For today's weekly cavnesHR newsletter, we are going to talk about open office plans. I read this article how open office plans are the worst and most costly management fad that we've seen in the business world in a long time. And I completely 100% and viscerally agreed. Why did I feel so strongly about it? Because I've been subjected to an open office plan in the past and it drove me crazy.
My leaders meant well, but they took my team, which was the intelligence team, and a military unit during deployment in war. They put us in the middle of an open office plan, where we were surrounded by the operations people who were loud and who were noisy and who were the way they needed to be for their job. We needed to be quiet, we needed to be thinking we needed to be in a smaller enclosed space. Where we could read reports for 12 hours a day. Where we could analyze information, and figure out what it needed to apply to the rest of the unit into the mission.
I think that it's interesting that these management fads happen, and they take over. So let's look at office space, specifically, what is the right office space. Google does something and it gets famous and everyone does it. But what I really think happens is that the perfect office setup is different for each organization and for each team and within those teams. As a business leader, trying to navigate the way the world is working today and the fast pace of business change.
One of the best things you can do is talk to your people. Talk to your individual teams and ask them what they need. Let those team leaders be the one that decides how the office space is going to be set up. Let them be the ones that weigh in on how you're going to manage larger spaces in the office. Let them have their voices heard. Maybe let some people work from home if that's how they get more work done. There are so many different setups and there are so many things that work differently for different people. Don't make the mistake of assuming that one size fits all because it never does. Thank you and remember to be great every day.
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