Having worked for many years as a programmer in an company where we all had an open area with Partitions, let me tell you that it has a negative effect on productivity. You can't shut out the other people, you have to have head phones on to shut down the constant white noise and there is no privacy. It was perfectly normal that, while you're working, someone would come up and just start talking to you, or if you had you head phones on grab the back of your chair and start to shake it to get you attention (something I treated to quite over to get to stop as it was so common). If you can look over the wall there's no idea of privacy, and if you have no door there is none at all, and it effects everything.

I've done many of the plans over the years, and the more privacy a programmer has, the better code is produced. Never under estimate the ability to close to the door and stick a note on it saying "e-mail only" (which will be ignored if people can just stick there head over the wall).

Here is a snippet (OK a little big) of a mail that I sent to Chris Liddell on his "Redmond Campus Space" mail. As a side note on the valet parking...have you tried to get out of Red West E parking during the day...fuhhh-get about it.
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In the “Enhanced Workplace” portion of myMicrosoft there has been one glaring omission in the area of telecommuting and/or flex work. Yes, we do have this, sort of, but for an employee to take advantage of this it is opportunistic and not consistent between groups. In order to assist in our space allocation issues, we need to address this in a much more formal fashion. Let me give you an outline of the program that I think needs to be put into place, at the very least for the Puget Sound.

- Identify roles, levels and personnel that can work as or more effectively as a remote employee (telecommuting). There are employees currently in single occupancy offices that travel over 50% of the time. There are employees who “occupy” offices currently, but who through some arrangement with their manager are remote employees and yet they maintain a Redmond office usually occupied by the boxes of the last move. There are people who work much better outside an office, and who don’t require much face to face interaction with a team or whose team is scattered. These and so many more could be formal mobile telecommuters.

- Create a profile to help managers identify potential telecommuters in their groups. Publish this profile and train managers on how to measure and ensure success from this type of employee. This could also be a template for other regions who want to encourage the same model.

- Give employees the option under that profile to opt in to that model and a safe environment for them to be able to express this desire to their management. Currently this is a delicate subject for en employee to bring up with their manager. Often they fear they might be seen as a slacker or worse, when in fact they just want to be productive in their own diverse work style. Letting employees know there is a formal Puget Sound program for this and that managers have been trained gives them a safe conversation point to opt in to the model.

- Create a compensation package for a mobile employee and make it consistent for the Puget Sound. Most companies in tech have a mobile employee package. For companies like IBM this can be in the thousands of dollars a year stipend for the employee. For us, this could be simple. Fund a stipend for broadband for home ($50/month) and cell allotment ($80/month). And in both of those we could probably negotiate HUGE discounts with Comcast, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. to provide those services. At the high end with no discounts that’s roughly $1500/year per mobile employee. I am not sure, but I have to believe that our yearly facility cost per employee is higher than that.

- Have a temporary workspace (the field calls this “hotel space”) where that mobile employee can plug into campus about 4 days a month to do office related things. This could be as simple as the currently unoccupied office down the hall, or someone in the office who doesn’t mind a visitor one day a week. Make this part of the “profile” for the manager so the employee can more reliably not have to worry about where to plug in when they need to.

- Implement ASAP. This would help office space, parking AND give Microsoft an enhanced public image in the Seattle area as an environmentally aware company, especially in this time of high fuel costs, etc.

I realize there is a little bit of work to do here, but I firmly believe that we can do it. I believe that our collaborative software, LiveMeeting, teleconferencing and VPN facilities that we offer make a wonderful infrastructure to enable this. The only changes we need are a formal program that everyone can participate in regardless of group, as long as they fit the profile.
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What I got in response was the link to a program that is in pilot, but that lacked some of the funding and programmatic aspects to make it broadly applicable and impactful. Oh well...green we are not.

PM Guy, those are very good points. One of the 4 types of employees that Workplace Advantage is targeting is "travelers", who rarely work at a fixed office. Even in EEG one of the reasons we are leaning towards small desks is that a lot of the time half of us are teaching classes and therefore not at our desks all day. Also, we are going to need to work somewhere temporary during the actual building remodel and I presume that telecommuting will be encouraged then. This should be a good chance to see how that works over an extended period of time (obviously if people are telecommuting you lose the open workspace advantages).

I once met some people who worked for a consulting company. They literally had no fixed office; the company paid for their home broadband connection and laptops, and would even send them new printer paper and supplies if they asked. The savings in not having dedicate office space was more than worth it. One other interesting effect was that the company could form development teams with people scattered across the country as easily as it could with people who were nominally based in the same office, since in either case they only saw each other in person when they went to a customer's site.

- adam

The issue with flexible work environments, telecommuting, and distributed teams is that it takes trust on the part of the organization AND the line management. And the tone at the company (sure there are good pockets) is in the direction of distrust of employees and more "stare over your shoulder" type of micro-management. I long for the day when I can be in a company (and I hope that company is Microsoft) that trusts their software enough to allow their workers (in a majority of the highly creative IC roles we have) to work remotely.

(sigh)

What strikes me as somewhat strange in this discussion (or maybe I am just not reading closely enough) is the assumption that 1 person will/should have 1 type of working space (be it open, closed, cubicle, whatever).

Part of our company designs office environments where workspaces are based on the needed and desired interaction patterns between people as well as the flow of tasks seen from an individuals perspective. This means that a person will be able to use different types of workspaces througout the day depending on the task, and depending on the type of interaction that goes with it. It can be an open space, a 'mixing' space, a concentration space, or telecommuting etc.
It is a way to align your physical environment with the collective objectives of an organisation/group, where the space around you gives subtle clues as to how things are done most effectively.

It is something we tend to do more intuitively in our private homes, where different parts of our house serve different tasks, different workingstyles, all by and for the same people inhabiting the house.

Ton, that is the way it is planned to work at Microsoft. For example, in our EE dev space we have 6 people who will be working in a large area that use to contain about 7 old offices, so maybe 750 square feet. Our 6 desks aren't going to take up anywhere near all that space. So we'll also have an area with couches if we want to go read or have a discussion with someone else. There should also be at least one small closed office for personal phone calls. And hopefully there will also be room for a small conference table and chairs (if not in our own space, there will be several of these scattered around the building, separate from the larger formal conference rooms). We're not just being stuffed into a small space, we're being given the space savings back for other things.

- adam

I've has a Temp. mattress for years and think it's the best nite's sleep you can get.

Reasons for this are detailed in an article on my blog, which I hope you will check out.

http://backbebetter.blogspot.com