I personally find open work spaces incredibly distracting, and therefore a very serious potential hindrance to productivity.

As you can see from the photo above, we embraced the open floor plan from day one at Trulia and now have over 90 people in our San Francisco office sitting in 12,000 square feet of open space. We have another 15-20 people in our downtown New York office sitting in a space that is a combination of an open bullpen and a handful of private offices that seat two or three people each.  I am based in New York, but have spent a week out of every four to six in our San Francisco office for the past four years. While both offices are open environments the culture of distraction at each is very different, mostly due to a “Top-of-the-Hour” policy I instituted in our NYC office when I first opened it in 2006. Before I explain, let’s explore the pros and cons of open work spaces:

Theoretical Pros of Open Work Spaces:

• Increased employee communication.
• Rapid exchange of knowledge and information.
• Employee equality – in most open environments everyone, including senior management, sit together out on the main floor, creating a sense of equality through a lack of private offices, especially the fancy corner kind.
• Easy access to team members and managers.
• Less opportunity for slacking, personal phone calls and/or surfing the web.
• Let’s face it, cubicles suck!
• Open space looks really cool and are most associated with the edgy, forward thinking companies, which help drawl a stark contrast between startups and corporate doldrums and make it easier to recruit talent.
• Open spaces are more flexible, so as you grow you can easily move furniture around freely without walls getting in the way.

Cons (aka realities) of Open Work Spaces:

• Lack of concentration and focus as a result of constant interruption by your coworkers – I read a study about why multitasking doesn’t work and one of the main tenants of the study is that it takes us 10 full minutes to really focus on what we’re doing and get into a productive zone.  So the more you get interrupted the less likely you will be to ever become truly productive.
• Socialization instead of collaboration – most of the increased communication resulting from open spaces is really just socialization.  While I am all for bonding and team building to increase productivity, a centralized common kitchen will do the trick. There is no need for an all day buffet of social opportunity.
• I have heard several people say they need to go home to “get real work done.” Need I say more?
• Lack of privacy – try getting a major confidential deal done by whispering your way though it, let alone deal with your mother-in-law!
• Unavailable conference rooms – when people can’t get work done or even get a little privacy at their desk they tend to go in search of private space, which fills conference rooms with singles.  I find this especially ironic when this happens to “green” companies that actively promote car pooling.
• Contempt – engineers and product people tend to breed contempt for sales and other people who use the phone alot, which is inevitably a major distraction and annoyance for them.  The easy answer is to separate the two groups onto separate open floors, but the danger is creating and/or managing two separate cultures.

Top-of-the-Hour:

The way I countered the above pitfalls in our New York office was with the simple rule I called  “Top-of-the-Hour” or “Open-mic”:  Only at the top of every hour are people free to take the floor to ask questions, make requests, tell jokes, talk about their weekend plans, and otherwise distract their co-workers.  This simple rule increased productivity in three major ways:

1. Enables people to work uninterrupted for large chunks of time.
2. Gives peeps a nice way to blow people off who interrupted them by simply saying “can this wait till top of the hour?” It also gave everyone permission to interrupt others once an hour.
3. Forces peeps to batch all their questions, problems, issues etc to be discussed at the top of every hour instead of interrupting people multiple times per hour. In many cases, people answer their own questions within the hour.

While this rule helped significantly, I would still do it differently next time and find a way to get all the theoretical benefits of an open work environment while avoiding all the harsh realities.

I also found a way to be productive when I visit the San Francisco office, but I don’t know how applicable it is for you unless you too are bi-coastal. In the first year I would simply find a quite room in the back and hide in there to do work. But as we got bigger I realized that my time in the SF office was a big opportunity to sync with my left coast colleagues from whom I was otherwise 3000 miles away. So when in SF now I simply work quietly from my hotel from 6-9am and then head into the office, where I have scheduled several meetings to push initiatives forward.  I also make it a point to spend time socializing in the kitchen, taking people out for coffee, lunch, drinks, etc.  I find this system to be extremely effective and productive for me, as I build deeper, personal relationships that really grease the tracks for productivity as we collaborate on the phone everyday once I leave. I just hope I don’t add to everyone’s distraction levels during the times I am in SF, or at least hope their productivity on projects we are working together goes up significantly enough to make it worth it for everyone.

I would love to hear other alternatives to or variations of open work space environment, so please feel free to talk about your ideas, experiences, etc in the comments section.