Reason #6479 of why WFH is a godsend. Never again will I have to suffer a useless VP rearranging the floor for the nth time in their quest to optimize inter-team collaboration.
When possible, tie it back to company strategy or objectives (“it’s important for us to sit closer to our stakeholders”, or “this layout will improve our carbon footprint”).
These feel exactly like the kind of BS VP rearrangement you're mentioning. Moving desks improves our carbon footprint? What kind of coolaid do they drink and how am I supposed to control my urge to just burst out in loud laughter if my boss tells me that as a reason?
If it's "we're moving everyone downstairs so we can turn off the heating on the 6th floor" then it does. But yeah, even in that case it's better to skip the bullshit; if you've laid off a bunch of people and you're packing the people who are left into a smaller space to save money, if you tell them that, they'll understand.
The trick would we to move everyone from the first floor to the 6th, rent out the first floor and let them pay for "their" heating bill, knowing warm air goes up ;)
That would be a great explanation. Doesn't do squat for the carbon footprint either way tho.
> Doesn't do squat for the carbon footprint either way tho.
Yeah it does. Heating two half-empty floors will generally have a higher carbon footprint than one full floor one way or another, and especially if you then rent out the other floor you're saving a bunch of emissions (particularly given how much it takes to build new buildings).
The company doesn't actually care about the carbon footprint, of course, which is why it's a bullshit excuse, but it does have that positive effect.
I honestly believe the primary driver of organizational dysfunction is management's tendency to find justifications for things rather than actually understanding what they're doing and if it's necessary.
i imagine they think it's necessary in order for them to maintain power dynamic, but they aren't willing to convey that message. so they contrive creative "cover stories."
I now kind of want to figure out where you work and try to get a job there that would put me in a management position above you, just to show that even WFH is not enough to save you from stupid management rearrangement of things. It might go something like this:
> Morkalork, I've noticed in our team Zoom meetings when you look at something on your second monitor you look to the left. Everyone else has their second monitor on the right and its really distracting to see you go left when everyone else goes right.
> I'm going to need you to move that second monitor over to the right.
I’m disappointed that after our last talk, you decided to try and fake a “solution” rather than swapping your screens as we had agreed. I’m getting complaints that the “NY JETS” pennant in the background is flipped now.
The one time I had a Real job I had to suffer through a desk shuffle. I happened to go into the office early one day the next week to get some actual work done. Around 6:30–7am some guy walks up to me while I am programming and asks me a question. It took me 30 or 40 seconds to finish my thoughts and start to think about the question. By that time, he had walked off. His question turned out to be something like “How much has moving the desks around improved the working conditions around here?” Even after he was gone, I couldn’t figure out how to answer that question; to me moving desks around was mostly irrelevant, and I wasn’t even sure if it was possible for a shuffle to make any difference at all. At least not for engineering, where all of our communications can be done through email, bug trackers, version control, etc, etc. Later I learned that he was the CEO (oops!).
On the other hand, they at least had a good reason for the shuffle. They had been subleasing half of the floor to another company. As we were growing, they ended that lease and let every one expand into their place. This left plenty of open space for the new people who were hired that year.
Is that ever really the reason? More likely, a larger or more important team covets your location, so your dinky cost-center team will have to move to the dark center of the 'open' layout.
Hysterically enough, the IT and sysadmin team got put in what became known as "the cave" and never got moved out. At least they had a door they could close. The real short end of the stick in the 'open' floor was being beside sales and customer support.
I used to sit and stare at the walls in offices daydreaming about a better way. I would stare down at the green space around the office building and imagine small single room office cabins, where everyone had light, privacy, control over the local environment. I thought if it could be made to work this would be the ideal layout for engineering/design/whatever creative work. Funny thing, over a decade later I found out I just described working from home.
