open floor plans create "a minefield of distractions," writes CNBC. But now they're being countered by a new trend that one office interior company's owner says "started with tech companies and the need for privacy."
They're called "office pods..." They provide a quiet space for employees to conduct important phone calls, focus on their work or take a quick break. "We are seeing a large trend, a shift to having independent, self-contained enclosures," said Caitlin Turner, a designer at the global design and urban planning firm HoK. She said the growing demand for pods is a direct result of employees expressing their need for privacy...
Prices can range anywhere from $3,495 for a single-user pod from ROOM to $15,995 for an executive suite from ZenBooth. Pod manufacturers are expanding rapidly. In addition to Zenbooth and ROOM, there are TalkBox, PoppinPod, Spaceworx and Framery. Pod sizes also vary to include individual booths designed for a single user, medium-sized pods for small gatherings of two to three people and larger executive spaces that could host up to four to six people.
Sam Johnson, the founder of Zenbooth, said the idea for pods came from his experience working in the tech industry, where he quickly became disillusioned by the open floor plan. It was an "unsolved problem" that prompted him to quit his job and found ZenBooth, a pod company based in the Bay Area, in 2016. He said the company is a "privacy solutions provider" that offers "psychological safety" via a peaceful space to work and think. "We've had customers say to us that we literally couldn't do our job without your product," Johnson said.
The company now counts Samsung, Intel, Capital One and Pandora, among others, as clients, as it works in tech hubs including Boston, the Bay Area, New York and Seattle. Its biggest customer, Lyft, has 35 to 40 booths at its facilities.
"In 2014, 70% of companies had an open floor plan, according to the International Facility Management Association," the article points out -- though one Queensland University of Technology study found 90% of employees in open floor plan offices actually experienced more stress and conflict, along with higher blood pressure and increased turnover.
They're called "office pods..." They provide a quiet space for employees to conduct important phone calls, focus on their work or take a quick break. "We are seeing a large trend, a shift to having independent, self-contained enclosures," said Caitlin Turner, a designer at the global design and urban planning firm HoK. She said the growing demand for pods is a direct result of employees expressing their need for privacy...
Prices can range anywhere from $3,495 for a single-user pod from ROOM to $15,995 for an executive suite from ZenBooth. Pod manufacturers are expanding rapidly. In addition to Zenbooth and ROOM, there are TalkBox, PoppinPod, Spaceworx and Framery. Pod sizes also vary to include individual booths designed for a single user, medium-sized pods for small gatherings of two to three people and larger executive spaces that could host up to four to six people.
Sam Johnson, the founder of Zenbooth, said the idea for pods came from his experience working in the tech industry, where he quickly became disillusioned by the open floor plan. It was an "unsolved problem" that prompted him to quit his job and found ZenBooth, a pod company based in the Bay Area, in 2016. He said the company is a "privacy solutions provider" that offers "psychological safety" via a peaceful space to work and think. "We've had customers say to us that we literally couldn't do our job without your product," Johnson said.
The company now counts Samsung, Intel, Capital One and Pandora, among others, as clients, as it works in tech hubs including Boston, the Bay Area, New York and Seattle. Its biggest customer, Lyft, has 35 to 40 booths at its facilities.
"In 2014, 70% of companies had an open floor plan, according to the International Facility Management Association," the article points out -- though one Queensland University of Technology study found 90% of employees in open floor plan offices actually experienced more stress and conflict, along with higher blood pressure and increased turnover.
Or you could use movable walls (Score:5, Insightful)
Movable walls can form 'rooms' which you could call 'offices' which can be accessed by 'doors'.
We did it like that for hundreds of years, no need to reinvent it.
You can rename them to 'pods' if you like.
Re:Or you could use movable walls (Score:4, Funny)
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Next step, why build them in city centres with very expensive high rise construction. Lets move them to the burbs, use more land area and keep construction height down. So start with carpark and build over that, say two stories, lots of land area and stairs work well at two stories. Now add a traffic able roof, for lots of landscaping and lunch rooms (technically now four stories but travel from ground to 1st level only twice per day, generally entry and exit and entry to the traffic-able roof only a few ti
Re: Or you could use movable walls (Score:2)
People in the particular burb you choose will have a short commute. Everyone else will have a long commute. A big advantage of the city center is its accessibility from all parts of the city.
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And city centers typically have amenities that people need, usually without requiring you to get in your car and drive there.
When you need to do some last minute shopping, or get some errands done, it's a lot easier in a city center location where people do it during a break than everyone skipping out early because they
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There's a difference between a cube and a podlike office.
