This man is passive aggressively asking for better open office

You actually got paid to make a video to tell your bosses you hate your office layout. That's gutsy and I totally dig it. Thanks for the video!

I’d rather have a cubicle, it’s like your own little bubble of concentration. They also feel so quiet and cozy.

The best part is when they say “millennials enjoy open office spaces”... says who?

I personally have trouble concentrating when there are people around me.

Even as a college student I never liked open seating libraries. I always gravitated to one of those individual study booths with high walls. Too much distractions if I just sit at an open study table with other students coming and going, talking, and even sometimes not studying at all but sleeping.

Open office is one of introverts' nightmares. Prisoners even have more privacy than us low-rank office workers.

It is just like a classroom. It is nearly impossible to concentrate.

Making phone calls is a monumental task at an open office, no matter how much you try to concentrate. Megan just simply won't stop talking about how her boyfriend hasn't replied to her messages.

Private offices are the best. If you don't mind interaction, you leave your door open. If you need to concentrate privately, you leave your door closed, and the only way to get in touch with you is to call you on the landline.

Working in an office was the reason I hated my previous job and eventually what lead me to resign from the company. I despised the feeling of constantly being monitored by either a co-worker or supervisor looking over my shoulder. I felt trapped in an Orwellian nightmare in which the simple act of opening a web browser to check the daily news headlines could result in either admonishment directly from a higher up or one of my co-workers snitching about seeing me doing an unrelated work task. Alternatively, there was the ever looming possibility of a co-worker “jokingly” calling me out in front of the whole office, rhetorically asking in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “why I was scrolling the web, instead of focusing on my work”. I will never ever ever ever go back to the dreaded cesspool which is the modern office workplace. I shudder thinking of the seven years of my life I’ll never get back working in that infernal death trap where hopes of happiness come to wither into dust...

Today's open office design is kinda depressing to be honest, especially if you're in the middle of the room. It kinda feels constricting and suffocating, your source of light is artificial, you're too far from the window, and you feel isolated in an alien world

Honestly, I'd prefer my own little box than seemingly open space.

Yes, to save money on real estate. But also, it's the panopticon - it's a cheap way for management to create the perception that a worker is being watched constantly, to instill fear & guilt in the workplace, and maintain control.

The worst thing about open offices are those people that just sneak up behind you and look at your screen for a good 10 seconds before actually telling you what they need.

Add to this horror is the "hot desk", where you can't personalize your desk, must clean it out at the end of each day so someone who comes in earlier than you can claim that desk the next day.

If this is Phil's attempt to get his own office then good luck lmao.

When I became a manager I did a lot of research into this topic. I was all hype to set up a more open office. However, what I learned is that the research show is that workers need *both* open spaces to congregate and personal spaces to work. The best work happens when employees have "random encounters" to collaborate (e.g. break rooms, open meeting space, etc.) but can retreat to a secluded space for formal work. The best example is the famous Pixar building, which perfectly implements these ideas.

As a person on the autistic spectrum, I simply cannot work in an open office lay out, and believe me I have tried. The tiny noises, movements, sights, sounds, even smells....way too overwhelming. I was so lucky to find an employer who respected people's wishes and I got my corner cubicle; my own quiet space where, believe me, I work harder and better than ever before. Open spaces might seem cost-effective, but I really wonder how productive the employees actually are.

I work in a open office all we all opt to talk via slack even though person is 2ft away. I agree it overrated. I want to adjust my balls, pick my nose and slam the keyboard on my forehead in privacy.

That was oddly depressing.

Open offices are horrible for those with ADHD and need a private space to be able to focus better.

What if we all work from home and company's improve homes

When I first got a private office with a door to work in, I never knew what true concentration and productivity looked like. It's so quiet that you can hear a pin drop on the floor. That's the level of concentration that programmers need to get work done.

Interesting video. Vox never fails to interest me in stuff I'd never thought I would have cared about

It's funny because I worked at SC Johnson headquarters and I love the look of the Great Work Room. However, I worked in a closed office and preferred it that way.

