Six months later psychologists found the employees reported being worse off across the board - stressed, dissatisfied, less productive. In 1997, some employees in an oil and gas company in western Canada switched to an open plan design. The second problem is that open floor plans hurt morale and productivity. Especially in open spaces, fourth-wall norms spread quickly.” It turns out that if you take out physical walls, people will create norms that discourage communication, what Bernstein and Ben Waber call a “fourth wall.” As they wrote in Harvard Business Review, “If someone starts a conversation and a colleague shoots him a look of annoyance, he won’t do it again. cities found that 31 percent held back their sincere thoughts on phone calls because they didn’t want their co-workers to overhear them. A much-cited study by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban found that when companies made the move to more open plan offices, workers had about 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions, while email and instant messaging use rose.Īnother study of open office workers in major U.S. If you shove them together cheek by jowl they will just put on headphones and burrow into themselves. People can take only so much social interaction. The first problem is that open floor plans don’t foster more face-to-face collaboration they foster less. If you jam a lot of people into a crowded space with no separations, you can squeeze in more employees at lower cost. This high-minded theory nicely dovetails with the somewhat less idealistic logic of cost per square foot.
If you put people together in one big room, or in low cubicles, the popular thinking goes, they will collaborate, a spirit of egalitarian togetherness will reign.
The ideology of open plan workplaces associates walls and rooms with authoritarianism, hierarchy and social isolation. And yet employers, decade after decade, neglect to give workers what they need, refuse to do what’s in their own self-interest. Human beings, if they are to thrive, need a bit of privacy - walls and a door. 4,000 in this litany of woe is the continued existence of open plan workplaces.įor decades, research has found that open plan offices are bad for companies, bad for workers, bad for health and bad for morale. Oscar Wilde is said to have quipped that “God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” Our species is capable of folly on a grand scale.
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