Open Offices Make You Less Open (calnewport.com)

Why do companies deploy open office layouts? A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence. Cal Newport: As I learned in a fascinating new study, published earlier this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, there was good reason to believe that this might be true. As the study's authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, note" [T]he notion that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction -- driving the formation of social ties and therefore information exchange and collaboration -- is one of the most robust findings in sociology."

But when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed. Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue. Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed.

Here's a summary of what they found: Contrary to what's predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day. At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc'd 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%.

Comments

No shit Sherlock

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking duh - every conversation had in the open air adds to the background noise. Not to mention everyone else listening in.

I'm happy these guys studied this. Hopefully the MBAs that climbed up their own asses to strip away our offices will read a copy and choke on it.

Re:No shit Sherlock

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, crappy management has grounds to pick on people for talking and also the ability to bully someone to use the open office as a playground

Re: No shit Sherlock

[c6gunner]

Also: open office is cheaper!

Cheaper than Microsoft Office, sure, but LibreOffice is the same price and way better.

Simple

[MikeRT]

Management often operates on perception.

If they aren't predisposed to give you the benefit of the doubt, they'll see chatting as goofing off.

That happened to me in an open office layout. Management saw most of my conversations as distracting others and was a key reason why I was let go.

Then it turned out that I knew a lot about what each group was doing and could discuss issues, direction, etc. with all of them.

Oh well.

Re:Simple

[alvinrod]

If management can't tell who's actually contributing work and who's screwing around and wasting everyone else's time, then it's management that needs to go. You can't expect to get good results if you don't have a useful way of measuring good results. Once most teams get large enough there's probably one person that's contributing several times the value of everyone else in the group. If management can't tell who that person is, they should be the one's being let go.

Re:Simple

[joe_frisch]

An open office doesn't even help that problem. Just because someone is staring at a screen full of code or engineering diagrams doesn't mean that they are actually being productive. Management needs to be competent enough to understand how well their employees are doing - and that requires technical expertise, and is sometimes really quite difficult.

It's about efficiency and noise management

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in an open office. A major consideration is noise - you have lots of people in a large room,
all trying to get work done. They need some modicum of silence. IMs and e-mails are quieter than
face-to-face communication - and trying to keep things quiet is something you learn quickly.

Electronic communications also do not require that you get up from your desk and find a meeting room - that's a (small) time suck and use of a scarce resource.

There may also be an element of satisfying our need for socialization by simple proximity, reducing the need for F2F meetings whose sole (unstated) purpose is to socialize. Get what you want more quickly via IM than via (much slower) personal contact.

There may be an assumption here that more face to face interaction is good, but I think that assumption is actually false. *Some* F2F interaction is helpful either to communicate complex ideas or to develop a sense of teamwork, but *more* F2F interaction just means spending all day in meetings and accomplishing nothing.

Well duh!

[Gravis Zero]

The obvious solution is to switch to Libre Offices. ;)

Re:Well duh!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The obvious solution is to switch to Libre Offices. ;)

The obvious solution is to switch to Home Offices. ;)

My employer went further than Open Offices . . . we went to "Flex Offices" or "E-Places". You get a closet locker and a Rimowa Rollboy Trolley. And there is a big room with empty desks . . . with less desks than employees. Folks were expected to work at customer sites or at their home whenever possible. In the office, each morning there is a Enterprise Edition game of "Musical Chairs" (or Reise nach Jerusalem for the German-speaking folks). Since the desks don't belong to anyone personally, you are not allowed to leave any personal belongings on the desk overnight. No awards or personal pictures on the walls either.

So . . . a helluva lot of folks just decided to work from home.

Now the fad wind direction has changed, and senior management wants to encourage folks to come into the office again. Under the current conditions in the office . . . not too many folks want to do that . . . and the way the company arranged the deal . . . they can't force us to either.

Want to get us back . . . ? Offer us a better place to work . . . it's as simple as that.

Don't be daft.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a pretext, and there is a reason. The reason is that they're cheaper.

It saves money on real estate

[rsilvergun]

that's the reason to have it. Period. I hate living in a world were we're constantly pretending bad things aren't bad things. Like how not having guaranteed access to medical care is somehow freedom. Or how a 90 minute commute brutal traffic is 'me time'.

Re:It saves money on real estate

[OpenSourced]

That. The motivation is putting more people in less space. The rest is marketing spin on the idea so it doesn't look so bad.

