Not surprised at this one bit. All these collab zones and moves to consolidate office space actually hurt productivity and collaboration.
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-open-plan-office-is-making-your-team-less-collaborative.html
Next you'll be telling us diversity doesn't work. Best just to swipe those badges and move along.
Diversity works great as long as your not a white male. Minority, females, with a disability are in pretty good shape
news flash! good employees can work from any location! however, it requires good management, to keep in-touch w/good employees. that rarely happens at T. instead, you get these folks that sit and do nothing. management's hands are tied. its of no benefit to them, to get rid of headcount.
They’re currently building floors out at Atlanta/Lenox and Dallas for open-plan. They’ve had open-plan in San Ramon for a few years now. In Atlanta/Alpharetta they converted 1/2 of one floor in one building a few years ago and recently 1/2 of one floor in another building to open-plan (a $1.2M+ renovation I heard). Thoughts from anyone here on those conditions now? Are there any others? Open-plan is fine for groups like application or data where they need to work together and collaborate, but NOT if you have a role that you need to host or participate on calls all day. I remember how quiet offices used to be. It’s now an audio/visual nightmare. My experience is that someone will talk at regular volume, even a few rows away, no consideration, that pumped in white noise doesn’t help that, and people walking around and raising/lowering desks - you can’t concentrate on what you’re doing. On top of that they won’t let you reserve space any more or rooms for more than 4 hours at a time. You spend forever finding a space now and setting up (not to mention parking now!). I hear “it’s all CRE” doing this??
Next you'll be telling us diversity doesn't work. Best just to swipe those badges and move along.
Might as well just go the closest Starbucks near your location. The coffee is better and there are more interesting people to look at.
In plano, if you arent there by 7am you have to park offsite.
Most people cant get any work done because it's too loud, and you cant hear the conference calls you're stuck on. People have to stay muted because it sounds like a boiler room when they unkute to talk.
It’s pretty bad... Loud people, stinky food, stinky people, no desk room, not vacuumed, not dusted, centralized trash cans, and no privacy.
the new hires probably think the buildings are like what they see on their commercials with floating displays and everything is white. lol poor kids
I’ve been inside many AT&T buildings all over the country and they’ve all been outdated, ugly and moldy/musty. I’ve never seen one that was even somewhat modern and I can’t imagine there are many at&t offices with these open office environments.
Every new hire that has joined my team in the past 5 years has been gone within 2 years at the most. They can't stand our old-@ss environment.
All the hip pierced tattooed scruffy millennials go to work at other companies. Were stuck with the boring tie wearing boomers.
It's all nonsense. They don't even have adequate drop in space in the locations they are forcing everyone into. A complete farce.
On the issue of metrics: they are inappropriate for any kind of creative work but AT&T executives want to be able to "manage" by dashboard because they are in the thrall of MBA-think. Imagine if this nonsense were being deployed in the heyday of Bell Labs. So last month your group invented the transistor but I don't see any milestones this month. Another month like this and you'll all be on performance plans.
By the way this is why I have complete confidence than AT&T will destroy Time Warner utterly. They just can't help themselves, it's a compulsion. They have to measure it or it doesn't exist.
Collaboration plans goal is to wear you down or p*ss you off. They want you to leave.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidburkus/2016/06/21/why-your-open-office-workspace-doesnt-work/#1b544ed8435f
I guess Rand-o and the rest of the execs need to take the PLE course that covers this topic.
At&t is a strange animal. Control freaks. They pretend to be hip progressive and innovative, but I can't imagine the younger generation new hire sticking around for long. They stifle creativity with their metrics. Numbers and metrics should be used as a tool. Instead they are treated as the product that we produce instead of the actual services that we provide.