It will definitely keep people away, just not for the reasons the bean counters expected.<p>1. People like having their own desks.<p>2. With enough space to actually work on.<p>3. Where they can hear themselves think.<p>I feel like it's time to carpet-bomb management and B-schools with <i>PeopleWare</i> again.<p>A few years ago I did a 3-week internship in the consulting arm of a Big 4 accounting firm. They had hot-desking in their office -- you were supposed to book it on the day. In practice certain folk had "ins" with the space and planning staff and so certain desks were never "available".<p>The practical upshot was that you had to wander around the vast office for 20 minutes trying to find the desk you booked from home that morning. And meetings were a pain. "Where are you? Red battleship 27 omega-B? I'm in pink rubber ducky 14 sigma-epsilon-J".
My previous company tried to encourage more support teams (sysadmins, dbas, storage etc) to work from home and a lot of people embraced it. However the company discovered an unfortunate side effect - teaming broke down.<p>When our customers had critical incidents, our ability to respond and resolve the issues became worse and worse. The effect of working from home caused the teams (and even people within the teams themselves) to often fail to see the problem holistically. They would check their specific area and then pass the buck to another team.<p>Telecommuting definitely has benefits in the right situations, but if your work requires groups of people to collaborate closely and quickly, telecommuting can have a very adverse effect on your performance.
Distributed teams are an anti-pattern. It's much easier to work with someone when you see them every day and perhaps have a few drinks after work from time to time. When everyone is just a name attached to an email or a voice on a noisy phone line, you're probably not going to feel too motivated to help them much. And without teamwork, why have a team?
A good office should attract people and by extension, serve as a recruiting tool.<p>Their modern facade of bright colors and "hip" furniture doesn't conceal the fluorescent lights, low ceilings, and berber carpeting.<p>Imagine the opposite - 20-foot ceilings, lots of natural sun light, and hardwood floors - and you can feel it's much more conducive for working.
My company has had this setup for the past 12 years. We have a small office with desks and conference rooms anyone can grab if they are free.<p>It works well. I work from home 99.9% of the time, but sometimes it's nice to go into the office for a change of scenery or when the cable goes out. There's usually one or two random people also in the office at any given time and you get to have interesting randomized social experiences by going out to lunch or dinner with them.
This fits the startup way of thinking but not the real way of thinking. If you can't draw a line between your work and personal life you'll burn out a lot sooner.
At first, I misread this and thought it was designed to keep employees <i>from</i> working from home.<p>Glad to see I was wrong.<p>ObOnTopic: I try to work from home once or twice a week. In those bursts, I can get a lot of work done that requires concentration and nobody bothering me. But the rest of the time, I make sure to be in the office, partly for the serendipitous connections ("oh hey, I've been meaning to ask you...") and partly for the easy back-and-forth with my team mates.