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"Office Sharing" "Office Sharing" is an excerpt from 'Offices that Work" by Franklin Becker PhD and William Sims PhD: Cornell University: International Workplace Studies Program http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu "The case against enclosed offices sooner or later gets around to the 'sterility' of working alone. But enclosed offices need not be one-person offices. The two-or-three-or four-person offices make a lot of sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align with work groups. The worker who needs to spend fifty per cent of his time with one other person will spend most of that time with a particular person. These are natural candidates to share an office. Even in open-plan offices, co-workers should be encouraged to modify the grid to put their areas together into small suites. When this is allowed, people become positively ingenious in laying out the area to serve all their needs: work space, meeting space and social space. Since they tend to be in interaction mode together or simultaneously in flow mode, they have less noise clash with each other than they would with randomly selected neighbours. The space has a vital quality because interaction is easy and natural. A degree of control over their space is viewed as an additional benefit. In the study undertaken by the International Workplace Studies Program at Cornell University they investigated enclosed rooms of 2 - 12 people). Data shows that younger workers liked these kinds of offices more than older workers. The reason is interesting: they felt they could learn more from their "officemates" in this kind of office. This makes sense, since in interviews a common reason for wanting to join a company was the opportunity to work with "great" people. Having great people around whom you rarely see and even more rarely talk to, is not of real value. Respondents talked about the much greater learning opportunities in a more open environment. Older respondents, in contrast found it harder to concentrate and more disruptive. It also seemed the case that older respondents were simply comfortable with how they had learned to do things over a number of years."
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