Amanda Mull* says thanks to the rise of the open-plan office, wireless headphones have become the new privacy cubicles.
Photo: Yuricazac
Once upon a time, offices had walls inside them.
They weren’t glass, like the conference rooms of 2019, but were made of plaster, and were usually painted a neutral colour, like many of the walls you know and love.
Over time, office walls gave way to cubicles.
Now, for many office workers, the cubicles are also gone.
There are only desks.
If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work.
In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers.
The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration.
Now that open offices are the norm, their limitations have become clear.
Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were.
But something as expensive and logistically complicated as an office design is difficult to walk back, so, as Jeff Goldblum wisely intones in Jurassic Park, life finds a way.
In offices where there are no walls, millions of workers have embraced a work-around to reclaim a little bit of privacy: wireless headphones.
The arrival of these now-ubiquitous devices has ushered in a new era of office etiquette — and created a whole new set of problems.
Unlike their tethered forebears, Bluetooth wireless headphones are convenient because they allow workers to forget they’re wearing a device and to leave their desk without yanking their laptop on to the floor.
In open offices, people commonly wander around with their headphones on all day, into bathrooms and kitchens, sometimes listening to nothing at all in order to avoid the constant distraction of compulsory social interaction.
We have Apple to thank for wireless headphones’ proliferation.
The tech giant launched its tiny white AirPods in late 2016 to accompany new iPhones that lacked a traditional headphone jack.
AirPods can also serve a different purpose: tuning out your co-workers without looking excessively hostile.
In that capacity, they’ve become indispensable to lots of people because the hard surfaces, high ceilings, and empty spaces common in open offices help sounds carry.
According to Ethan Bernstein, a Professor at Harvard Business School who studies organisational behaviour, it makes sense that this subtle tactic for avoiding constant interaction has seeped into office environments.
“People are very good at creating spaces for themselves, and these days you look at everybody and almost without exception they’re on their phones with headphones in their ears,” he says.
In a 2018 study, Bernstein and his team found that open offices decrease face-to-face interaction among co-workers by as much as 70 per cent, in stark contrast to the designers’ stated goal of collaborative teamwork.
The proliferation of small wireless headphones may exacerbate that effect.
Since you don’t have to remove AirPods to wander around the office, it can be hard for your co-workers to tell if you’re listening to music or on a conference call, or if you’ve simply forgotten to take them out.
Sometimes that’s the point.
And for people who find music as distracting as they find their co-workers, putting on their quiet headphones can be as much of a visual signal as an attempt to dampen ambient noise.
It’s not a perfect system.
For women, there can be an extra wrinkle: Wireless earbuds are often so small that they’re entirely invisible under long hair.
Bernstein suggests that to send a clearer do-not-disturb signal to colleagues, people might consider larger, over-ear models.
Employers can do some things to help with the confusion, such as retrofitting a space with small, private phone booths to give employees somewhere to escape.
That solves another headphone problem, too: Even when people can see your AirPods, they still don’t know what you’re doing with them.
A person quietly sitting in on a conference call looks pretty similar to a person who’s focused on work while listening to soothing nature sounds, or to one who’s checking Facebook while listening to nothing at all.
This ambiguity has prompted a whole new visual language meant to mime the difference to unsuspecting desk-mates.
To perform its most common gesture, which indicates that you are on a call, you dramatically motion to your ears while making a face that communicates a sense of semi-smug capitulation: You, too, are currently being inconvenienced by your own importance.
According to design psychologist Sally Augustin, all of this irritation has come about because open offices ignore some essential elements of human psychological development.
“We get revved up just being around other people, so in a workplace you’ve always got that force energising you,” she says.
“When you’re doing intellectual work, you’ll do it better in an environment that’s generally less energising.”
Although headphones can help filter auditory interruptions, they can’t block visual ones, which Augustin says can be just as disruptive to performance and focus.
AirPods also can’t change the fact that you’re just sitting in the middle of an open room, which Augustin notes is stressful no matter what you’re doing.
“When you can be approached from the rear, a little part of your brain is always vigilant,” she says.
“It’s not about what you’re looking at on your screen or anything.”
“It’s much more fundamental than that.”
The good news is that trends are already turning away from open offices in favour of designs that have a range of space types, including those that allow workers privacy and relief from constant stimulation.
“This is how humans work,” Augustin explains.
Evolutionarily, our open-plan stress response goes back to a time long before office politics.
“We like to think we’ve come so far from our days on the savanna, but maybe not,” she says.
* Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She tweets at @amandamull.
This article first appeared at www.theatlantic.com.
