A Report on Bring Your Own Office

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not dedicated to the acquisition of reliable and actionable data, which is why we decided to try it out when our accountants suggested a novel approach to cut costs.  The result was our Bring Your Own Office initiative, an exciting test of a cutting edge idea to reduce the cost of running an organization.  We have been trying it for a month now, and it has saved the GNU Public Dictatorship nearly all of the costs associated with running an office.  Our researchers have been gathering data from the experiment and have been attempting to answer the following questions:

1. What is the savings that can be expected in an organization that decides to go officeless, and how does the number of employees affect the savings?
2. What are the impacts on worker productivity?
3. What are the impacts on communication?
4. What are the impacts on morale?

Our researchers believe they have enough data to give preliminary answers to these questions, so we're reproducing their early answers here.  None of these answers are finalized and they have not yet passed peer review, but we believe it is a good starting point and will help us decide whether to proceed with our experiment.

Answers:

1. The central GPD office cut its facilities budget by 94.6% over the last month.  The remaining 5.4% was still required to rent a small closet with Internet and power access within range of the GNU Public Parking Structure outside of the GPD offices.  There was some investment to bring power and network cables to enough parking stalls to accommodate our workforce, but this investment will be recuperated within a few months.  Smaller GPD offices that participated in the study showed reductions in costs, but the reductions were about 53.2% overall.  In general, it appears that the savings from moving to a BYOO scheme are dependent on the employee count, the cost of the facilities, and the cost of Internet access.  It also appears that some owners of office buildings don't want to run power and network cables to their parking structures, which in at least three cases caused a temporary move for local GPD employees.  Recommendation: you can save money by switching to a BYOO model.  The more employees you have, the more dramatic the savings will be.
2. The central GPD office saw worker productivity figures at or near baseline values, suggesting that worker productivity was not materially affected by having to provide an office.  Most of the local GPD offices that participated in the study showed similar results, but there were several outliers in which productivity declined drastically.  Recommendation: if anything, switching to BYOO brings a decrease in worker productivity.
3. Communication was a difficult property to measure, especially since in an office setting much of the communication that occurs is rather informal in nature.  The fabled "water cooler conversations" are rarely recorded and analyzed.  Our researchers compensated for these problems using a number of adjustments, and determined that formal communication (work-related e-mail or phone conferences) increased by 23% overall (in the central and smaller GPD offices) and that informal work-related communication decreased by 89%.  Informal non-work-related communication decreased by 99%.  Total volume of communication decreased slightly.  Some workers responded that having to leave their air-conditioned vehicle in the middle of summer to talk casually to a coworker was prohibitive.  Recommendation: BYOO decreases informal communication but increases formal communication.
4. Morale is easily measured using the Grubermann scale (developed by the famous Heintz Gruberman III to measure response to advertising campaigns, but easily adapted for this application).  GPD office morale has been consistently measured at 7Y5 +-3 since we started measuring.  Morale at offices that did not choose to go BYOO suffered slightly as a result of feelings of being left behind, but morale at BYOO offices showed a more interesting trend.  In the first few days of the test morale skyrocketed to 9Y8, but subsequently as the summer heat continued dropped to 5T6.  These values are well out of the range of normal variation in morale, and indicate that BYOO significantly affects morale.  Recommendation: BYOO has an initial positive effect on morale as employees become excited about the change, but over time the morale declines significantly.

Given these results, the GPD is stopping its trial run of BYOO.  While we were saving a lot of money, the increased load on our formal communications infrastructure and the drop in morale overshadow the fiscal benefits.  Adding to this a negligible or negative effect on productivity, and the answer is clear: BYOO is not going to work for us right now.

On a side note, we asked our researchers to determine whether moving to a BYOO system while simultaneously moving to a Hawaiian beach would be effective, and they answered that their data were not conclusive, but suggested that morale might continue to improve under those circumstances.  We may have to revisit this idea in the future...