| None taken. It probably depends on the marketing department. There is a lot of brainstorming and back-and-forth, but I personally need my own space to brainstorm. A lot of my conversations go like this: Person A: Hey, have you decided what you want to do with [x] thing? Person B: No, I was thinking [y], but I got stuck with [z]. Person A: That makes sense, what happens if we do [w]? Person B: That's a good idea, but [v] might be a problem. I'll think about it and get back to you. Person B sits down and works for a few more hours If you have individual offices, that conversation might take ten minutes, and it only occupies 20 man-minutes. If you have an open-office with your entire marketing department, the conversation will probably take a full-man hour between all the people who get distracted and the other people who need to chime in. Honestly, I think easy collaboration works better for programming/IT than it does for sales/marketing/communication, because the problems in IT are more concrete. So I think you are more likely to be able to chime in with a useful comment when the problem is "I'm getting this weird error" than when the problem is "does this have the tone we are looking for?" In both cases, I think open offices are terrible. 2-3 people per office seems about right to me. |