I remember when I was part of the management team that designed new working spaces at a new building, I emphasised the inclusion of quiet rooms to the open office space. Developers and Introverts loved them, they were 6 to 8 seater rooms and the rules were simple, no phone calls and no printers and minimal talking.

The company I work for has an open office space, but there are no desks, you're given a laptop and the building is literally coffee places, restaurants and large seating areas, so you don't have someone sitting right next to you, and you're free to get whatever word done in peace.

Please do one on overrated: pumpkin spice flavor. How did it get so big? What exactly is pumpkin spice? Is pumpkin really being used in all these pumpkin flavored things? Don't get me wrong. I love it. But it would be fun to explore how it got so big and people's obssesion with it.

Well I don’t have a job so I can’t tell what’s best

“To encourage interaction” Me, someone with social anxiety “Mmmm sure, sure,”

Open office means slowly suffering hearing loss due to having to blast music all day with headphones for 8 hours 5 days a week

Open offices are bullshit....straight bullshit. I use to work for a big named company that tried this nonsense and no one interacted, stayed silent and the higher ups got closed off offices. Everyone felt like they were in a fishbowl and absolutely hated it. I left that company last year, but most of my friends that are still there, still hate the design and I think at least 6 of them are looking for other jobs and they outline the open office design as one of the reasons. Not a high reason, but a reason nonetheless....pity.

"Open offices"..."Managers have private offices" HMMMMMMM....

Another decision taken out of the hands of the people doing the actual work, how shocking.

How about home office instead? Going outside of my house, especially commute for over an hour just to get to a workplace is a pain and waste of time

I need my own space to be honest

Open offices are also meant to eliminate the "boxed in" feel employees suffer from. They're also designed to ensure managers/superviors can monitor their workers and see that the level of productivity is being maintained. But haphazard layouts, lousy colour schemes, cheaply made equipment combined with saturated artificial lightning has really polluted this once great idea........

Yessss, I hate it. I'm right in front of the coffee and water/ice machine we have. Further I see people walking in my peripheral vision all the time. I need a square around my desk!!! I hate it. I hate hearing people talk around that area too. Like please go away

I work in the open office environment and I have to admit one thing: it’s a nightmare! I can’t concentrate properly when I'm working on my projects. People are too close to each other, too loud! I have asked my boss if I can work from home.

You said, “the office” dozens of times and never used a clip from The Office-missed opportunity

YES, YES, YES. Finally. I agree with this video completely. I much prefer a nice cubicle or even better my own small office room to these hip, trendy open space offices. They're just a scheme to pack in as many people into a tight, uncomfortable space as possible. They are entirely economical, not cultural.

I don't see why they have 100% open or cubical. Why don't they create workstations instead of designated spots. Have a mix of cubical and open space. Open space is good for teams working on a project but if you solo and doing your own thing, open spaces can be very distracting. So have rooms/offices/cubical areas for anyone that needs quiet time to work. If you have "interaction" in the workplace, it's a team effort thing. Otherwise, everyone is doing their own tasks solo and if you working...there is no time for interaction because the interaction you get is not work orientated, 75% of the time it's random chit-chat, horseplay. This is why you need both open spaces and private spaces. Tons of people also can't work efficiently in a open space setting because it is much to distracting and hard to concentrate. They spend less on designing a floor layout but in the end probably waste more money due to inefficient employee productivity. They probably have to hire more people also to make up for it.

Open office is a nightmare, now post covid. I find myself working more from home after work answering/reading emails because I cannot concentrate and focus on my open often desk that happens to be next to the cafeteria. My coworkers don’t realize how loud they are, how often I’m interrupted. It’s completely counterproductive

one thing i think you overlooked is the way all the desks are facing. in wright's open offices, not only is every desk further away, but everybody is facing the same direction which makes it more private.

Id take a cube over an open office any day - and cubes are a nightmare. yay for working virtual.

For someone like myself who's not only sociable but also has ADD, working in an open office has been incredibly challenging with respect to my own productivity. As an analyst, I feel like it makes much more sense to have some privacy.

I'm introverted and prefer having my own private cubicle over an open office personally, so it's a good thing I work where I do.

