Cubicles: The great mistake
Interesting piece from Fortune on the history of cubicles, the bane of my postal life. (Yes, I’m one of those ‘overhead’ employees who doesn’t touch the mail, and is stored in a cubicle during my workday).
And I liked this quote on telecommuting from Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA): “There is nothing magic in strapping ourselves into a metal box every day only to drive to an office where we sit behind a desk working on a computer.” Amen. Especially when the “office” is a cubicle. (Hey- you think Wolf could get telecommuting added to the Postal Reform bill?)
March 16th, 2006 16:07
A major objection you could make to the Wolf quote, I think, is that telecommuting is an entree to a form of ‘time theft’ as employers would seek to effectively put employees on call all the time. The question is whether working in PJs and avoiding commuting is sufficient compensation for that. (Could be if you had a lot of Northern VA traffic to fight, less obviously so in less congested parts of the world.) A lot of notionally telecommuting-friendly jobs do also benefit somewhat from face-to-face contact with colleagues.
That said, I would not suggest that the *option* of telecommuting isn’t valuable, or that I have any love for cubicles.
March 16th, 2006 18:49
That is a real problem with tele-commuting from home, no doubt about it, although there are many days that I’d be happy to run the risk. But I’d settle for the option to work at another postal location (we have quite a few last time I looked!), hopefully one with real furniture.
The face to face communications part is also a consideration, but I think that a lot of the analytical types like myself would also benefit greatly from being in a location with actual mail, rather than in an office tower or suburban office park.
March 17th, 2006 11:30
From what I’ve seen — at USPS HQ, which is cubicle city apart from upper managers’ offices, and various P&D facilities, which seem to use relatively cramped bullpen arrangements for most supervisory staff — ‘real furniture’ is relatively scarce in the organization…
There definitely is no substitute for being around actual mail, vs. data representing the mail, every once in a while.