A theme in my coaching practice is leaders' profound ambivalence regarding open offices. On the one hand, open space is easily reconfigurable, a key advantage for rapidly growing organizations; it can be less expensive to lease, allowing a company to obtain more space at a preferable location while containing costs; and it's consistent with our stereotypes of modern working environments, which can be useful when competing for talent in tight labor markets.
On the other hand, ample research over the past decade makes clear that open offices can have a substantial negative impact on employees' sense of well-being, relationships, and productivity. It's worth exploring these findings at some length to determine whether your organization should continue to accept these trade-offs. First, open offices increase distraction and undermine cooperation as a result:
Negative effects of acoustic environment increased significantly, including increased distraction, reduced privacy, increased concentration difficulties and increased use of coping strategies. Self-rated loss of work performance because of noise doubled. Cognitively demanding work and phone conversations were most distracted by noise. The benefits that are often associated with open-plan offices did not appear: cooperation became less pleasant and direct and information flow did not change... The results suggest that the open-plan office is not recommended for professional workers. [1]
Potential improvements in ease of interaction can be offset by increased noise and less privacy:
Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects...particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues [i.e. the physical distance we need to maintain between ourselves and others in order to feel comfortable.] Benefits of enhanced ‘ease of interaction’ were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration. [2]
Open spaces help with creative problem-solving and information exchange by fostering brief, problem-oriented communications. Open spaces also promote transparency, so employees have greater access to coworkers’ expertise. But open office space is a double-edged sword. What’s happening is you have reduced privacy. That triggers certain kinds of behaviors among employees that are not always beneficial for building relationships...
This whole trend toward open space and bringing down barriers really ignores individual preferences, work complexities, close interpersonal relationships, and employee well-being. You want to offer employees the ability to adapt space to their needs and preferences, to mitigate some of the negative effects of the design features of open space plans. [3]
And the diminished privacy in turn lowers satisfaction with ease of interaction and can actually discourage face-to-face communication and increase reliance on virtual channels:
The key finding relates to whether the costs of lost privacy were outweighed for open-plan office workers by the benefits of ease of communication. There is in fact past field research to suggest that open-plan offices can discourage communication between colleagues due to lack of privacy. Consistent with this, there was a trend in the current study for workers in private offices to be more satisfied with ease of interaction than open-plan workers. Moreover, analysis showed that scores on ease of interaction did not offset open-plan workers’ dissatisfaction with noise and privacy issues in terms of their overall satisfaction with their workspace. [4]
We empirically examined--using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers--the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70 percent) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. [5]
The results were stark: after the shift to an open-plan office space, the participants spent 73 percent less time in face-to-face interactions, while their use of email and instant messenger shot up by 67 percent and 75 percent respectively. [6]
Overall, employees in open offices are unhappier and feel less productive:
The results of the study indicate that employees' perception of health, work environment and performance decreased during a 12 month period following relocation from individual offices to open-plan offices. [7]
Our systematic review found that, compared with individual offices, shared or open-plan office space is not beneficial to employees' health, with consistent findings of deleterious effects on staff health, well-being and productivity. Our findings are also consistent with those of earlier reviews... Decisions about workplace design should include weighing the short-term financial benefits of open-plan or shared workspaces against the significant harms, including increased sickness absence, lower job satisfaction and productivity, and possible threats to recruitment and retention of staff. [8]
So what can be done? I'm well aware that open offices aren't going away anytime soon--the advantages noted at the outset are too economically significant to ignore. But acknowledging and understanding the many disadvantages can allow leaders and employees to compensate for them in a number of ways:
Legitimize Privacy and Unavailability
In a physical environment that minimizes privacy and creates the perception that people are always available, organizations must establish a culture that enables people to counteract these effects of open offices. This can take both tangible and virtual forms, ranging from not interrupting people who have signaled a need for privacy (e.g. via headphones), to honoring blocked time on people's calendars, to tolerating longer response times via email and messaging tools. (The role of messaging in heightening distraction and undermining focus is a topic that merits further discussion, but for now I'll simply note that these tools--and our understanding of how to use them effectively--are still in their infancy.) The key is that these practices must be commonly understood and respected, and while leaders can't simply impose such norms, they can foster an environment that encourages their adoption--or, alternatively, that insures their failure. [9]
Create Temporary Refuges
This entails occupying shared spaces and transforming them into private spaces for a period of time, as well as leaving company property in order to obtain private space elsewhere. These options can be employed on an ad hoc basis, but they can also be pursued more systematically--for example, I've had clients who made a standing reservation in a company conference room every day at 4:30pm, others who worked from home one morning a week, and still others who claimed a private office during fundraising only to relinquish it after the round was closed. Note that these alternatives don't eliminate the need for a culture that legitimizes privacy and the norms to enforce it, and the absence of such a culture will render them less useful.
Capitalize on Office Moves
A trend I've observed in my practice is that when a company has outgrown its current space and needs to relocate, the organization takes advantage of this opportunity to select a new space that includes a larger number of private offices. This, of course, raises difficult questions of fairness and equity: Whose work merits privacy, and who must remain subject to the distractions of the open office? Is office space merely another form of compensation--in which case we expect people in roles that command higher salaries to also enjoy greater access to privacy? Or is office space an environmental condition, like sufficient lighting and a comfortable temperature--in which case we expect colleagues in the same professional setting to share more equitably? While contemporary business culture often rewards symbolic displays of egalitarianism, I think it's important to acknowledge that in organizational life 1) everyone wants the leader's attention, and 2) no one cares how much it costs the leader. There's no simple solution, and the leaders I've worked with who've pursued or merely considered this option have struggled mightily with these challenges.
Footnotes
[1] Effects of acoustic environment on work in private office rooms and open-plan offices--longitudinal study during relocation (A. Kaarlela-Tuomaala et al, Ergonomics, November 2009)
[2] Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices (Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear, Journal of Environmental Psychology, December 2013)
[3] The supposed benefits of open-plan offices do not outweigh the costs (Christian Jarrett, British Psychological Society Research Digest, August 2013, a discussion of the two papers above)
[4] Open Office Space Trend May Be Hurting Relationships (Academy of Management Insights, a discussion of the paper below)
[5] The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration (Ethan Bernstein and Stephan Turban, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, May 2018)
[6] Open-plan offices drive down face-to-face interactions and increase use of email (Christian Jarrett, British Psychological Society Research Digest, July 2018, a discussion of the paper above)
[7] Work environment perceptions following relocation to open-plan offices: A twelve-month longitudinal study (J. Bergström et al, Work, January 2015)
[8] Office design and health: a systematic review (A. Richardson et al, New Zealand Medical Journal, December 2017)
[9] For more on norms and organizational culture, see Rules Aren't Norms (On Better Meeting Hygiene)
More on Open Offices
Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace. (Lindsey Kaufman, The Washington Post, 2014)
New Proof the Open Office Concept is Ineffective (Nate Swanner, Dice, 2018)
The Open Office Is Dead. Now What? (John Edwards, Information Week, 2019)
Myths that refuse to die--open office plans (Alaistair Creelman, The Corridor of Uncertainty, 2019)
The Implications of Working Without an Office (Ethan Bernstein, Hayley Blunden, Andrew Brodsky, Wonbin Sohn and Ben Waber, Harvard Business Review, 2020)
Related Posts of Mine
Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care
How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)
Photo by Ben Seidelman.