It's mainly the height of the walls, but also, because the intended usage is different, the design is different too. Cubes don't have closing doors.
American cube farms are absolutely fucking horrendous.
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They're better than this awful "open office", no walls/cube walls, everyone else's noise pounds at you relentlessly nonsense...
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'Open Landscape' was the most common term among designers. But cubes went from 7'-9' walls down to 6' or less, the materials became more sound absorbent, and the wiring actually worked. Storage and lighting improved.
Then planners realized the ability to work at home left them with occupancy from 80% during the week down to 20% on Fridays and holidays. Wasted space being paid for. And so, open office becomes a real estate solution.
Not that you're solving anything when your typical occupancy is 80% and you de
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The difference between an office and a pod is that an office is yours, your own workspace. Can't have that, of course; gotta keep some separation of status between management and the rank-and-file. But now there are studies that workers get dist
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the ZenBooth Executive Room. It's a glorified (and tiny) garden shed with a couple of power and network sockets and a nice door. Yours for $16k.
That/if they manage to actually sell this at that price, then damn do I want to have their marketing department.
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These [homedepot.com] might be more appropriate for the mentality. They're certainly a better deal.
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Most of the places I work, the managers don't get an office either. Only very senior managers (multi-site departments) get one.
I had one CIO that turned his office into a general use meeting room. He had priority for using it, but if he wasn't in it anybody could wander in. His day to day work was at a normal desk in the open plan office.
Look with suspicion at people that measure themselves by the size of their office.
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Better still, it'll stop the employees wasting paid time in socializing with each other.
Again? (Score:2)
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20 years ago? Watch a few select episodes of Man Men. Linoleum desktops and those adorable little green ribbon glass dividers. Pre-Selectric I think.
Office Space (Score:2)
"Corporate Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!"
"If you could just be productive even with all that noise around you, that would be great."
Last door I had was summer 2007. (Score:5, Insightful)
They took our offices and gave them to Finance.
They put us in a cube farm. It was a step down but it was better than Open.
Little by little the walls got shorter, until one day it was all Open with vestigial frosted glass dividers.
Now, in 2019 where I am, they're talking about cubes again, proper cubes.
Just let me work from home, best office there is, for me anyway.
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Reinventing the cubicle (Score:2)
You could just go down to the dump where you left them about a decade ago, it's good to recycle.
Open office space has always been a dumb idea and merely done for cost savings. Improving on a broken model is a bad thing. Build offices once again, private per team or per person. The walls don't even have to be that thick, I've seen offices built with 3" thick walls.
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You may say that, but the actual physical facilities departments that are implementing open office say it's about being less expensive.
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Bingo
Re:Reinventing the cubicle (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with the open office design and the cubicle design, is that people looked at what the original creators did and simply copied 1 or 2 things from it. So its no wonder that these office setups are as sucky as they are. Vox (Ya, I know), did a video [youtube.com] on open offices being overrated and shows some of the original ideas in the full design. It's worth a quick peek.
So it's basically like Agile (Score:2)
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Yes, exactly. Just as folks who don't know Unix keep re-inventing it, and folks who haven't read "They Mythical Man Month" keep re-discovering its truths. However, the world is now run by Marketing, and it's better to look good than to be good.
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Systemd isn't reinventing Unix. It's reinventing something else, sinister, dark, and wasteful. More like Windows NT 3.51, or CICS.
Re: So it's basically like Agile (Score:2)
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Fascinating how long nonsense can be the standard (Score:2)
Well, not really nonsense, more of an "employees must suffer and be treated like dirt" attitude, no matter how much that reduces profits. Evidence-based management is really in its infancy.
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It does seem that economics always takes second place to disrespecting the lower classes, for whatever definition of 'class' that HR will let you get away with.
Re: Fascinating how long nonsense can be the stand (Score:2)
"economics always takes second place to disrespecting the lower classes"
Pretty sure that explains the appeal of the "Agile(tm)!!!1!!" micromanagement methodology.
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Evidence-based management is really in its infancy.
I work in cybersecurity management, and you'd think of these the cybersecurity part is the one less mature, with more rule-of-thumb approximations, less supporting evidence and fewer measures of sucess or bullshit - but I've found out that no, it's the other way around, it's the management part that is basically nobody having a clue what they're doing.
And that is after cybersecurity set a really, really low bar that an infant could jump over.