First my dad worked at Microsoft and he had his own office, then he worked at LinkedIn and didn’t have one and whenever I came to work with him I could tell he was a little annoyed at his coworkers.

You guys are better than Buzz feed...

This was one of the best videos I’ve ever seen. Period.

Companies always want their employees to be family so that good personal connections can make employees forget how underpaid and undervalued they are. They greatly overestimate how many people want to be friends with their coworkers. My team is cool and all but I could really care less about talking to them all day or getting to know them on a deep level. God forbid being next to them all day like in highschool. Also weird how your superior or coworker can just sneak up behind you like big brother to catch you getting distracted for a second. Miserable bastardization of an interesting concept. We can socialize and come together during meetings or breaks.

Open office actually hinders my collaboration... Because i feel like i cant talk to my "close" teammates, so i dont bother the others in there!

Open offices makes farts too public >

I hate open offices so so much. I hate it that my colleague in front of me lights up light (which two tables share...) all day long... I hate that... My eyes are quite sensitive and daylight is totally enough.... Yet she lights it up... How can I deal with that? There is constant laughter and talking. Phone calls. This is true disaster....I can't focus on anything. People walk around, some bring food and eat it.... seriously it's a nightmare... Yet everyone should be happy about what they get. Cause its so "modern" and "cool".... I'd rather stay in lame building, but with my personal space...

As Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, most of us are working fake jobs in buildings that would be better used as shelter for the homeless. When you see the game for what it is, it's astounding that so many of us are employed at all. When the average person has a better computer at home than the one at the office, the concept of commuting to an office to email each other and have telephone conferences should really strike everyone as an absurd waste of resources. It seems to me that a lot of people are more concerned with playing office than actual productivity; which by the promise of the industrial revolution should take up about 8 hours a week.

"Cubical Hatred" could be the name of a Yu-gi-oh! card.

I don't like open offices, gimme a cubical farm any day

I still prefer Open office to ms word

Ive never liked offices period, you feel confined and they always make them so cold. I don’t like open offices but I like working from cafes. We should be allowed to work from wherever we want as long as we get the job done.

dad tried this at his business. he stopped and resorted back go cubicals

I've enjoyed this series so far, but I really would like to see your solutions to these overrated trends.

Wright was my inspiration when I wanted to become an architect. A book about his life was the first ever architecture book I've ever read, and it was more about art. His designs was so great that even a highschool kid from the 21st century is amazed, she thought the designs was made during her time when they was actually built from late 1800s to early 1900s.

This is such an important video! Having just graduated, I became exposed to these two different office styles and found myself hating both of them. Somewhat comforting to know it wasn't just me.

I used to work in a small firm with a real office and it was pretty good, but now I work in a cubical farm and love it. Cubicals have improved a lot. My desk is essentially a giant L with lots of space for storage and tools. I also have several free standing shelves on my cube walls to store things in process.

So this guy made a video to rant about his office.

Please ...can these companies give the “open concept” a funeral and give us employees back our cubicles. 🤣

I think it depends on your job surely and whether it’s task-focused or not? Working from home has been really hard for me personally because it makes it hard to ask someone’s opinion on something (and I think there’d be a similar hesitancy if there was a door separating us) and you just learn a lot by overhearing / having a problem and getting different people chipping in their thoughts on it 🤷🏽‍♀️

i don't know a damn thing about architecture but i can tell you i would lose my mind working in a noisy open area with no privacy like that. How can you expect people to get anything done with so much distraction? And why such a big fuss over creating an environment that encourages communication when most of the collaborative work (especially in hip millennial tech startups) is likely done online these days? sounds like a lot of empty buzzwords to justify sacrificing the workers personal space for cost-saving. Anyway, cool video.

When you are a Linux user and hears 'Open Office'

And the overhead fluorescent lighting... my god... it made me flee the corporate world

another great video by Phil! Love his content

Open offices work when the people in the open space have similar or identical jobs and are limited to a small number of individuals. For example, a specialized call center team or a fast paced accounting group. I could see this work for a PR team keeping up with news and social media feeds. It does not work for a large scale call center or large business departments.

