My favorite past employer had a sea of 8x8 cubes. The solution to communications issues like this was all you can eat Friday night pizza parties. People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza. That was the end of that.
A few years later they tried to shove engineering into 6x6 cubes. That lasted 2 months. Productivity had plummeted.
Naively imposing open offices to improve collaboration is like naively imposing scrum to improve communication - both are externally imposed edicts attempting to establish by fiat something that needs to grow organically.
It was the bean counters that put the kibosh on the all-you-can work pizza parties?
Fire the bean counters. Compared to the hourly wage of an engineer, even a whole large pizza per hour is a great deal.
Granted, the institution would have fallen apart in the long run. Eventually people would get lives outside of work (families, friends, hobbies...) and realize that 'free pizza' in exchange for 4-5 hours of off-the-clock labor is a shitty deal for anyone making more than minimum wage. People would get hired on that just saw the company as a paycheck & wanted to get out after their 9-5.
>People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza
For the price of a meal the company got up to six hours of overtime from staff members at the beginning of the weekend and they decided to cut it to a third of a meal?!
A few years later they tried to shove engineering into 6x6 cubes. That lasted 2 months. Productivity had plummeted.
Naively imposing open offices to improve collaboration is like naively imposing scrum to improve communication - both are externally imposed edicts attempting to establish by fiat something that needs to grow organically.