Re:It saves money on real estate

[EvilSS]

Ding Ding Ding! I had a customer move buildings. No hires/fires but they went from basically every one had offices or a team room to all open office. They reduced their square footage requirements by over 35%. We had another that went through a buyout and workforce "rationalization". They went from about a dozen buildings down to one. It was so bad the city fire marshal and city engineers stepped in to tell the new owners they couldn't put as many people as they wanted on each floor.

It's rude to talk in an open office

[reanjr]

Isn't this obvious? Anyone talking to someone face-to-face in an open office is being rude to everyone in the room. So no longer do you pop into someone's office and chat, but are instead formed to setup a meeting or distract a dozen other people.

Concentration is important too...

[lenski]

Agreed on the distractions.

My preferred arrangement is 2-4 person spaces in which the office-mates have a shared project interest and a shared interest in concentration.

Why do companies deploy open offices?

[QuietLagoon]

Because they are cheaper. Period. Every other reason is an after-the-fact attempt at rationalizing the open office concept. The open office concept had its root in cubicles. Cubicles were sold to companies because, as the cubicle salesreps put it, they are cheaper. To get around the ambient noise from co-workers, more ambient noise was introduced, i.e., white-noise from speakers in the ceiling to mask the noise of your co-workers.

.
With open offices, you don't even have the sound-absorbing walls of a cubicle to help reduce the noise of co-workers, so everyone tends to wear [noise-cancelling] headphones, isolating themselves from their co-workers.

Open surveillance, annoyance, and zero-trust

[fyngyrz]

Open office layouts make you feel like you're under the eye all the time.

Because you are.

It means that you're not trusted to manage your own time and space, that you're not worth your own space (much less a damned window), that you're subject to all manner of extraneous noise, that your security is definitely more of an issue to the point of what you are willing to leave on your desk changes...

Only fucking idiots running on ivory tower thinking and nothing else at all would want to build an open office environment.

...oh, wait.

Companies are full of those.

Sorry, my bad.

Re:Open surveillance, annoyance, and zero-trust

[Anonymous Coward]

I once asked why we are using open office when all the studies say we should not (in addition that it increases mistakes, lowers happiness it also takes as much space as office with individual rooms, because you need more meeting rooms etc). Answer was that why would all the other companies use it if it was not worth it. I could not argue with that, because if are ready to abandon science and do what everyone else are doing, it is religion, and from experience I know that debating with religious people is just a waste of time.

Re:Open surveillance, annoyance, and zero-trust

[Rick Schumann]

Yep. People naturally like privacy. Now someone might point out that so-called 'social media' flies in the face of that statement, but the Internet gives people a false sense of privacy such that their privacy can be totally violated (data collection, surveillance of activities, profiling, etc) and they don't notice it because it's not someone right in their face with a camera and a microphone observing them, even if the violation of privacy is worse. But having people literally in your face all day long at work? Screw that, nobody likes it, and some people put up literally opaque barriers to regain some privacy. If you have ADD/ADHD, so-called 'open office' layouts would drive you batty, you'd never be able to concentrate on anything, ever. It's stupidity and I just don't understand why anyone would think this would improve productivity.

How much is abou status?

[joe_frisch]

Has the office become a status symbol like the old Mahogany Row and executive restroom? Is there an active desire to put lower level workers in unpleasant conditions to make management feel better about themselves?

There are lots of reasons to think that open offices are less efficient. Often the workers are highly paid so the loss in efficiency clearly outweighs the cost of extra offices. Maybe its an incorrect money optimization but it seems obviously wrong. It doesn't take a lot of loss of efficiency in an employee who is costing $150/hour to balance the extra cost of a small office.

Another, equally damning explanation is that open offices "look" nice and modern. It seems likely that the insanely expensive Apple headquarters building (clearly not cost optimized!) is mostly open offices for improved visual appeal, with no regard to efficiency.

It's kind of bullshit

[OrangeTide]

Office workers in the 19th and most of the 20th century sat in a large room at a desk without walls. And it was managers who got their own office. If you were senior but not a manager you would share an office. Even then employees complains when coworkers chatted near their desk too frequently.

In the practical world ....

[petes_PoV]

A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence

Nonsense.

You can just pack more people in a given space and it's easier for supervisors to check if people are goofing around, sleeping on the job or just plain AWOL.