And it's not for lack of research and publications in the field. Y
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Matches my observations. The most extreme mismanagement I have seen recently was placing people in control of a new larger SOC that did not even understand the basics of TCP/IP networking. Management then decided to fix that (after somebody complained) by sending them to an adult evening class in networking and believes now to be well prepared for all possible future IT security incidents. This is a high value target.
The disconnect from reality in management is absolutely staggering.
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The disconnect from reality in management is absolutely staggering.
Their reality differs from ours. Their reality is the next quarterly numbers.
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Intangible costs aren't real money (in their eyes). They can see their up-front cost savings, meanwhile.
They still havent figured it out yet,,, (Score:4, Insightful)
What animals tend to prefer is a taller C-shaped spot, where the only way that they can be approached is from the front--where they can sit facing out, and always see anything coming.
In an office environment, this means that other people can't look at your screen--and it also helps control the noise level a lot...
Cubes were -almost- good, but they don't do it because they're too short. The fact that you can stand up and see over them means they don't work.
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Cube walls that started at the floor (no under-opening!) and were ~8 feet tall would be better.
Not at all, but for different reasons.
The problem with cubes is that they're installed in open floor plans, where the lighting and HVAC were installed with the intention of it being an open space with 4'-6' of space above the desks or cubes. When you stick walls up like that you end up with messed up HVAC and lighting. The lighting you can sort-of fix by just adding a desk lamp, but the HVAC is a killer.
They did this to make some new "junior executive" offices at one job I had, and those two people were mis
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About the best they can do is go with a raised floor and redirect the HVAC into the floor.
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Cubes were -almost- good, but they don't do it because they're too short. The fact that you can stand up and see over them means they don't work. ...Cube walls that started at the floor (no under-opening!) and were ~8 feet tall would be better.
The first generation of cubes was six to seven feet tall. Even six feet is enough that very few people can see over the top without climbing on a chair, jumping or doing some other obviously-rude thing. But they got shorter over time.
Full circle... (Score:3)
Watching it happen before my eyes... (Score:2)
A tech company just invented the phone booth (Score:2)
A tech company just invented the phone booth. I wonder what they will come up with next?
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Genius product idea - The Cubicle Roof (Score:2)
I have an idea for a product that I think would be universally loves (well probably not by management), the Cubicle Roof.
The way it would work is, you'd hook it to the top of the cubicle walls, it would act as a topper providing opaque walls all around and above you.
This would reduce the distraction of seeing everyone around you all the time, but even more importantly hearing them (even headphones cannot truly block out open office noise I've found, unless the guy in the cubicle next to you can also hear th
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At a former employer, the mask designers would get these tent looking structures to go on top of their cubes because the fluorescent ceiling lights caused too much glare.
Pod People (Score:2)
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They should make a scifi/horror movie about this.
Have you seen Office Space? or even The Office?
They are dark horror masquerading as comedy.
office sabotage (Score:2)
Open floor plans create "a minefield of distractions,"
That is putting it so mildly, we're in the same class of calling breaking someone's fingers a "mild inconvenience".
Open floor plan offices are utterly impossible to work in if your work requires any concentration and mental focus at all.
I'm in the lucky position to have had both in my career. I worked in a double-office (me plus a co-worker) for many years, then had about five years of having an office to myself, then worked as a consultant in whatever I got provided, including open floor plans and at the m
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Open floor plan offices are utterly impossible to work in if your work requires any concentration and mental focus at all.
No, they're not.
I've always worked in open floor plan offices and I've had no trouble at all delivering working software.
The issue is that you're unwilling and incapable of adjusting, or finding ways to be productive that both mitigate or eliminate the distractions but also take advantage of them.
The office isn't the thing at fault here.
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The office isn't the thing at fault here.
If I have to adjust and mitigate, then yes it is.
The workplace should be enabling work, not making it necessary to mitigate bad design so that you can get some work done.
And while YMMV, most research done into the field strongly supports my position.
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All office designs are compromises, offering a range of features and some downsides.
That you can't adjust to one of them isn't a design flaw in the office layout, it's because you're too inflexible.
If you can only work by hiding in an office with the door shut and no contact with actual people then you're in the wrong fucking job.
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That you can't adjust to one
You completely missed the point. I shouldn't have to adjust. The design of an office, i.e. a place where work is supposed to be done, needs to enable working there, not make it necessary to adjust. If I have to adjust, then whatever cost it takes to adjust (attention, money, concentration, emotional, whatever) is taken away from productivity.
Literally everyone who learns about design learns that. Good design is not beauty. Good design is functionality that also happens to be beautiful.
