Not entirely sure I understand this, but it looks like hell for an Aspie

[Otenba]

Considering poor desk set up can lead to some serious health problems, including back pain from poor sitting posture; that conference room working environment just screams neglect of staff basic needs just to be cheap. I think an employer could be challenged under law over it too, in the UK anyway. Open office environments are ableist anyway, and encourage worker distraction. It's just a lazy money saving tactic. Workers need personal space.

 

[Judge]

OMG, my cousin just sent me pictures she took of her immediate work environment. Definitely now a sweatshop. Yet just another multi-billion dollar publicly traded corporation.

A total nightmare of crowded, common areas with only tiny partitions to mark one workspace from another. I could never work there under such circumstances.

"Hell" for much of anyone.

 

[LucyPurrs]

That's not the same in terms of what the original post is all about. Meeting rooms are intended to be communal spaces for temporary events usually lasting minutes or hours. Not intended as a space to do your regular job. As for classrooms, they must inherently be communal spaces as a single instructor must communicate to several people at once. But then we've seen numerous accounts here of Aspies who have a terrible time attempting to follow an instructor in an overcrowded classroom as well. I got by in overcrowded classrooms often by sitting in the very front or back of the room when I had the choice.

Try to imagine working in an office, where you sit all day long performing a certain function, and you are sitting directly next to another person who may be doing the same function. Worse if you have people on both sides of you. Then consider that such a job may involve telephone conversations all day long. Where you are continuously hearing unwanted voices and sounds while trying to think and do your job. And that you're not expected to leave your workspace other than to go to the restroom. It's a sensory nightmare, apart from the possibility that the person working next to you might be excessively chatty.

I once worked in such an office environment. Rows and rows of desks with endlessly loud, ringing telephones. Luckily that lasted only a year and a half before the introduction of cubicles, which everyone praised. Though the cubicle walls were generally little more than waist-high. Visually you had a sense of privacy, while much of the noises outside your cubicle were still quite audible.

I still recall that our branch manager had a rule against putting anything on the walls of the cubicle. So I improvised and made a number of charts used in my job that I taped to a single sheet of cardboard which simply rested against the cubicle wall. LOL...the Operations Manager was not amused, but she let me keep it.

I don't know how you lasted a year and a half in that environment Judge- I couldn't have lasted 1.5 hours! I can't imagine being able to focus when there are so many intrusions and distractions in the environment- I'd flee fast!

 

[Judge]

I don't know how you lasted a year and a half in that environment Judge- I couldn't have lasted 1.5 hours! I can't imagine being able to focus when there are so many intrusions and distractions in the environment- I'd flee fast!

Absolute desperation to find and hold a job. Sadly something a great many here may relate to.

 

[LucyPurrs]

That is a true nightmare scenario. I feel for anyone who has to endure that just to have an income.

 

[Theta.G]

20 billion start up for a communal work space? I don't think that's going to save any companies money lol
"Ya lets just give these guys 5.8 mil to redesign our office. Everyone already has a desk and their own workspace and we monitor their online activity but hey why not right lets step it up and let everyone monitor each other while we're at it. never mind the fact that we could just arrange some furniture and do it ourselves hur hur hur".

Disclaimer: I wasn't interested enough to read the article. Fully aware it's probably more than just redesigning an office space.

 

[Sid Delicious]

That looks like a terrible environment for any employee, not just aspies. It amazes me how a business can justify charging that much just to rearrange furniture (badly)! I still work PAYE, but set up my own company this year precisely because I'm sick of all the insane working practices in the modern world. If I have to meet up with anyone, we use VR and if I hire anyone full time in the future, I'll use VR for office space and board meetings as much as possible (maybe the odd 'group brainstorming day' in a pub or something for anyone who wants to). The fact that companies are still insisting most people spend thousands of £/$ and waste hours of their day commuting and then stick them in these open/shared/communal space environments that are proven to lower productivity infuriates my pedantic inner child!

A few years back I had a contract job that included analysing data on exactly this scenario for multiple teams across a well known company. Even after we presented all the data showing the increase in productivity (as well as improved morale, decreased sick leave, lower staff turnover) across the board, the manager still decided to force employees to travel into the city every day to sit at a desk that cost the company £4k/yr! Mainly because that manager and most of the others on the deciding team didn't want to lost any of the tight control they had over staff who were physically there, and didn't want to accept that there was software that already tracked all of the work each employee was getting through far better than they could as a human. Basically, middle management would struggle to justify what they did all day and were happy to sacrifice all of the above factors in order to save their own asses!

If you're making an employee wake up 1-2 hours earlier and lose sleep/exercise/whatever, pay a big % of their salary to travel by car/train/bus, then lose another 1-2 hours commuting in the evening that they would have spent either working or switching off then common sense tells you they are not going to perform as well. By the end of the week most people are exhausted and not firing on all cylinders at work, and unless you are on a high wage then wasting a lot of your money on travel is a big demotivating factor.

We've had the technology for remote working and tracking productivity (which should be the main concern) for years in many jobs, but it seems like a lot of CEOs are incredibly old fashioned and simply don't trust their employees to work if they aren't physically in the same building and being directly watched over by other staff. If employees really can't be trusted to work from home without slacking off, then that reflects either bad hiring practices and/or bad management (tech or human). If staff take advantage and don't work, then you sack them and get someone that is going to work.

The same argument can be used for hiring practices. In many cases, I can't see the justification in making a candidate get dressed up then travel all the way to an office to sit in front of an interviewer (maybe I'm biased because I hate having to wear heels or put on makeup). If you hire on VR rather than real life and can't see the candidate, then it's harder to consciously or unconsciously discriminate on things like appearance, skin colour, etc. In fact, I'd love to go one step further and have completely blind hiring via an AI interviewer without any details such as gender, ethnicity, age, etc known until after the candidate has passed any tests. That seems like a far more meritocratic and fair method. Again, we have the technology there so I don't see why companies haven't started doing this.

Sorry for the rant. I haven't slept and this topic is a current irritant of mine!

(Edited: Because I can't spell!)

 

[Paralleluniverse]

I've never had a cubicle...I really wish I did. In my old jobs, once in a bank it was open plan with a barrier which was kind of ok because I had some sort of privacy but in my most recent job at a fortune 500 company we were lined up like chicken ... It was so bad!! An O see office with goldfish rooms for meetings and 400 employees talk about a nightmare for Asperger's !!!I can't stand it