A reader writes:
This is a low-stakes question, but I’m curious if anyone else is bothered by open-office floor plans (or otherwise very visible work spaces) and if so, any tips on how to deal with feeling strangely “on display” at all times?
I work a non-customer-facing office job. I haven’t worked a true customer service job since I worked restaurant jobs in college, and I remember feeling terribly drained at the end of a shift with sore facial muscles from smiling all day at strangers. (I say that just to say I don’t know how people do it; customer service workers have my utmost respect!)
More recently, at my last job my desk happened to be in the middle of a large room and visible via an interior window to a busy hallway, and also visible to another hallway behind me. We had no break room so I’d eat at my desk and had many moments where I’d be stuffing my face while accidently making eye contact with those walking by. It wasn’t just the eating that was awkward — I’d really prefer to blow my nose (allergies, yay), or make a weird face at my computer on occasion, or stand up for a quick stretch without an audience of people walking by and sometimes stopping to stare or ask me what I’m doing. I had a micromanaging boss then who pressured me to not eat at my desk and to look professional at all times (aka, always smiling) since I was so visible — seems easy for her to say when she had an office with a door, and my job was not a front desk manager or receptionist so I wasn’t expecting to be “on” in that way, it was just the way the room was set up. I asked to move desks because I found the pressure to smile 24/7 to be too distracting but was brushed off. It was a strange environment, mostly because of my boss’s smiling thing and also partly because I personally didn’t love working inside a fishbowl.
Now the concept of highly visible workspaces has become a fascination of mine. I’m at a new job and have a cubicle so it’s less of an issue (though I still feel a little awkward if I need a stretch break). My new colleagues with offices have fully glass doors/walls. (It is not at all soundproof but that’s a different issue.) Is it only me that would feel uncomfortable and distracted in a highly visible office? How do people deal? Maybe it does work well for some people?
It is definitely not only you! Loads of people dislike highly visible workspaces.
Generally, people do adjust at least to some degree, and there are a lot of of workplaces where visibility and lack of privacy is built into the model (think, for example, of newsrooms, call centers, factories, etc.). Usually people function by mentally assuming a sort of cloak of invisibility around some activities, or just get used to it and don’t think about it much after a while. But some people don’t adjust and are never quite comfortable with it.
Sometimes there are physical changes you can make to your work area that will ameliorate it a bit, like tweaking the direction your computer faces, strategically blocking passer-bys’ view with some files, or agreeing with your coworkers on a “do not disturb” signal.
But your set-up was made worse for two reasons: the lack of any break room, so you had to do everything at your desk, and the smile-obsessed boss. Either of those would make the situation worse, but the boss in particular was ridiculous. Expecting someone to smile through the entire workday (and not just when, for example, a client approaches them) is bizarre and out of touch with the reality of human faces and displayed some really weird priorities.
