Cubicles

In another article about cubicles, I talked a little about going through an office move. This one is more about working in a cubicle. In some ways, I'll gain a more effective working space when I move to a cubicle next week. But there's more to it than just efficiency. I worked in different cubicles for four years at last company I worked for. Perhaps the biggest disadvantage is noise. Without the walls and a door, there is no real way to shut out noise. It carries in from other offices and hallways. Informal hallway meetings add their portion.

Some of our fax machines and the printer copier combinations are on inside corner niches. These have the inherent noise of the machine operating, and the conversation of the people collecting their stuff. But the main killer is speaker phones. Anybody wanting one should be required to present a business case for it, and even then it should be interlocked with the office door. The speaker phone function doesn't turn on until the office door is closed. Nobody in a cubicle gets one.

The brutal fact is that noise distracts people. In a noisy environment we have the ability to pick out the conversation we want to hear, but it takes varying degrees of concentration. When you already have something to concentrate on, such as the work at hand, you are making your brain work harder than it needs to. That leads to stress, a poorer quality of work, and a shorter period of effective work before you need to take a break.

Humanity has been teaching computers how to do more and more kinds of work. There are fewer and fewer people doing rote work anymore. That means people are increasingly doing creative work, or making decisions that can't be trusted to a computer yet. Given incomplete information, I often have to decide what records in a moderately complicated database should be updated, related to one another, or deleted. I spend some of my time shuffling around data using MS Access on the tables themselves to reflect changes done in the physical world. My biggest fear isn't losing the data, it's scrambling it somehow. Or, given the software limitations I work under, figuring out how to pull out certain data items for a report. Chains of temporary tables are not fun when you don't have peace and quiet.

I'm sure people that are trying for just the right effect in Photoshop, or debugging programming code, or even simply writing a report often wish the world would go away for a while. I wonder how many people have had the magical aha feeling, only to have it shattered by someone asking for the help desk phone number or to borrow their stapler.

The other drawback of cubicles is the lack of privacy. Now, there's nothing on my monitor that is secret, or that I'm ashamed of anyone else seeing. Well, maybe except for the initial versions of the intranet page I did. But there are times when I'm trying to think about how to word a particular document, or structure a query. People tell me that when I'm concentrating I tend to either look grim, or vacuous. Or if they see from a distance that nothing is moving on my computer monitor they might wonder if I'm working or not. Either way, I don't care for it.

I'm fortunate in that I will have two full size walls. This gives me a place to put my whiteboard (how did people think before whiteboards were invented?), maps, and a hodgepodge of phone lists, cheat sheets, and art work. Most cubicle walls have space for small things, but plotter printouts or a whiteboard are right out. These often essential tools are lost to the cube dweller, leading to a further loss of productivity.

The last point is the subtle message sent when some people are in offices and other in cubicles. The people in cubicles can't help but feel their contributions are not as valued, or that they aren't quite part of the team. People use all sorts of clues to figure out who's where on the feeding chain. Window offices, art work, desk ornaments, office furniture, office size, parking space, title, number of people supervised all go into the mix. Working in a cubicle is still generally perceived as being lower status than working in an office. For some people, this is almost as important as money. Supposedly, all the deadwood has been trimmed from work organizations now, and the work people are doing has to get done. Putting some people in cubicles is gambling that you'll save some money. Do you really save if that's the thing that drives someone to another organization?