Nike expects Nike HR and certain Tech teams to be on campus, before the RTW on Jan 10. WD&C also expects "all" admins to be onsite. I will be submitting an ER and I hope all admins do the same.
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Yes, it's long since past time Nike gave up on the open office concept. Especially "hoteling" during a fricking pandemic.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/draft-everyone-hates-open-plan-offices-so-why-are-they-still-so-popular.html
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Everyone Hates Open Plan Offices. So Why Are They Still So Popular?Nearly forty years of research says that open plan offices don't work, so why are they still around?
BY GEOFFREY JAMES, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC.COM
@SALES_SOURCE
Everyone Hates Open Plan Offices. So Why Are They Still So Popular?
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Whenever I post about open plan offices, I get a flood of tweets complaining about how much people hate working in them. I can count on one hand the number of tweets from people who like them.
It isn't just my Twitter followers. Extensive peer-reviewed research spanning nearly four decades has found that 1) employees intensely dislike the open plan, and 2) open plan doesn't make employees more productive. The scientific consenus is overwhelming:
1982: "Employees who enjoyed performing managerial and technical tasks reacted more unfavorably to office conditions than did clerical staff, who generally viewed their work as undemanding. Loss of privacy and increased disturbances were consistently at the source of these negative reactions." (University of Aston)
1989: "Results indicated that greater satisfaction was expressed by those working in the private offices. In addition, people working on the complex task were more satisfied in the private setting than the non-private one." (University of Georgia)
2002: "Results indicated decreased employee satisfaction with all of the dependent measures following the relocation. Moreover, the employees' dissatisfaction did not abate, even after an adjustment period." (University of Calgary)
2009: "Negative effects of acoustic environment increased significantly, including increased distraction, reduced privacy, increased concentration difficulties and increased use of coping strategies. The benefits that are often associated with open-plan offices did not appear: cooperation became less pleasant and direct." (Finnish Institute of Occupational Health)
2013: "Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts... particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration." (University of Sydney)
2015: "The majority of respondents who were situated in open plan work-environments preferred private offices as opposed to open plan offices, especially since it had an adverse influence on employees' concentration, privacy and emotional well-being." (Cape University Institute of Technology)
2018: "Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM." (Harvard University)
@1hlt exactly!!!
What’s working and what’s not working? I’ll tell you what ain’t working: whoever designed the new buildings obviously did so either as a joke, or because they didn’t give much thought to the fact humans would be working in those buildings. I thought my previous open office space was bad. This new space guarantees no actual work will get done with the beehive of activity encircling me 360 degrees.
Nike must have forgotten that some people do heads-down work that requires extended periods of concentration. If I had to think of the WORST physical environment for that kind of work I would have designed exactly what Nike designed in the new buildings. I fully expect morale to plummet when we return to the office and my teammates realize they can’t get any work done 3 days per week.
It makes perfect sense to have some teams come back earlier. The campus has been largely unoccupied for almost 2 years. Many changes have been made during that time. WD&C needs input on what's working and what's not prior to the full return to work. My guess is they are trying to make it better for everyone on Jan 10th.
They get big tax breaks from the state of Oregon by employing so many workers in the state, thus a HUGE reduction in taxes owed in agreement. Plus the other factor is all that commercial real estate and money spent on buildings is the real reason. Once people start getting sick again, I wonder what leadership will say.
Your ER will not do you any good, sadly.