If you can only work by hiding in an office with the door shut and no contact with actual people then you're in the wrong fucking job.
Ah, the usual /. imbec
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The design of an office, i.e. a place where work is supposed to be done, needs to enable working there
People do work in open plan offices. I've spent most of my career with a desk in an open plan office
I've also done work in cubes, in small personal offices, in large personal offices, in the canteen, on the train and at home.
But I'm a human being; we're renowned for adaptability. We aren't viciously constrained to a single approach that we must dogmatically follow and demand everybody else adopts.
That's just you.
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My biggest distraction is the boss coming by and asking me to do some random task on a project that I'm unfamiliar with and that interrupts everything else. That would happen with or without a private office.
These things look awful (Score:3)
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These things are terrible, and expensive. You can probably put up a drywall and make a proper office for half the price.
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You might think so, but you'd probably be wrong, especially if you're putting it up in an existing office. On the other hand, I doubt these pods meet fire & ventilation codes.
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According to the article:
"A traditional office space, a fixed room enclosed with four walls, also means heftier prices than a pod. Adding a traditional office can cost roughly $65 to $125 per square foot, according to Turner."
The largest of the Zenbooth offerings is 7x7, at a price of $16,000. That's $327 per square foot. The smallest one is 8.5 square feet for $4500, or $530 per square foot.
I have to assume that these are being bought by people who are really, really bad at math.
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Booths are one-time costs, the "traditional office" quote is monthly.
I've started wearing earplugs (Score:3)
I've started wearing earplugs. I've got two types: 3M E-A-R ClearPlug, and 3M E-A-Rsoft FX.
The ClearPlug are made from silicon and are reusable. They lower noise with 20 dB, which means I usually will hear when someone asks me a question while wearing them. I've worn them in meetings when I knew certain people would attend, who have loud voices.
The EARsoft FX are when I really want silence. They aren't reusable and take a bit of practice, but they attenuate with 39 dB. They're frankly amazing and allow me to concentrate in noisy coffee shops.
I'm no 3M shill but buy do their products work.
You may get questions about why you wear earplugs. However I'm past 40 and no longer give a fuck.
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Practically every open office of any size I've been in has exceeded OSHA standards for noise at least part of the time (you can test this yourself on the cheap by downloading an app (from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topi... [cdc.gov]) but in general: if you have to raise your voice to be heard over the ambient noise the noise level is unsafe). Limits are lower if you are exposed more than eight hours.
Having an area identified as high noise creates work for employers. The have to track noise levels, test emplo
Re: I've started wearing earplugs (Score:2)
+1 Informative
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I doubt it. [osha.gov]
With noise, OSHA's permissible exposure limit (PEL) is 90 dBA. for all workers for an 8 hour day. The OSHA standard uses a 5 dBA exchange rate. This means that when the noise level is increased by 5 dBA, the amount of time a person can be exposed to a certain noise level to receive the same dose is cut in half.
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They're a touch anti-social, but damn, I love them. I listen to my podcasts, books, or music, and to hell with the world and my neighbor(s). They rock.
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Noise cancelling headphones are (a) 100x more expensive than foam ear plugs, and (b) don't even approach the level of noise attenuation that ear plugs do. You can also put your head in whatever position you want with ear plugs on a plane (e.g., head against the wall if in coach, lying on your side if in business) but with headphones, you have to content with the hoop around your head and ear cups which are often not compatible with positions other than sitting up straight.
If I want to experience quiet in a
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You can use both!
I greatly dislike ear plugs and don't wear my hearing aids because it irritates the ear canal but a cheap pair of ear defenders gives me that 20dB drop and are lovely.
I haven't worn them at work yet, but it's an option.
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Why not just buy noise-cancelling headphones for when you want to be left the hell alone? The good ones aren't cheap, but they are worth it. I took a 3 hr flight on a chartered turboprop (noisy as hell) with my father-in-law. We landed, and he said that someone one row back and four seats over from him had been talking the entire time. News to me.
I have tried that before and disposable hearing protection works better. Noise cancelling headphones are fine for trips but not when you want to wear them for peace and quiet all day.
New fangled ideas = waste of money. (Score:2)
In the enthusiasm to try stupid or self-indulgent group-think me-too ideas, the lemmings all pile on the bandwagon of "the office as Woodstock" model of daily business : open air, open forum, city park or cafeteria style workspace where you try to remain focused on work as the distractions buzz around you.
