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Workstation – where work stops.
I have been working for a client who is an Open Source company. Over the last few weeks, I’ve learnt a lot about Open Source. The most remarkable thing is that open source software is often made by people working at home. Yet, open source products are gradually eating into traditional software giants like Microsoft and Sun. This is just like a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend crores to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.
This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient. The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. Superficial and utterly useless
Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching cubicles, they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe." And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be.
The most demoralizing aspect of a traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times. In reality, only a few people in a company who really have to be physically present in the office. Most employees work fixed hours just because the company can't measure their productivity. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In reality, they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.
The ideal would be if the company tells its employees that, “This is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.”
The problem for me is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. The problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing, I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of coffee, smoking or walking around. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.
Till there are corporate reforms, I guess we all are stuck with this fixed time menace.
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This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient. The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. Superficial and utterly useless
Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching cubicles, they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe." And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be.
The most demoralizing aspect of a traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times. In reality, only a few people in a company who really have to be physically present in the office. Most employees work fixed hours just because the company can't measure their productivity. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In reality, they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.
The ideal would be if the company tells its employees that, “This is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.”
The problem for me is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. The problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing, I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of coffee, smoking or walking around. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.
Till there are corporate reforms, I guess we all are stuck with this fixed time menace.
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