Office Madness – The Winner Takes It All

OfficeMadnessFinals

Your votes are in and the winner of the 2016 Office Madness competition is No Privacy! While I was personally rooting for Microwaved Fish, it’s no surprise that the biggest office annoyance deals with the constant struggle between collaboration and concentration. Our own Barclay Pollak wrote about both the benefits and pitfalls of an open office environment and how that’s increased the demand for flexible work environments:

Do you know why I enjoy working from home or remotely? I’m not confined to my cube! Everyday 60 percent of Americans go to work and spend eight hours in a box. It shouldn’t come as a big shock that 93 percent of workers despise cubicles according to Yahoo! Finance. Nikal Saval, author of the book “Cubed” says the cubicle, “connotes dread, hatred, the terrible white collar life.”

Of course, the solution to the No Privacy annoyance isn’t just to give everyone an office or enable them to work from home. That’s not practical. But we can work toward redesigning the workplace itself:

We can redefine remote work. It doesn’t have to mean working from across town, sometimes it just means the ability to work from across the office. With VoIP technology, powerful laptops, and high-speed internet, we’re not tethered to our desks anymore. We’re high-tech hobos, who can, and should, pick up and move to whatever space is most conducive to the kind of work we’re trying to accomplish at that moment. Designing our workspaces around that kind of flexibility is a key element of employee satisfaction and productivity.

And who knows, as the workplace of the future becomes the workplace of today, our biggest office annoyance of 2017 may just be Microwaved Fish after all!

About Kris Prusynski

Kris works on the Commercial Marketing team at TDS Telecom and helps TDS achieve their online objectives through digital marketing and website optimization. She has worked in the digital marketing space for over 15 years, in product categories as diverse as shoes, banking, beds and pig farming supplies (really!). Kris has both undergraduate degrees and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and therefore bleeds Badger red. She’s a veteran blogger on topics ranging from digital marketing to Wisconsin fish frys to the sweet necessity of ugly office sweaters. Nowadays, you’re more likely to find her on Twitter or Google+ trying to decipher the mysteries of A Song of Ice and Fire. In her spare time, you can find Kris kayaking, hanging out at the dog park, or thinking about lawn care.

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  1. Office Madness 2017 | TDS Business - March 13, 2017

    […] year, “No privacy!” won the whole tournament by a convincing margin. The people spoke, and they decided on this one, […]

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