Posted by: Alex
I work in IT, an industry known for squeezing as many people into a space as is possible. This usually happens at the expense of privacy, and we get used to that, but we get used to it.
I don’t need huge amounts of office space. I’m a bit of a neat freak when it comes to my desk at work. I am also a hoarder by nature, but I manage to keep my loot tidy and in it’s space.
Tomorrow we move into new office space. It’s in the same building, just down one floor from where we are now, but it’s also smaller. Our average cubicle seats four people and is 6m x 5m in size. Our new cubicles are 5m x 4m, still seating 4. That’s quite a bit smaller. And that’s for people lucky enough to get a full cubicle. My three man team is out of luck: when the planners realized they couldn’t fit our department into the space as originally planned, they discarded one cubicle and slotted the desks up against the entrance of other cubicles.
One of those random desks is now my new spot Not only am I right by the entrance that the whole department comes and goes through, I am also in a thoroughfare to another cubicle. For a person that dislikes distractions when I’m concentrating, this is not a good thing. Oh, and did I mention I’m right by the printer also?
In addition, our cubicle dividers that used to extend about a meter above the desks are being replaced with translucent Perspex dividers about 30 cm’s high. My question: Why bother? Oh, and they haven’t arrived yet, until they do we’ll have no dividers at all.
You can tell this annoys me. It shouldn’t. Professionalism should mean that a desk doesn’t affect my work, but this makes me sour. They’ve pretty much removed my privacy and taken away my ability to personalize my space: I have insufficient desk space to put anything that’s not necessary, and I can’t pin my jokes, calendar or team building paraphernalia to the new dividers.
If I take this to its full conclusion, it removes my personality and makes me a cookie cutter resource just like everyone else – I’m not sure if that’s what the company was after – and puts a damper on my desire to go to work in the morning … That sucks.