Katharine Schwab* says everyone hates open-plan offices and research proves they are ineffective, so why is it taking so long for us to get rid of them?
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First, you tear down the walls and dispense with the soulless cubicles.
Then you put everyone shoulder to shoulder, so that they can talk more easily.
Ditch any remaining private offices, which only enforce the idea that some people are better than others, and seat your most senior employees in the mix.
People will collaborate.
Ideas will spark.
That is the myth of the open office, a workplace layout so pervasive that its presence is taken for granted, and its promises — of collaboration and innovation — are sacrosanct.
According to a 2010 study by the International Facility Management Association, 68 per cent of people worked in an office with either no walls or low walls — and the number has undoubtedly grown.
There’s just one problem.
Employees hate open offices.
They’re distracting.
They’re noisy.
There’s often little privacy.
For as long as these floor plans have been in vogue, studies have debunked their benefits.
Researchers have shown that people in open offices take nearly two-thirds more sick leave and report greater unhappiness, more stress, and less productivity than those with more privacy.
A 2018 study by Harvard Business School found that open offices reduce face-to-face interaction by about 70 per cent and increase email and messaging by roughly 50 per cent, shattering the notion that they make workers collaborative.
And yet, the open plan persists — too symbolically powerful (and cheap) for many organisations to abandon.
As with so many things today, we have Google, at least in part, to thank.
Open floors have existed since the secretarial pools of the 1940s, but when the then seven-year-old Google renovated its headquarters in California in 2005, the lofty, light-filled result was more than a showcase for the company’s growing wealth and influence; it signalled the dawn of a new professional era.
Architect Clive Wilkinson eschewed the cubicle-heavy interiors of the company’s previous office for something that resembled a neighbourhood: there were still some private spaces, but also lots of communal workplaces and small, glassed-in meeting rooms.
With Google’s rise, his vision for a collaborative workplace took off.
Around the same time, a more radical version of the open office was emerging from other startups.
As these companies proliferated, they looked for cheap ways to differentiate themselves from each other and their predecessors.
They found inspiration, Wilkinson says, in the more playful offices that had long been common in the advertising industry.
Some moved into the unfinished lofts — and left them that way.
Walls only make things complicated when you’re rapidly adding (and eliminating) staff.
By the time Facebook opened its Frank Gehry–designed Menlo Park headquarters in 2015, the open office had become not just the face of innovation in Silicon Valley but a powerful metaphor.
Facebook now houses roughly 2,800 employees in a 4-hectare building it claims is the largest open floor plan in the world.
“The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together,” founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in 2012.
Famously, he has a plain white desk in the communal area, just like everyone else.
(He also has a private “conference” room, where he is rumoured to spend much of his time.)
The whiff of disruption that open offices carried became irresistible to startups and established employers alike.
“When you talk to leaders … about why they designed their space [in an open plan], most will give some fluffy answer,” says Ben Waber, CEO of workplace analytics company Humanyze, which tracks how people use offices and interact with each other.
“But when you dig down, it’s because this is what the workplaces look like at a couple of highly successful tech companies.”
According to Humanyze, open plans are great at encouraging interaction between teams, which is useful when an organisation is trying to create new products.
But they are terrible at encouraging interaction within teams, which is necessary for execution-based work, like writing code, when employees need to be in sync.
An open office might be suitable for an organisation coming up with new ideas, but when someone has to implement them, it becomes distracting.
Of course, one of the main reasons business leaders default to open plans is simply that they’re inexpensive.
According to commercial real estate association CoreNet Global, the average space allotted to individual employees globally fell from 21 sq m in 2010 to 16.3 sq m in 2013, and is projected to keep decreasing.
This adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings per year.
Perhaps no company has exploited these efficiencies more than WeWork, which popularised communal tables and lounge areas in its coworking hubs and now builds offices for other employers.
WeWork distinguishes itself by using its data to compress people into smaller areas without, it says, sacrificing employee satisfaction.
Liz Burow, WeWork’s director of workplace strategy, says this entails bringing people closer so they interact more, while also creating a variety of seating arrangements and, yes, even some private areas.
“People have different needs throughout their day and their life,” she says.
“They might need to focus at a certain point and talk to someone at another point.”
Many architects share this vision.
But, as WeWork has found, the most expensive part of an office is the small meeting room.
As a workaround, WeWork offers its enterprise clients phone booths — basically, portable pods that can be dropped right into an existing layout.
At 1.4 sq m, they’re rather tight for a private office.
But at least there’s a door.
* Katharine Schwab is an Associate Editor for Fast Company.
This article first appeared at www.fastcompany.com.
