Open Plan Agencies
The scourge of the default workspace layout
I can’t believe in 2018 we’re still talking about whether open plan offices are supportive of productivity and quality.
“Occupants in open plan offices (more than six people) had 62% more days of sickness absence” — source NHS
Since I changed focus earlier this year, I’ve been working hard learning about and sharing approaches which support developer wellness, and develop team happiness and productivity. People are the key to any business’s success. They’re the difference between turkey for Christmas and winding the whole thing up. Bear that in mind as I take another swing at convincing you, whether developer, manager or MD that it’s time to just stop it with open plan layouts.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last six months visiting agencies and speaking to those in creative teams, and two things are clear. Those in charge of office layouts almost without exception default to open plan islands of desks. Those who work in open plan office spaces are certain they’d be happier and get more done given their own space and fewer distractions.
Those in charge of office layouts almost without exception default to open plan islands of desks.
It’s no accident. There are several key reasons that desks end up laid out in this way, especially in small agencies.
Budget. Almost everybody working in the business will need a desk and a chair. Beyond that, walls, dividers, cubicles and other furniture are all additional costs. Nice to haves.
A table tennis table is way cooler than a partition.
Available space. Beyond desks and chairs everything else is only a consideration. Furniture has to justify the space it takes. In a small office you have a small kitchen, or no kitchen. You might put up with client meetings on sofas or a larger table in your main office space, or no meeting space at all. If you can’t move to a larger office then you might have to keep squeezing more desks in and removing or downsizing all other space invaders.

The desire for collaboration. In a small business it’s key to know what everybody doing. Collaboration is key to being agile and feeling secure about your shared direction. You can’t get more collaborative than to all sit around the same table where asking a question has zero friction attached to it.
Growth. When a team is small open plan works because there are limited lines of conversation. Only 1 between 2 people, 3 between 3. Open plan works. You get the benefit of being agile, the feeling of being a close team, but you also run out of urgent things to discuss pretty quickly, leading to unintentional periods of quiet focus. But then the lines of conversation grow to 6 between 4 people, 10 between 5, 21 between 7 and so on. The quiet focused periods are gone, but the layout remains.
The quiet focused periods are gone, but the layout remains.
Lack of proven alternatives. If you don’t default to an open plan space, with islands of four, six or even more desks, what do you do? What is ‘good enough’ when it comes to layout which supports quality work? When do you rearrange? How do you justify the time, effort and new layout?
I’ve spoken with a lot of people about their office space, and those who value making progress on detailed, complex, deep work despise open plan office layouts. Coincidentally, those people are usually the ones who are paid most and are most billable.
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.
The members of your team wearing headphones all day long are the canaries in the coal mine. If you have people in open plan space having to create their own personal bubbles, just see how they thrive when you stop surrounding them with distractions.
The data clearly shows open plan offices are a bad choice if you desire productivity, quality or good health from your team. It can also inhibit communication due to the lack of privacy for candid private discussions.
There are dozens of relevant studies. Nothing recent is defending the open plan office. All modern papers and research tell a similar story. Everybody benefits if you move away from open plan.
And it’s not one of those sets of findings that has exceptions. If you run a creative agency and you have an open plan office you’re losing money due to reduced productivity and higher levels of sickness.
“… considering previous researchers’ finding that satisfaction with workspace environment is closely related to perceived productivity, job satisfaction and organisational outcomes, the open-plan proponents’ argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature.” — source The BPS
“no basis in the research literature” — wow!
So it’s time for some changes, and if you’re part of a small agency and you have an open plan layout then here are a few low effort recommendations for you to limit some of the impact that your open plan layout is having.
You likely don’t have a big budget to throw at office space, furniture or layout planning, so these will help you do better without breaking the bank.
Face the walls. Sound crazy? If your team all currently face each other they’re more easily distracted and may not be making the most of the health benefits the windows your space hopefully has. This alternative layout will often take up no more room if you put group activity furniture in the center of your space. People can no longer wave across an office to grab attention.
Facing a wall or window may be all your team members need to stay focused.
Dividers. The fewer faces, screens and general movement there is in your immediate eye line, the less likely that when the office phone beeps, a yelp of excitement rings out or a client arrives, you’ll be dragged out of the flow you’ve found. Dividers can be for a single person or for those working together as mentor/mentee or even development teams.
Wall partitions. It can be incredibly cheap to put up partitions which act like walls. Anything which covers the majority of floor to ceiling space is enough of a barrier to visual and audio distractions. People don’t generally have conversations with people they can’t see as it’s human nature to move into the same space. The new wall space is also super useful for sticking things to. Split the room into four, six or even more spaces.
Meeting rooms as offices. The vast majority of meeting rooms are empty at least 50% of the working week. Why meeting rooms are seen as a sacred space which can only be used when clients need to avoid distraction is beyond me. Use them to avoid distraction as individuals or teams. Book a meeting with yourself or your team, pick up your computer and set it up in the meeting room. Be pragmatic when the room is actually needed for client workshopping.
Book a meeting with yourself or your team, pick up your computers and set them up in the meeting room.
Group similar people. You may have people in your business who spend a lot of time on a phone, or people who code, or people mentoring or pair coding. Sit people with similar needs with each other. A person on the phone won’t impact on another person making a phone call, but might stop somebody writing a proposal from getting in the zone.
I’ll be talking more about focus and productivity in future posts.
Whatever you decide to do, share it with your team before implementing it. Change is scary. People like to have certainty. Explain why you’re making the change and give some notice prior to it. Where possible allow people choices, even if that’s the colour or style of the dividers you buy. Choices help reduce the anxiety that change can bring.
If this article has triggered the seeds of a plan and you decide that you are going to make a change, or several changes to improve your team’s workspace I’d love to know a little about about your current situation and what you’re planning to do.
If you have any additional suggestions I’m all ears. I’d be keen to hear how others are tackling this in small and medium sizes agencies.
If you have a subject you’d like to suggest I write about, let me know. The obvious extensions to this article are around productivity and focus, but I’d love to have your input.
If you’d like to know more about my work supporting developer well-being, and fostering teams and the humans who form and fuel them then you can find me on Twitter @harrybailey.
*Water, microwave and oven don’t actually function. 7/10 fun score.
