I believe that the general office, often does more bad then good for the ability to effectively work. There are many reasons that the office for many people is a place that they will often find is the time that they are the least creative or get the least work done.
For the most part it is not the intention of a company to build office’s that prevent effective working environments. However purely by the nature of how most offices are built and the limited colour range used the majority of office’s are just that uneffective.
The biggest problem that i see with office’s is that there is literally to many distractions and to many causes to do tasks that may be associated with working but are not actual work. This may to some extent be a kind of shallow or maybe not in depth view of things, however it is in so many cases the actual truth of it.
Distractions
- Open plan offices especially have no real way to minimise the build up of noise from everyone in cubicles. This often means any noise out of the ordinary will have the whole office looking.
- In an office environment, where person to person communication is often easier people will just stick their head in to ask something, which diverts you from the task at hand.
- Some office’s that have the main phone ring to everyone, leave all their employee’s in the position of getting interrupted every time the phone rings whether they answer it themselves or not.
- Being in the same general area as your direct manager can lead to potential micro managing and this is really not that great for anyone involved. It adds to company overhead, for managers that potentially are not really needed. Additionally i means that employee’s spend more of their productive time conferring with manages and not working.
Time Wasters
- Attending meetings in some other part of the building, a 15 minute meeting could easily take an hour out of your day, getting to the meeting, early, and discussing the meeting afterwards, and finalyl getting back to your desk. It is maybe not intended to be this way, however i am sure that it is how it happens in more then a few offices.
- Fetching Printouts, from the printer can waste unknown amounts of time, interrupting what you are doing, getting up and walking to the printer, and then walking back and getting back into what you were doing. This is not to say if someone else stops you to talk, or if the printer jams, or any number of other things that can double, triple or extend the time that it takes even more.
- The constant countdown, while this is maybe not something that every one does, but there is i am sure more then a fair share of office works that spend much of the day watching the clock for when it is time to knock off for the day. As soon as you start watching the clock you are not as productive as if you are working on the idea that time does not matter.
While these distractions and time wasters, are maybe not entirely specific to offices, and to some extent exist no matter where you are working, they do not all have the same effect. For example when you work in an office if someone interrupts for a quick chat there is a good chance that you will chat with them. However if you are working at home or in a coffee shop, this same distraction would more then likely be worked into your work process, deferred because you know that you can get what you are doing done and have a more quality time with the person, or you are actually more productive and the interferance does not affect you to the same degree.
Finally while all of this may be true, there is something else that is also very true of those that work outside of a normal office. This is that time management skills are essential. None of these distrations, or time wasteres, will make any difference if you are going to find a way to waste time no matter what, either by surfing websites you don’t need to for most of the time you have allocated to working, or if you are not actually creating anything useful in the time.