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2018-07-31 06:27:16
Some workplace designs are more about cost-cutting than collaboration
LONELINESS is a crowded room, as Bryan Ferry of the band Roxy Music once
warbled, adding that everyone was all together, all alone . The open-plan
office might have been designed to make his point. That is not the rationale
for the layout, of course. The supposed aim of open-plan offices is to ensure
that workers will have more contact with their colleagues, and that the
resulting collaboration will lead to greater productivity.
Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, two Harvard Business School academics, set
out to test this proposition*. The authors surveyed interactions between
colleagues in two unnamed multinational companies which had switched to
open-plan offices. They did so by recruiting workers to wear sociometric
badges. These used infra-red sensors to detect when people were interacting,
microphones to determine when they were speaking or listening to each other,
another device to monitor their body movement and posture and a Bluetooth
sensor to capture their location.
At the first company, the authors found that face-to-face interactions were
more than three times higher in the old, cubicle-based office than in an
open-plan space where employees have clear lines of sight to each other. In
contrast, the number of e-mails people sent to each other increased by 56% when
they switched to open-plan. In the second company, face-to-face interactions
decreased by a third after the switch to open-plan, whereas e-mail traffic
increased by between 22% and 50%.
Why did this shift occur? The authors suggest that employees value their
privacy and find new ways to preserve it in an open-plan office. They shut
themselves off by wearing large headphones to keep out the distractions caused
by nearby colleagues. Indeed, those who champion open-plan offices seem to have
forgotten the importance of being able to concentrate on your work.
Employees also find other ways of communicating with their fellow workers.
Rather than have a chat in front of a large audience, employees simply send an
e-mail; the result (as measured at one of the two companies surveyed) was that
productivity declined.
Cubicles do not offer a great work environment either; they are still noisy and
cut off employees from natural light. But at least workers have more of a
chance to give their work area a personal touch. Allowing plenty of room for
pictures of children, office plants, novelty coffee mugs these are ways of
making people feel more relaxed and happy in their jobs.
Such comforts are completely denied when companies shift to hot-desking , as
45% of multinationals plan by 2020, according to CBRE, a property firm, up from
30% of such companies now. Workers roam the building in search of a desk, like
commuters hunting the last rush-hour seat or tourists looking for a poolside
lounger. If you planned to spend a morning quietly reading a research paper or
a management tome, tough luck; the last desk was nabbed by Jenkins in accounts.
Hot-desking is a clear message to low-level office workers that they are seen
as disposable cogs in a machine. Combine this with the lack of privacy and the
office becomes a depressing place to work. Workers could stay at home but that
negates the intended benefits of collaboration that open-plan offices bring.
The drive for such offices is reminiscent of the British enthusiasm for
residential tower blocks after the second world war. One British wartime survey
found that 49% wanted to live in a small house with a garden; only 5% wanted a
flat. But flats they got. Architects, who fancied themselves as visionaries
like Howard Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand s The Fountainhead , competed to
create concrete temples for the masses to occupy. As David Kynaston, in his
book Austerity Britain recounts, the desires of the actual residents were
dismissed.
The real reason post-war architects built flats rather than homes is that it
was a lot cheaper. And the same reason, not the supposed benefits of mingling
with colleagues, is why open-plan offices are all the rage. More workers can be
crammed into any given space.
Some people like them, of course, just as some like living in tower blocks. The
only option for everyone else is to kick up a stink until executives change
their minds and provide some personal space. In other words: workers of the
world, unite. So you can separate again.
Transactions, The Royal Society
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the
headline "Open office, closed minds"