How to best design our next office?

I work at a company that employs roughly 50 people. Most of them are software engineers. We grew from 3 people to 50 in 3 years. We designed a new office and moved into it a few months ago.

Here are some of the things we did:

- Desks are all in rooms with at most 10 desks in it. Most rooms are smaller and have ~5 desks in them. All these rooms are completely sealed off with sound proofed walls. The temperature can be controlled in each room.

- Throughout the office there are so called phone booths. Relatively small booths, good for quick calls. A single booth fits two people. All booths are completely sound proof. You could yell in there and nobody would hear you.

- Flooring is solid. Rolling your chair around or walking around does not produce a lot of noise.

- Water coolers everywhere. You're not far from a glass of cold (mineral) water.

- Lots of natural light. All windows are from the ceiling to the floor and all the rooms with desks are at these big windows.

There are some pictures here: https://www.facebook.com/todorcosminstudio/posts/24735875227...

The pictures don't show the working spaces very well, just the communal spaces that are all separated from where people have their desks.

In addition to other suggestions, give employees a $400 headphone credit to get headphones of their choice. Have a few noise canceling options on hand if they don't have a specific preference.

A benefit like this is part of the office design. Every company I've worked at that's had an open office plan had this kind of benefit as standard for all employees.

I really enjoyed our dev room. It was an open floor plan but there were only 6 of us and we pair programmed all the time. The sales floor was an open floor plan and there were about 25 people in there, and it felt like chaos to me. I'm not sure what everyone else wants, but I wouldn't want a large open floor plan, and I wouldn't want a bunch of cubicles. Maybe there are modular options now? Japanese shoji screens maybe. I recognize the silliness but I think there's some possibilities here.

If you like the rapid feedback and collaboration, have you thought about ways to encourage that without having an open office? Maybe have some collaboration work zones, some cubicle pits, and a really attractive kitchen area with free snacks/drinks that makes people want to hang out sometimes. Perhaps let everyone have a dedicated desk, but lots of flexibility to work in different parts of the office. I've heard Valve desks are all on wheels so people can move them anywhere they want.

It may help others answer better if they know how many people in the company and what departments are going into this office.

Rapidity of feedback for some means constant interruptions for others.

Ideally you would want a way for engineers to have private spaces but also have team rooms. That takes a lot of floor space so open-ish cubes surrounding an open space closed off from other spaces is a likely solution.

Attempt at ascii design:

  -------------
  | C | C | C |
  |           |
  |   open    Door
  |           |
  | C | C | C |
  -------------

Open space could have a whiteboard wall, table, comfy chairs. The team could determine quiet times, lunches, etc. as they want. Some people might want to not be in a room all day, provide other open spots for people to use. Planning for the space might mean small, medium and large versions of "team rooms" and large ones could be for large teams or just conference space.

i found out that the best possible layout i have ever worked on is a large corridor in the middle, with closed offices for each squad on both sides ( meaning mini-open-offices per squad ) isolated from each other. The offices are separated from the corridor by a glass wall and glass door. Each squad work around a large table ( for 8 to 10 people ), with wall to wall whiteboards ( the walls between offices ) and a wide screen TV for presentations.

Cubes with walls that absorb noise.

The walls should be above your head when standing, so a sit-stand desk isn't noticeable to neighbors (let alone stare at them).

sit-stand desks.

Best practice is hiring an architect...but acoustic drop down ceiling tiles and carpet help.

we can do it pitfall