Now, people realize that quiet and privacy are productive. That shouldn't be a surprise.
But look at the irony of these "pods".
It used to be that the architect and builder built walls and functional enclo
Friday at the office (Score:2)
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Fighter Jet or X-Wing Pods (Score:2)
I had this idea several years back. Picture a work pod that is similar to a fighter jet or x-wing pod. It has one of those nice new fully adjustable seats with cooling and warming options, surround sound speakers, joystick/keyboard in the center, curved monitors, air conditioning, drink dispenser. Pop the canopy to get in and out, everything at your fingertips while you're working. Ejection seat for the layoffs.
[John]
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Something like the Orrb [orrb.com] design by Lee McCormack [leemccormack.co.uk]? Sans ejection seats, of course.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal (Score:2)
You Mean, Cubicals? (Score:2)
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Which means they probably don't meet ventilation codes and, in a with a fire suppression system (most decent-size office buildings nowadays), would need fire sprinklers added, making it not much easier to install than a regular office.
Ventilation ? (Score:2)
saving money? (Score:2)
So what is the reason? Saving money? Ever since we moved into an open office, productivity had among our teams has gone down.
We now have people working on development together with people doing operation tasks. Too much small talk, people shouting, talking loudly on the phone.
I regularly leave work with a headache if I have been in the office all day. Even though I have 3 24" screens at my desk, whenever I can, I take my laptop and find a quiet place in a hallway somewhere or perhaps an available meeting ro
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I will defend open plan here. While some companies use it to pack workers in, especially in very high rent places, it is often much more about image. This does not mean that they want a certain architectural aesthetic, but more that they want to create an environment that facilitates communication within and among teams. This is in the hopes that people develop personal bonds to their co-workers. Ultimately this is the “sum of the parts” mindset, where the individual might be transient but the
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But research shows that the reverse happens. People don't become more social or collaborative. They become more isolated and stressed. And productivity takes a nose dive.
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Exactly. I know that people are trying to concentrate, so I don't talk in open designs. Then I put on headphones, so I look like I don't want to talk to you either. Finally I feel cramped and 'watched' so I perform my work slower and more deliberately. This puts me behind and creates stress.
Strongly suspect I have ADHD, open env is bad (Score:2)
Depending on the type of work I'm doing, an open environment is fine for me, lets me stay in communication with others, overhear what's going on, I can multi-task on multiple, inane tasks quite quickly.
I can do short simple tasks very quickly.
However.
If you ask me to properly focus on something, with some depth, I'm utterly unable to do so with distractions. I have to put in noise cancelling headphones, play back some kind of white noise or LYRICLESS music and not be disturbed, then I can produce good resu
Tested many years ago in Silicon Valley (Score:2)
At least one tech company of which I am aware allowed their engineers to erect yard sheds in their Silicon Valley office more than 10 years ago. These were ordinary yard sheds like the ones sold at Home Depot and other big-box stores. Very quickly, streets and small villages comprised of sheds of different sizes, shapes, and colors formed. It was picturesque and the occupants seemed to enjoy it a lot. I was sitting in a cubicle farm at the time and was jealous. In addition to the diversity of appearanc
Can't do that now (Score:2)
Rent being what it is, people would start sleeping in them. It would reek of pot, and you wouldn't really be able to tell where it was coming from. Blue tarps would start to appear connecting sheds, because people would cheap out like that. Next logical step is that people sublet them. Then you'll want a community garden and you need to punch some holes in the ceiling to let in light, which nobody can see because of the aforementioned blue tarps. If you don't crack down on it, you'll have Kowloon Walle
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I doubt those would meet fire & ventilation codes.
Are pods not illegal? (Score:2)
Ugh (Score:2)
A client of mine uses these. First, they built a giant new open-plan office with a number of meeting rooms integrated into it. Stupidly, the meeting room walls are merely there for optical effect: they don't reach the ceiling, so any meeting would be a massive disruption for everyone in the general vicinity. After several years of complaining, they installed a bunch of these pods. They're cramped (barely seat 5), and despite a noisy fan they're stuffy enough that people want to leave the door open, defeatin
Cubicle: "Do you miss me now?" (Score:2)
Would be interesting to see a $ per square foot accounting of: offices, cubicles, and booths.
Re: Colonization by managers (Score:2)
Michael O'Church wrote an interesting essay about colonization of the software industry: http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/m... [prgmr.com]
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That was, indeed, an interesting article. It gave me new thoughts on colonization (of the political, founding of the US, sort) and business. Thanks.