The Promise — and Curse — of Open Offices
By: Stowe Boyd
Tags: Culture, Millennials, Design, Workplace, Open Office

Milllennials working in GREY’s Base Camp — source: GREY New York

The idea of open offices — generally called open plan office space or bürolandschaft (literally, office landscape) — has been around for a long time. Indeed, in the early 1900s many businesses had long rows of desks where clerks, secretaries, or engineers performed their tasks out in the open, under the watchful eyes of their managers. But there was a steady shift toward more privacy in offices, leading to the 1950s model of traditional single occupant offices for many or most knowledge workers. However, in the 1970s we reached peak office, and cubicles colonized the business world, allowing for much denser configurations of space. And now, in the 21st century, in the quest for even greater density — and even lower costs — the open plan office is back, but the cubicles are gone.

What’s old is new again.

The Promise

The metaphor of breaking down walls between workers may be more than a metaphor. Maybe.

A meta-analysis of research in this field by Matthew C. Davis, Desmond J. Leach, and Chris W. Clegg, summarized some of the work of researchers on the plus side of open plan offices (references omitted):

It has been suggested that offices that facilitate greater communication and interaction (e.g., those that place individuals close to one another and remove physical barriers to communication, as open-plan offices frequently do) allow individuals to share task-relevant information, promote feedback, and create friendship opportunities, leading in turn to increased inter-personal relations, reduced conflict, increased job satisfaction and motivation. Indeed, studies have found that more open workspace generates greater group sociability and an increase in interaction has been typically observed. Furthermore, open-plan configurations have been found to affect the pattern of interaction, with less time spent in formal meetings and an increase in informal communication (e.g., more conversations held around desks) observed following its introduction.

It is this always-on-the-sunny-side thinking that serves as cover for management’s efforts to cut the overhead associated with ‘surplus space’, especially in major metropolitan centers where the costs of prime office space have been climbing quickly.

The case has been made that open plan offices support more open and collaborative work styles, and McElroy and Murrow reported in 2010 (in Employee reactions to office redesign in Human Relations), that adopting an open plan office layout yielded positive changes in employee perceptions of organizational culture, with employees saying their culture was more innovative, less formal, and fostering greater collaboration than the study’s control group, which had not moved to an open plan.

The quest for increased serendipity — or ‘coincidensity’ as my old friend Matt Biddulph called it — is a motivation in many high tech companies, who bring in office planners and architects with the expressed goal of amplifying innovation through careful design of the workplace.

The reality for the majority of companies, however, who simply tear down all the partitions and sublet 30% of the office space, is far from rosy.

The Curse

Noise — which leads to distraction — is the biggest headache of open offices, and it leads to lower performance. Raj Udeshi, an entrepreneur in New York City, said ‘headphones are the new wall’ in a NY Times article about open office noise. Remedies like ‘pink noise’ — which masks low-frequency background sound — can decrease the detrimental effects of sound pollution in open plan offices, but other distractions — like interruptions — can’t be so easily countered.