Office 06
4 Apr 2006 by Chris N
My friends, we’re living in the future. We can communicate with people across the globe as if they were in the next room, we can annoy people on the train with a vast array of portable noise-making devices, and we can access just about the entire sum of human knowledge from our desktops. So why are we still working in offices?
It hardly seems surprising that there’s a game coming out called ‘Office Massacre’ (well, at least there was) -the cultural consensus seems to be that the office is a hellhole full of David Brents and broken dreams. Furthermore, over the years we’ve heard again and again that technology will let us all work from home. So why am I sitting here in a high-tech company that mainly runs from an open-plan office? Shouldn’t we all be wired up to the matrix, holding meetings in a virtual space straight out of Tron and disconnecting occasionally to watch Neighbours at our leisure?
Well, from the technology side of things, yes, I could be working at home. But I’d be at a further level of remove from the team we have here. Communication is everything, and spontaneous communication is essential in this work. As I mentioned in my first post, I want to produce usable stuff, putting the emphasis on people. There’s no better way to balance the highly abstracted coding my department has to do than to stick us right in the middle of a busy office. We can see what sales are up to, we can hear what tech support are telling the people who use our systems, we don’t always need to formalise the process with meetings and phone calls, we’re in it.
And the social side of things is much better than they’d have you believe, the writers of The Office or those smug rock stars who ‘just couldn’t bear the anonymity of office work’. Maybe we’re lucky here with this mix of characters, but come on, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of gossip? We’re all social animals, even those of us who know what AJAX stands for and can happily spend an hour solid quoting Tarantino movies, and here we all are in a big room where we can easily decide to go to the pub after work – and if I was working from home I’d never get a chance to steal Giles’ crisps.
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With the risk of this blog turning into the Chris and Giles Show, I am commenting again, (there must be some other people, at least in this office, with some opinions?).
I would happily work from home, surrounded and cushioned by my Email, Mobile and Instant Messenger happily in the knowledge that all I need to to to reach someone is to press a few buttons, but then just as I check my inbox I still see that it isn’t showing any unread emails? WHY NOT? i sent the email at least 3 minutes ago, it only had one sentence and he should have read and replied by now! So my frustration begins to grow, another 30 seconds go by and I pick up my mobile and send a text; ‘Did you get the email I just sent?’
Now I am getting really worried, it has been a whole 5 minutes now and still no reply so I phone him. When he answers the phone he explains to me that he has just stepped away from his computer and got distracted by some show on ITV where a group of middle aged women debate several humerous anecdotes on the subject of ‘What my Husband Did the Previous Night’.
Oh how I wish I could be back in the office again, where I can just swivle around on my chair and ask John if he has finally updated that setting on some server so my up to now, useless scripts, will start showing their true magic…
I’ve thought about the whole working from home issue a few times before and with type of work we do here (being web site and applications development) it could be worthwhile to consider this option. Most of the time is spent writing lines and lines of code not interacting with anyone else, so at home could we get things done faster with no interruptions? We could save a few quid on travel costs and roll out of bed at 8:55 to get to work too!
So why not? well personally, I prefer coming into the office to work, a bit of gossip is always good as well as discussing the latest developments in "24". By the time we get to work we’re.. well most of us are.. wide awake and in a pretty reasonable state, ready to go. Its also good to be in the same room as someone when helping out or explaining the next project. Often its quite tricky to put across the idea in your head for someone else to build, so you have to draw diagrams or scribble stuff down as an aid, although pick up the diagrams from last weeks explanation and you wonder what on earth you were talking about!
Being in the office you also get to hear the latest moaning… I mean positive feedback on the latest updates you made to the technical support application and fix and improve continuously. Without the interaction the system would never evolve. You can also keep an eye on the lads and tell them to stop writing immensely long blog posts and get on with some "real" work
So I’ll put up with the ever increasing variety of odd smells emanating from the microwave at lunchtime, its better than sitting at home with no one to talk to directly without having to use some kind of technology.
Working from home was something I was involved in during a previous incarnation in the wonderful world of creative packaging (think shiny envelopes and ‘novelty’ junk coming through your letterbox). By the way, I’m George, the Sales Manager, and I try not to venture down to the dark side of the office inhabited by the likes of Chris, Giles and Darren.
My day working from home would generally involve switching on the laptop the second I rolled out of bed, throwing out a couple of emails to the MD so he would know I was working, whilst tuning into Aerobics Oz Style and Trisha.
I can honestly say that I don’t know anyone who works from who doesn’t do the exact same thing. From my experience, anyone who claims they don’t wear their dressing gown all day when working from home is a liar.
Eventually, we come to my point. How can anyone function in an efficient, business like manner when they are wearing a blue towelling dress gown with the hood up, monster feet slippers and watching girls in leotards bend and stretch?
I go along with George. My first company I had I ran from an office in my flat. I worked very hard but never really got anywhere. It wasn’t until I moved into an office on the outskirts of Manchester city centre that the business took off.
By moving from my home, I was far away from distractions. I was able to structure my day with out the tempting creature comforts of my house. Just as importantly for the first time ever I was able to lock the office door behind me and switch off at the end of a day. Rest and recreation time are important ingredients to a successful life.
It is nice to hear colleagues valuing the team spirit. This is one part of UKFast I will never change.
Recently as part of our Investors in people accreditation, we had an independent assessor interview 16 staff at UKFast. I was warned that morning before he started, that employers don’t always like the results, so I was rather nervous waiting for the outcome. At the end of the day I sat down in the boardroom with the examiner and he told me something that I will never forget.
‘in assessing over 200 companies in the last 17 years I have only ever witnessed the same sort of energy in one other company; they grew from 40 staff in 1999 to over 1000 by 2002.’
Now I am not planning the same sort of unprecedented growth, however I know that our success is down to the energy he spotted. That energy could not be emulated in any other conditions other than us all working together, as a team under one roof.