What we really need is our own space, writes Nicole Richards.
Open-plan office. The term itself sounds enticing: you might imagine an airy work space with lots of natural light, decorated tastefully and filled with shiny, happy people.
The sort of place where creative types with laid-back bosses toss around new ideas and witty banter.
Alas, the reality is the majority of open-plan offices more closely resemble an experiment in human pigeonholing.
Bland, compartmentalised workstations in insipid colours span as far as the eye can see.
The vista of partitions is only interrupted by the occasional coat rack, sickly office plant or the leftover decorations that marked a recent staff birthday.
Employees are generally crammed within 1 metres of each other and, as a result, the issue of personal space is contested hotly.
Like tightly packed sardines, workers jostle for an extra couple of inches of desk space or an additional bookshelf on which they can put some reminders of their identity and life beyond the cubicle.
Despite the lack of permanent walls, there are boundaries, both real and imagined, between colleagues, between teams and between egos.
Space comes at such a premium that tempers can fray when an untidy colleague's pile of mess seeps across the boundary to an adjoining workstation.
Turf wars spring to life when a corner desk becomes available. Working in such close proximity to each other in a world without privacy brings countless challenges to office etiquette.
Where do you look when you've just caught your supervisor looking for a new job online?
Is there anything that can be done about the resident loud talkers, the coffee slurpers and the slackers who perch interminably upon the edge of your desk for a chat every time they pass by?
How much boom-boom bass should you endure from Mr iPod next door before you ask him to turn it down? Yet these are minor dilemmas when compared with the contentious issue of heating and cooling in an open-plan office.
For some reason, the temperature seems to vary wildly from corner to corner and despite tremendous diplomatic fortitude on the part of those brave souls who try to broker an agreement, there's never a happy outcome.
To many workers it probably comes as no surprise that research published in January (by Dr Vinesh Oommen in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Health Management) shows open-plan offices have a negative impact on productivity, are detrimental to employee health and may even be a factor in high staff turnover.
While defenders of the open plan continue to spruik worker efficiencies and the free flow of information as benefits of the layout, which may well have been true for 1950s typing pools, it's clearly not the case for the majority of offices today.
Communication can be as impeded and ineffective in an open-plan office as it can anywhere else. We need to accept that workstations and cubicles don't change these things – workplace culture does.
And culture is about people, not floor plans. It's time to reconstruct the walls, bring back the doors and restore our privacy. Let us work in peace!
Is there an aspect of office life that makes you laugh, cry or simply drives you crazy? Readers are invited to submit 550-word articles for publication in The Office to theoffice@fairfax.com.au
Nicole Richards - Nicole Richards is a freelance writer. nlrichards.blogspot.com
