Startups

How to Actually Design a Wonderful Work Environment?

How can you sit together in chaos and still find your much needed solitude?

My office recently got a face lift. There used to be old school cubicles. Now we have open sitting areas. It’s much more spacious and people get to sit together and work, rather than sit alone in their own silos. Plus, it looks cool!

I couldn’t have been happier.

In this collaboration economy, we all prefer to sit together, discuss stuff, brainstorm ideas, collaborate and make shit happen.

Jason Fried has a TEDx Talk (above), and along with DHH, he has also written a book on why office is not required; at least in some industries. I’ve read it; I love it. But somehow I couldn’t see myself coming to terms to apply that in real life.

I can’t imagine myself sitting all day at home, or at a café, or some co-working space, in front of a computer.

Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One:

“Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day.”

I’m not against remote working. But personally, I need to have people around me. I might not talk to them all the time, but sometimes I need to bounce off ideas or talk about stuff to kill stress.

Communication with peers builds connections.

Like most people, I need a healthy distraction. I don’t think I can get that if I work from home, alone.


In our office, we conduct all major communication through GitLab. Although it’s mainly used for software development, we have managed to use it for almost any form of communication. If someone has an idea, or wants something developed, she just creates an issue on GitLab, tags related people, starts a discussion and takes it ahead.

This process helps us put all our ideas together in a structured way, and get our voices heard easily. We even developed a tool which gives an overview of what the 19 people in the company are kicking asses in. This is like how Basecamp works. But unlike Basecamp, we aren’t remote.

All is good.

But there were times when I felt the process of explaining a design, or an app flow in writing, getting feedback in writing, and then working on the feedback, becomes tough. Face to face is quicker and better. Sometimes, two people can just sit together, discuss ideas, and come up with something better faster.

It’s just that direct face-to-face communication is better at nailing certain things, and passive communication is better at nailing others.

It’s just that face-to-face is better at nailing certain things, and text is better at nailing others. All things have their own purpose. I guess we all can agree on that.


After the open-plan design, something interesting happened. It started with a joke. Our CEO asked if we need Do Not Disturb signs on our seats. He casually referred to a research which said it can take more than 20mins to get into the groove when we are distracted even for a little bit. Studies show that even the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity.

It got me thinking? The open-plan is cool. But is it hurting us somehow?

Is the open-plan workplace hurting us somehow?

Susan Caine writes in Quiet:

“Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.”

I’m not sure if I completely agree with her. I believe the ideal solution lies somewhere in between — neither in a completely remote workplace nor in a supposedly chaotic open-plan office.

Any workplace which values privacy is a good workplace. I guess we all can agree upon that. But an office where one can switch between spending time with colleagues when needed, and getting into a solitary mode when we need to do some focused work, is ideally the best place to be.

Any workplace which values privacy is a good workplace.

If you have talented and motivated people, I agree they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.

But they need somebody around to slack off as well. Short breaks in between work are important too. Spending time with others, who are also taking a break, is always better than spending time on YouTube, or Facebook.

Companies like Basecamp, GitLab, HelpScout are great, and they have indeed nailed the remote culture. But it will be hard for somebody like Pixar to pull it off. They are in a different kind of business altogether. Also, I think when you’ve grown enough and have gotten big, it becomes a bit hard to stay completely remote.

I like a workplace where people work together, but use passive and asynchronous means of communication primarily. If needed, then only do they engage in face-to-face communication. In my office, a bulk of things happen through GitLab, few through chat, and others face-to-face.

A healthy workplace environment is more important than a no-workplace environment.

Encounters with other employees are important to build a healthy work environment. I’m not against solitude. But I’m against constant group-engagements. We all need some alone time, and we all need some people time. Let me explain.

A Thing About Solitude

Let me talk a bit about solitude.

What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, it’s only when we are alone that we can engage in Deliberate Practice, which some argue might be the key to exceptional achievement. When we practice deliberately, we identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of our reach, we strive to upgrade our performance, monitor our progress, and revise accordingly.

Deliberate practice always trumps simple practice.

Any practice session that falls short of this standard is not only less useful but counterproductive. If you are a budding artist, and you practice your wrong sense of proportions daily while drawing, it will only reinforce the existing cognitive mechanism instead of improving it.

Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally.

In 2000, Reebok consolidated 1,250 employees in their new headquarters in Canton, Massachusetts. The managers assumed that their shoe designers would want office space with plenty of access to each other so they could brainstorm. But when they consulted with the shoe designers themselves, they understood that what they actually needed was peace and quiet so they could concentrate.

Research also shows that open-plan offices force you to multitask all the time. There are people all around you, and either you overhear something and want to Google it while coding, or someone drops a very small request which “will take only a minute” of your time.

What looks like multitasking really is switching back and forth between multiple tasks.

Multitasking is a myth. The brain is incapable of paying attention to two things simultaneously. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks. It reduces productivity, and only increases mistakes.

Solitude is important, but I can’t work alone. I might reach the office early to get myself into the groove before others come in, but I can’t work alone all day long.

We Need Healthy Distractions Too

We are all social. We can’t work in solitude all our life.

A café can work as an office sometimes because it has specific attributes that are absent from many workplaces. It is social, yet its casual, come-and-go-as-you-please nature can make us free from many unwelcome entanglements.

The best part is I don’t have to say hello, or goodbye to anybody, and still not be rude.

We are all social. We can’t work in solitude all our life.

In a café, we can toggle back and forth between observer and social actor as much as we want. We can also tweak our environment. Each day we can choose the location of our tables — in the centre of the room or along the perimeter. And we have the option to leave whenever we want some peace and quiet time.

That’s why many writers, artists and coders work from various cafés around the town. It brings variety to their environment, gets them to work around the town, and as we all know, new environments and experiences keep the creative juices flowing.


I think ideal workplace lies somewhere between complete solitude (no encounters) and open-plan workplaces (forced encounters).

In an ideal workplace, we create settings in which people are free to circulate in a shifting kaleidoscope of interactions and to disappear into their private workspaces when they want to focus or simply be alone.

An ideal workplace has both the attributes of working from home (in solitude and distraction free) and working from a café (with healthy distractions).

There is a big difference between forced and casual encounters.

Some companies are starting to understand the value of silence and solitude, and are creating flexible open plans that offer a mix of solo workspaces, quiet zones, casual meeting areas, cafés, reading rooms, and places where people can chat casually without interrupting others’ workflow.

Ed Catmull writes in Creativity, Inc.:

“Everything about the place was designed to encourage people to mingle, meet, and communicate, to support our filmmaking by enhancing our ability to work together.

“…This all resulted in cross-traffic — people encountered each other all day long, inadvertently, which meant a better flow of communication and increased the possibility of chance encounters. You felt the energy in the building.”

Personally, I feel it is better to have a seat mate who just sits and does his work than having no seat-mate at all. As long as there are no prying eyes, sitting together is not at all a problem.

An ideal workplace is where you sit together at work, but you don’t peek at what others are doing. Just like in a café, saying “Hello”, or “Goodbye” is not the norm. But you don’t mind if someone is a big greeter. Sure, you discuss ideas now and then, or share a joke or two, but you don’t go on gossiping without an end. You surely do have a chat with others occasionally and have the ability to share a piece of a pie and a brainwave with colleagues — who don’t mind a bit when you disappear into your seat in the middle of the conversation to get some real work done.

Thanks to Jahnvi Mudgal

Abhishek Chakraborty

Written by

I write ‘Sunday Wisdom’, a weekly newsletter on life and strategy: https://coffeeandjunk.com/newsletter

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