Think about an open office. The lights are all on, some are in conference rooms, some are on vacation or sick and there is a general amount of distractions from activity. Smaller offices allow more concentration and are significantly more energy efficient in daily operation.

I need to correct your thinking here. The problem in building design in the US is that it is cheaper to heat and cool blowing air. This thinking is faulty when it comes to people so the better solution is to heat and cool a person. If you walk outside on a sunny cold winter day against a southern exposure you want to take off your coat. The reason is because of radiant heating effect. The sun is heating objects directly, which include yourself. The air you breathe is actually colder, but naturally your body finds this rather nice.

For Phoenix, probably you would benefit from radiant ceiling panels. Say goodbye to cold air blowing on your neck.

The second part of this solution in the workplace is not recirculating stale office air. With radiant cooling and heating the requirements for blowing air is reduced. Now you just bring in smaller amounts of fresh air.

This is a nice solution, especially when you consider the person with the flu like symptoms next to you now has that air recirculated and distributed throughout your office.

Of course radiant heat and cool costs more to install, but is more efficient to run. And, for most office spaces the building owner doesn’t pay the electrical bill. Therefore, they put in the cheaper first cost air based system and let the tenants worry about the monthly electrical bill.

However, I have some other workplace complaints I haven’t seen here.

1) Cubicles vs. bullpens vs. offices. I’d be much happier with an office, I’d be OK with a cubicle, but a bullpen or open-plan office is a no-go. For some strange reason, they seem to be making a huge comeback however. Employers think that workers need to “collaborate” instead of actually concentrate and get work done.

2) Bathrooms. Make sure the building you rent has enough of them, and they’re located conveniently. The morons who designed my building put in only one set of bathrooms for our entire floor, which has over 200 people on it (and is partly vacant, it’ll be worse if the remaining spaces are leased). It’s worse in many companies where most of the employees are male. And it sucks having to walk to one end of the building every time I need to go.

3) Parking. For some strange reason, our building has a huge parking garage, but it’s mostly empty, and most of the employees are required to park on the top deck (which is bad because your car gets really hot in the 115-degree heat in Phoenix). The covered spaces below are all reserved; I’m not sure for whom, because they’re always empty, but we’re not allowed to park there.

4) Private areas, lounges, etc. Employees need a place to go to get away from everyone and relax for a few minutes. No, a “break room” with bright, bright lights and a TV blaring CNN all day is not relaxing. Also make sure there’s lots of conference rooms.