The open office fallacy

After decades, resistance finally seems to be growing to the open office or open plan office, the model for around 70 percent of US companies, whose employees are typically spread out across large, wall-less floors, working in small enclosures divided from their cohorts by low panels. Interestingly, the open-plan approach is still very much favored by tech companies, as illustrated by Facebook’s new campus.

The reasoning behind the open office trend is that working in this way increases communication, teamwork, and the exchange of ideas. But some studies show that in practice, productivity is lower in open plan offices and that, quite simply, a lot of people don’t like working in them.

My own experience with open plan offices is limited: I spent four years at UCLA, where staff were assigned work spaces behind fairly high dividing panels that gave some degree of privacy, but other than that, my working life has been spent in a private office. That said, I am a firm believer in the benefits of the open plan approach, while at the same time aware of the many fallacies that cause the problems some writers have commented on.

The original idea behind the open plan office was to allow managers to better supervise productivity: by eliminating walls it was possible to see what everybody was up to. But what soon happened was that a kind of class system emerged, whereby certain levels of management were given offices, while everybody else had to do their thing out in the open: that isn’t an open plan office in my opinion.

I would argue that the only open plan system that can really change a company’s culture, and that I have seen up close and personal, is one where it is not permitted to leave anything on desks: no paper, no pens, and no photographs of the family. At most, certain areas of the office are broadly agreed to be for this or that work group. And of course such a model is applied to everybody, from the big boss, down to the lowliest admin assistant; it’s also backed up by shared infrastructure such as meeting rooms or cabins from where phone calls can be made without bothering other people.

To work properly, this kind of model needs to be accompanied by rigid rules about how the space is to be used: there is no point in organizing things “theoretically” if certain people in more senior positions “claim” certain areas and convert them into their dens, and where they leave their stuff as though marking their territory. Well managed, and with no abuse of the rules, this model has one key virtue: it is able, almost overnight, to do away with paper once and for all.

When somebody cannot leave their things on a desk, they automatically make the transition to the web, assuming that they have the skills to do so safely and efficiently. I believe that paper is the enemy, and must be banished from the workplace: paper documents are not circulated properly, and thus not read or understood.

Properly managed and with the right resources, the open-plan office can bring about a change in a company’s culture. It can give employees the freedom to do their work where they best operate: at home for some tasks, and in a shared space for others, as well as helping to improve communication, exchange ideas, and team work. Office design needs to include meeting rooms set up to facilitate online meetings, as well as the right combination of laptops, tablets, and smartphones as work tools with the right software to get the most out of them.

And needless to say: no printers, photocopiers, or fax machines. Set up in the right way, the open office can provide the advantages that can come from working in groups and the free flow of ideas, along with the culture change required to allow the company’s information to reach the environment where it can best circulate. Without these types of controls, simply demolishing walls and putting panels round desks along the lines of a panopticon creates an inefficient workplace filled with discontented employees. This isn’t about simply following a model: it’s about how we develop it and the culture we implant to manage it.

(En español, aquí)