Apple may very well end up being the subject of future business white papers regarding their new HQ and how they’ve mismanaged their plans for open office seating for their staff. It looks like they’ve every mistake in the book in adding open office to their new “flying saucer” building.
As a caveat, I don’t actually mind open office myself. I’ve had a hard-wall office, and I’ve been in a 3-4 foot open office plan, and while there are definite plusses for the added space, shelving, art-hanging-spots, and closable door of an office, the open plan had certain charms in terms of, yes, engagement and collaboration with others. And I say that as I guy who tends to be fairly quiet and private in a lot of circumstances.
But my old employer’s move to open office was handled a lot better than Apple is doing.
The key to open office, to my mind (certainly what worked for us) is that (a) everyone has to feel like it’s a shared experience — shared pain, if you will, but shared. “We’re all in this together” is always a key to any sort of change in office life. And (b) people need something to call their own. Instead, Apple’s efforts have had the following apparent flaws:
- Business group exceptions: In our case, all the business units had to move to the open office setup. Some were able to do some slight tweaks — types of conference rooms available, cubicle size / arrangement variations, etc. But nobody got to opt out.
The article, though, notes one Apple business group whose top leader basically said “Fuck this,” and had an entirely separate building added to the campus for his team, rather than join into an open office setting. Another group is staying at the old office campus, for the same reason. If some units get to operate by significantly different rules, not sharing in the pain, it only breeds resentment from the rest. - Executive exceptions: In our case, everyone up to the CEO had a cubicle. Now, to be sure, the top execs had double-sized cubicles, often in a corner, or on floors or in areas with limited numbers of other people, and they also had larger or more plentiful meeting rooms and the like. But the symbolism was there: I’ve got a cube, too. The arguments for you having to put up with this mean I should put up with it, too. And, in fact, I heard a lot of execs, at both the office and corporate level, extol the setup’s virtues in their own workday experiences.
Apple, on the other hand, apparently has their executives in their own office space on their own floor. All that “collaboration is good” and “easy reach-out-and-touch is important” and “incidental synergies from spontaneous proximity-driven discussions” [I just made that one up] stuff only applies to grunts, it seems, not the C-suite types and their cronies. That breeds resentment, too. - Going to extremes: There are a lot of ways to do open office. Apple isn’t instituting “hot seating,” thank heavens (where you grab whatever seat you can, each day, so that no space is truly your own), but the article does mention “bench seating” and “work tables,” which sounds equally awful. We had small cubicles, but they still gave us all space to put some things that belonged to us, and we had actual chairs we could sit in and adjust, stuff like that. Even if it was a compact setup, we were able to call our cubbies our own, in a way that sounds like it will be much sketchier for Apple workers.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a condemnation of open office seating per se, though one of Apple’s problems may be that the trend has come and gone; the new HQ has been six years in the making, and the open office idea as not only gotten less popular in that time, but there’s some science out there that indicates it may very well objectively hurt productivity. I’m not sure I agree, anecdotally, but regardless of whether open office is a good idea or not, Apple’s approach has been … less than innovative or user-friendly.