Humane Offices: SAS

Located outside Raleigh, North Carolina, analytics software maker SAS is the largest privately owned software company in the world.





SAS is consistently ranked as one of the best places to work in the United States and is well known for its workplace culture and world-class employee benefits. One particular aspect of its culture might stand out to readers of this blog.

One example of employee-centeredness can be found in the fact that each employee has his or her own office. There are no cubicles. While SAS Institute describes this as a way to maximize productivity, it also fits in with the operating principle for [CEO] Jim Goodnight: that’s how he would like it were he “just” an employee.  - The Wharton Work/Life Roundtable

Everyone gets a private office. We're not talking cube farm here, either. These are real offices with doors that can be shut. All of SAS' 13,700 employees are encouraged to be creative and make their work space fun. A SAS senior communication specialist has turned her office into a shrine to Elvis with a velvet Elvis painting and a life-size standup of the King.  - The Huffington Post

SAS has incredibly low employee turnover of 3-5% annually, when the software industry average is 20-25%. If you want to get in the door (and get your own door), apply here.

Humane Offices: Epic Systems

If you’re the kind of person who cares about humane office space, you’ve no doubt heard the vocal opinions of Joel Spolsky and his companies Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow. But I wanted to shine a light on some of the companies that aren’t constantly mentioned when the topic comes up.

Epic Systems, a healthcare software provider, has bucked the open plan trend by giving a private office to every developer in their beautiful campus outside Madison, Wisconsin.

 

At its 385-acre campus, with 1.5 million square feet of space spread across five buildings, Epic Systems Corp. provides private offices for all staff—a choice that is designed to support the focused-work practices and needs of software developers. According to Epic’s own research, this design approach increases productivity by 40 percent.

- HQ

One feature that isn't farm related: A lack of open offices. Cuningham has worked with Epic for more than 19 years, and learned early on that "employees felt they were much more efficient when working in individual offices."

"At first they exclaim that they don’t feel individual offices are necessary. But they all go away saying, ‘Wow, I think they’re onto something.'"

- Fast Company

 

Even more beautiful than the architecture and carefully manicured landscape is this: hallways lined with individual offices and doors that close.

 

Epic Systems is hiring aggressively. If you like what you see, apply here.

Open Plan Alternatives: Gleaming the Cube

In my last post, I urged office planners to ask their people what kind of environment is best for them. One surprising thing they might hear is that people prefer—gasp!—cubicles. Yes, cubicles.

In the hundreds of comments people have written on my various blog posts about office design, a common theme was of people working in open plans who wished they could have their cubicle back.

In fact, I was surprised when an interview I did with Wired regarding my views on office design was boiled down to a statement I made to this regard:

I’ve heard from several people who were incredulous that anyone could prefer a cubicle to an open plan. I believe this attitude may be a kind of extreme reaction to the giant, soulless “cube farm” that some companies employed (and still employ).

But, an open plan can turn into a landscape just as depressing when applied uniformly to a large space.

We can compromise, right? The Library and the Bazaar can coexist. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. And please don’t assume that everyone hates cubicles. It’s no private office, but for many people it beats the hell out of the open plan.

Open Plan Alternatives: Ask Your People

I’ve heard from several people who have the power to make decisions about office space, but feel frustrated that they can’t find practical suggestions on what to do instead of an open plan.

Well, if you’re already open to the idea that open plan offices are not a panacea, but you don’t know what to do instead, here’s a surprisingly straight-forward suggestion: ask the people who work there.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my writings on office design, it’s that people who work in offices have strong opinions about how they’re designed. The only thing that holds them back from expressing their opinions is a sense of learned helplessness that comes from years and years of working in crappy offices and seeing that no one cares about improving the situation.

This point was buried in another post I wrote regarding open plans, but here it is again: No size fits all. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to consider the people who work for you as individuals with different wants and needs, because, well, they are.

I’ll end on a quote from Peopleware, as I often do…

A common element that runs through all the patterns (both ours and Alexander’s) is reliance upon non-replicable formulas. No two people have to have exactly the same work space. … The texture and shape and organization of space are fascinating issues to the people who occupy that space. The space needs to be isomorphic to the work that goes on there. And people at all levels need to leave their mark on the workplace.

Integration Is Communication

Kent Beck wrote a tweet recently that had me nodding my head:

I feel like this is a lesson one only learns while working for a large corporation. At this scope, there’s so much work to be done, and so many groups of people involved, that the most acute pain is always felt at the integration points.

The obvious solution is “better communication.” More meetings, more emails, more documentation, more complicated forms one group fills out to communicate its needs to the others. The cure seems worse than the disease.

What’s the real solution? I’m not sure there is one.

Martin Fowler, Perks, and Remote Work

In my post, Remote Work Denial Is a Bad Look, I argued thusly:

You can think face-to-face, in-person communication is most efficient, and I won't argue with you, but it ultimately doesn't matter as the remote work trend will not be stopped.

Figure out how you're going to make remote work effective for your company and then shout it from the rooftops.

In a recent article, Remote versus Co-located Work, Martin Fowler presents a level-headed take on remote work in which he arrives at roughly the same conclusion:

Most groups of people will be more effective when working co-located due to the richer communications they have.

Despite the fact that I think most teams would be more productive working co-located, you will often get a more effective team by embracing some form of distributed model because it will widen the talent pool of people you can get.

The fact that you can get a better team by supporting a remote working pattern has become increasingly important during my time in the software business and I expect its importance to keep growing. I sense a growing reluctance amongst the best developers to accept the location and commuting disadvantages of single-site work. This is increasingly true as people get more experienced, and thus more valuable. You can either try to ignore this and accept the best people who will relocate for you, or you can explore how to make remote working patterns more effective. I think that organizations that are able to make remote working patterns effective will have a significant and growing competitive advantage.

Remote work is certainly not easy to get right, but it is nevertheless possible, and it represents a very desirable perk. Just as you could easily make the argument that it’s silly for employers to be responsible for the health insurance coverage of the people that work for them, try going out and hiring great people while telling them that you don’t offer health insurance (and good health insurance). How long will it be before companies have a similar difficulty hiring good knowledge workers because they don’t offer the perk of remote work?

The Yacht Metaphor for Software Organizations

I’m big on metaphors, and I’ve always loved Joel Spolsky’s software-organization-as-yacht metaphor:

Think of your development abstraction layer as a big, beautiful yacht with insanely powerful motors. It's impeccably maintained. Gourmet meals are served like clockwork. The staterooms have twice-daily maid service. The navigation maps are always up to date. The GPS and the radar always work and if they break there's a spare below deck. Standing on the bridge, you have programmers who really only think about speed, direction, and whether to have Tuna or Salmon for lunch. Meanwhile a large team of professionals in starched white uniforms tiptoes around quietly below deck, keeping everything running, filling the gas tanks, scraping off barnacles, ironing the napkins for lunch. The support staff knows what to do but they take their cues from a salty old fart who nods ever so slightly in certain directions to coordinate the whole symphony so that the programmers can abstract away everything about the yacht except speed, direction, and what they want for lunch.

Management, in a software company, is primarily responsible for creating abstractions for programmers. We build the yacht, we service the yacht, we are the yacht, but we don't steer the yacht. Everything we do comes down to providing a non-leaky abstraction for the programmers so that they can create great code and that code can get into the hands of customers who benefit from it.