The image of legions of headphone-wearing employees sitting silently at their workstations, oblivious to the flesh-and-blood community around them but actively engaged with a virtual world, seems like a dystopian future envisioned in movies like Minority Report. But that future is here. A Wall Street Journal piece on the "officeless office" had a sidebar with six new rules for office etiquette which included #1, no sneaking up; #5, limit chit-chat; and #6 use headphones. That may increase a certain kind of productivity, but at what cost?

Management professors Sigal Barsade at Wharton and Hakan Ozcelik at Cal State Sacramento are among the pioneers in studying how employee isolation correlates with organizational outcomes. In a recent study, they found "because they feel more estranged and less connected to coworkers, lonelier employees will be more likely to experience a lack of belongingness at work, thus decreasing their affective commitment to their organizations." Something to think about before you decide to limit social chit-chat or put those headphones back on.

Bread clips as power cord labels. Doesn't get much simpler or clever...er. Unplggd also suggests using them to label your cords at both ends so you don't have to do the 'tug test'. You know, when you tug on the cord to see which one reacts at the other end?

Airbnb, one of the web’s fastest growing and most talked about companies, recently moved into its new San Francisco-based offices. Located in Potrero Hill, the space was designed by Michael Garcia and Farid Tamjidi of Garcia-Tamjidi.

The company recently made made the decision to design and move into the space to accommodate its growing number of employees, which now numbers 100+ in the SF office. Beyond simply increasing square-footage to 25,000 , which Airbnb fit out using wonderful Vitra furniture, they worked to bring some of their service in to the space by designing some of their meeting spaces after rooms from a few Airbnb listings.  Berlin, Hong Kong, NYC, and Aptos.

One of the bonus services that the headquarters boasts is a full-time chef, which of course helps the company provide on-site meals for staff. Whether or not those meals are free is another question, but we’ve seen several companies try this out as a way to foster community among employees while keeping them at work thereby adding to productivity.

Sit-Stand Workstations
We have tested computer use when sitting and standing in different ways (see EHAW). The problem with standing is that when you raise desk height for keyboard/mouse use you need to also raise screen height above the desk or you get neck flexion. Also, for standing computer work the computer fixes the person’s posture there is greater wrist extension and pretty soon people end up leaning which also compromises their wrist posture, thereby increasing the risks of a musculoskeletal disorder like carpal tunnel syndrome.
 
In our field studies of sit-stand workstations we have found little evidence of widespread benefits and users only stand for very short-periods (15 minutes or less total per day). Other studies have found that the use of sit-stand stations rapidly declines so that after 1 month a majority of people are sitting all the time.
 
Others have proposed a treadmill workstation or a bicycle workstation. Both of these have been tested and shown to decrease computer work performance (typing and mousing slows down and significantly more mistakes are made).
 
Sit-stand workstations are expensive and generally ineffective in addressing the issues to hand.
 
The bottom line:
Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes.  Simply standing is insufficient. Movement is important to get blood circulation through the muscles. Research shows that you don’t need to do vigorous exercise (e.g. jumping jacks) to get the benefits, just walking around is sufficient. So build in a pattern of creating greater movement variety in the workplace (e.g. walk to a printer, water fountain, stand for a meeting, take the stairs, walk around the floor, park a bit further away from the building each day).
 
So the key is to build movement variety into the normal workday.

When you try to download .docx (Word 2007) files from the Internet, does Internet Explorer want to rename them to .zip files? If you’re looking for an easy fix, stop banging your head against the wall, it’s not you. It’s the server. You should contact the webmaster and ask him or her to add the Office 2007 mime types to the server’s configuration. With Apache running on linux, this is typically in the file /etc/mime.types. Ask them to add

application/vnd.openxmlformats docx pptx xlsx
to that file, and then restart Apache. If you’re testing it out on one of your own servers, you’ll probably need to close and restart your browser, too.