I work for Viasat; all of our new-build offices in the past few years have been designed around what we call the neighborhood concept. A neighborhood is a set of individual offices (maybe 60sqft-ish?) with three solid walls, and one glass/wood wall with a sliding door. All the offices open into a central room that can be outfitted in a bunch of different ways. There are neighborhoods of different sizes, and basically, each team gets a neighborhood to themselves. The whole concept was developed through a series of experiments that took several years.
Some teams make use of the space better than others, of course, but for my group it's been a huge boon to our collaborative culture. The offices are well-insulated, so you don't need headphones to achieve quiet, but if you want to, you can leave your door open and hear what your teammates are discussing at any time.
Over time we're upgrading our older facilities to the same model, but in general there are few open-plan offices or cube farms in the company, and I highly doubt we're going to build more. Many years ago, our founders made it a company priority to give folks a door they can close, to get away from "it all" and focus.
I worked in a similar environment at Apple, when Infinite Loop first opened: Pods with offices that surrounded a central courtyard, which was furnished with sofas, chairs and whiteboards. Each office had a simple (and heavy) door alongside a tall and narrow window.
The door provided effective sound isolation, and years later I realized the window was a psychological link to what was going on in the inner "courtyard", after spending time in a completely closed office at Microsoft. The message at Apple seemed to be "Okay, we know you need to concentrate on work, but remember that you're part of a community" while the office of the particular group I was in at Microsoft seemed to say "Please just sit there and write code and do email -- we will feed you under the door".
Architecture matters in the weirdest ways, and sometimes tiny tweaks make a big difference.
That's the office concept I've always wanted to build. It would be cool if someone from the company could document it/blog post/etc. -- might be good for recruiting too. (Especially since Viasat does pretty cool stuff -- excited about the new Exede sat expanding coverage...)
I was thinking it would make sense to have roller doors or some other way to open the entire side of the office (on both sides -- "neighborhood" and "hallway" if the occupant wanted.)
I'd like more auditory isolation, though. (Ideally I want to be able to have a private conversation whenever I want within my office, without disturbing anyone else, and then have others able to do the same.)
I worked from a 2.2m x 2.5m "pod" office once and it was great, but the views also helped. Imagine one wall being a massive screen window in the country side with views of a lake, and the opposite wall being mostly window, leading to a balcony overlooking and inside courtyard (where other pods also look into). The side walls were exposed brick and the ceiling was at a decent height. The entire building was an old Arabic courtyard house that had been restored.
Same here. A bar in a coffee shop would have compared favorably to that desk in size and ergonomics. Craziest thing about it was how at the time I was getting paid absolute tons of money, but in many ways my status at work felt more like my desk than my paycheck. I don’t know what that tells you about the human psyche, or mine. Rationally, I wouldn’t have traded much of the money for a better desk, but emotionally the money just felt like a number on a screen going up, while the desk felt visceral.
Sure, however I'm currently sitting in a kind of cubicle (on an open plan floor), with 4 developers sharing what seems to be about a 3.5m x 3.5m space (I'm 1.8m, and if we all stand up and put our arms out, they'd touch), which brings it to just under 13m2, or 3.2 m2 per person. There are teams that are more cramped than even this, which I find pretty sad.
Boss was happy for me to work somewhere quiet and the only space we had was an unused meeting room that takes up up half the second floor of our second building.
I always thought it was "4 metres squared" means 4x4 and "4 square metres" means 2x2. Unless 4m^2 doesn't mean "4 metres squared", which would really be confusing me ...
The new Skyscanner(my employer) London office also uses this setup and the times I've been in London and worked from that office I've really enjoyed it. I work in the main office in Edinburgh which is unfortunately an open floor plan, but hopefully we'll get the same layout as London. I feel it strikes a very good balance between the intentions of an open office plan and the need for a quite space to get work done.
We absolutely are! Our list of open positions is on our website: https://www.viasat.com/careers/openings. I'd post my usual spiel about our Seattle office (where I work now), but we're renting coworking space up here, so I don't want to bait and switch.
This is an awesome idea. From what I've seen, the Pixar offices are actually very similar. Probably more stylized, because Pixar, but it's a mix of unowned open spaces for collaboration or socializing and clustered office spaces.
It seems like an exceedingly good answer for teams where "water cooler" collaboration is genuinely important, but so is silent work time.
Do you think you could get us some pictures of a neighborhood? Would be quite interested to see it empty before or after hours as an example of how things look.
I tried finding some online but it looks like we haven't published any. I'll need to get permission; our customer base cares very much about facility security. Let me see what I can rustle up.
Some teams make use of the space better than others, of course, but for my group it's been a huge boon to our collaborative culture. The offices are well-insulated, so you don't need headphones to achieve quiet, but if you want to, you can leave your door open and hear what your teammates are discussing at any time.
Over time we're upgrading our older facilities to the same model, but in general there are few open-plan offices or cube farms in the company, and I highly doubt we're going to build more. Many years ago, our founders made it a company priority to give folks a door they can close, to get away from "it all" and focus.