Back to open plan

For the second time this year the office is full of brightly coloured plastic crates. We have to be packed up and out of this place by 12.00 tomorrow ready for the contractors to shift all our stuff back to the Mothership just around the corner.

We will be one floor down from where we used to be, on the first floor (2nd if you are American and don’t have ground floors) and round the back in the shady part of the building. I use the word “shady” advisedly. I worked in that part of the building about ten years ago and the word should really be “stygian”. Still, this time I have a window seat, so it’s not all bad. No view, mind, but I get to see some natural daylight.

The bit that baffles me is the need to cram more people in the same amount of space, given the staff reductions we have experienced recently. Most, if not all, of the cell offices have gone to be replaced by small meeting areas and the desk space has been reduced and we will all be packed together just a little closer than before - to the point, in fact, where someone has seen fit to produce a note on open-plan working etiquette…

For all that, I am quite looking forward to moving back into the main building. I’ve got used to open-plan and I miss it. I used to enjoy being able to lean over and ask a colleague a question rather than having to traipse half way around the building.

The lack of file storage is a little worrying for a civil servant of long standing, but on the other hand, the opportunity for losing embarrassing pieces of paper…

I am concerned, however, that my photograph of Gillian Anderson will have nowhere to go. I’m not sure that there are any partitions between the working spaces any more, making it that much harder to personalise your own working space. I suspect that much ingenuity will be expended on that over the coming months only for us to be told to stop it. Which, of course, we won’t.

I understand that sometime from the middle of September, we will be getting new work PCs. What's going on here? It's only four years since the last upgrade. This is almost unheard of.

Back to open plan

For the second time this year the office is full of brightly coloured plastic crates. We have to be packed up and out of this place by 12.00 tomorrow ready for the contractors to shift all our stuff back to the Mothership just around the corner.

We will be one floor down from where we used to be, on the first floor (2nd if you are American and don’t have ground floors) and round the back in the shady part of the building. I use the word “shady” advisedly. I worked in that part of the building about ten years ago and the word should really be “stygian”. Still, this time I have a window seat, so it’s not all bad. No view, mind, but I get to see some natural daylight.

The bit that baffles me is the need to cram more people in the same amount of space, given the staff reductions we have experienced recently. Most, if not all, of the cell offices have gone to be replaced by small meeting areas and the desk space has been reduced and we will all be packed together just a little closer than before - to the point, in fact, where someone has seen fit to produce a note on open-plan working etiquette…

For all that, I am quite looking forward to moving back into the main building. I’ve got used to open-plan and I miss it. I used to enjoy being able to lean over and ask a colleague a question rather than having to traipse half way around the building.

The lack of file storage is a little worrying for a civil servant of long standing, but on the other hand, the opportunity for losing embarrassing pieces of paper…

I am concerned, however, that my photograph of Gillian Anderson will have nowhere to go. I’m not sure that there are any partitions between the working spaces any more, making it that much harder to personalise your own working space. I suspect that much ingenuity will be expended on that over the coming months only for us to be told to stop it. Which, of course, we won’t.

I understand that sometime from the middle of September, we will be getting new work PCs. What's going on here? It's only four years since the last upgrade. This is almost unheard of.