I really like this series

Biggest problem: I can't be my weird self in an open office.

2017: Open offices are overrated 2021: Offices are overrated

Soo....everything comes down to economics reasons right? No architect changes architecture constantly just for the sake of it.

what is... 'work"?

Open offices should be prohibited by law. There's no better place for development of various psychosomatoses and hate towards the others. I'm so happy for my little room, where I'm alone. It's a perfect quiet place with plenty of privacy where I can fully concentrate on my work. If I were forced to work in a room with more than 3 people, I'd become a serial killer. Dress code should be banned as well.

Awesome video!! Inspired to check out more of frank lloyd Wright’s architecture !

I'm thankful every day that I'm in a high-walled cubicle. It's not a private room, but boy is it so so so much better than an open office.

I miss my wework building.. being able to escape and just cozy up on a different floor on a stand alone desk in a corner.. or the phone booth or the couch or the dining table.. 6 floors of fun beautiful design.. the most annoying part of being in an open space is pretending to be busy with work.. look.. I can complete my job in 5 hours.. now I got 5 hours to kill.. just let me hide somewhere in piece and watch anime

I worked in an open office before. It was the reason I fell into a depression. I was always watched, people were always passing behind my place or talking around me. And just the number of people around had a great pressure on me. Not to mention horrible lighting, as we barely had any light from outside and lamps were those horrible blueish-white things that made my eyes hurt. Also we couldn't just start discuss the work out loud because people from various departments were in the same huge open space and we'd disturb them. It was horrible.

This video has made me like my open, curved desk, high ceiling office a lot more. And also the coffee shop in the lobby

this video is an inside protest from the VOX journalist and creators

What’s worse than open offices? Hotdesking

1:54 the imposters... they're everywhere

Please do one about the layout of classrooms

GUYS MY BOSS NEEDS SUBTITLES TO SEE THIS (SPANISH) !!!!!!!

I'm so glad I chose to write my research essay (2 years ago) in my architectural​ design class on Frank Lloyd Wright. The man was a truly a wise thinker, often associating his architecture to the morals of America's values (as mentioned in the video, when it quotes Wright saying open offices were symbolic for democracy). He emphasized his vision of creating a modern and contemporary style that differentiated it from the European style because he wanted to give America its own unique genre and vibe. Another idea that I appreciated from his style was that architecture should adjust to the environment and blend in, not the other way around or forcing a geographical location to become whatever you want it to be. He had a slow start to his engineering career, but his determination and perseverance in previous drafting firms has led him to become such an iconic figure in this industry. The video made a great point that - while the idea and social intention (not including the economic reason of profits for less cubic space) of open offices as being comfortable, communicative, and creating a good working environment - the continued copied designs of open offices leading to cubicles has forgotten the attention to detail and design that allows the open offices to achieve its CLAIMED purpose for more interaction and good functionality for working conditions.

OMG... This answered a lot of questions that I had!!! I love to work in my room, it's like my private office!

Great video ! More thought has to go into the entire work life model

I had a cube at my last job. It was nice because if I wanted alone time I could have it and if I needed help all I had to do was stand up and ask anyone within a 5 foot radius.

I always thought that a cubicle would be kind of nice. It’s like your own small little office where you can do your work in private.

I like the wide variety of topics you guys cover. Im sure the research work into this must be intense. Nice work! How big is the vox team? how many researchers?

Cubicle & closed office is my ideal design, because I can actually focus & not be distracted by noise. Trying to understand someone in a noisy atmosphere is a real challenge.

Yet the managers and executives have offices

That office looks pretty great for 1909!

I think the issue nowadays is the hike in office rent prices which is now more expensive for less space. A contributing factor could be the appearance of more electronic/Internet based companies such as online retailers or game development companies that require offices to manage servers and Maximize efficiency. These requirements have likely lead the demand for offices to rise over time leading to its higher prices. These are my main ideas on why offices aren’t as elegant as they could be/ previously were.

As a person who hates buzzfeed and stuff alike, I'm surprised that I enjoy your channel this much. You seem like you care about what you do, and you like to make people more educated or at least think more. I respect that. Keep up the great work!