Open Plan Offices Were Invented by the Devil — and It’s Destroying Our Health
If you’re my age, you have probably only sporadically experienced the focused silence of being hard at work. Millennials do not do quiet. We text, talk, listen to music on our way to work, keep our bluetooth earphones on even at the office, and associate work with the endless, exciting and nightmarish buzz that is the open-plan workplace. Personally, I’m not afraid to share that working in an open-space office has, at worst, felt to me like the stuff of the devil’s creation. So, I set out to explore this hellish landscape with hope of finding answers.
“Open plan offices should be banned immediately”
Describing open-plan office spaces as nightmarish may sound controversial to some, but hear me out — there is scientific evidence that they have a detrimental effect on people’s work output and mental health.
The majority of you who are extroverts may thrive in an open space of interaction, but it seems that extroverts and introverts are affected all the same. At least 50% of employees link lower productivity to office noise and many feel like they do not have the tools to cope with its effect on their wellbeing.
Where did they come from?
Although open-plan spaces seem modern, they predate cubicles by decades. The first open-plan office design is accredited to Frank Lloyd Wright who, in 1939, designed the Johnson Wax Headquarters. Personally, I believe in good intentions. But open-plan offices opened up a world of suffering on employees across the western world. The creepy little cubicle office was a reaction against this, to provide a sense of privacy and focus to employees who quickly became overstimulated by the noise and lack of space an open-office imposed on them.
That’s right, open-plan offices were crushed once, so maybe it’s time to crush them again.
Are they really that bad?
With the crumbling of walls in the cubicle office came flat company structures, endless possibilities for collaboration and on-the-spot collaborative magic, and being able to spin your chair around to ask your boss a question about any topic, any time of day.
The promise of cohesion and productivity fails massively. Believe it or not, your boss doesn’t want to be asked about font sizes at any time of day, and you don’t want to lose your flow every time you make eye contact with someone across from you and feel obliged to start a conversation. The promise of endless possibilities for collaboration looks really more like an invitation to an endless stream of pointless chatter. Besides, there is the important issue of whether we should really be forced to listen to Rick’s decades old punk playlist on repeat every day.
How do open-plan offices affect people?
To list all of the ways in which an open office causes strain and suffering would be an unending and masochistic exercise, but there are a few major trends that are worth noting.
Lower productivity
An open opportunity for interaction does not equate to meaningful interaction — it doesn’t boost productivity, and as this Harvard study pointed out, it doesn’t increase collaborative work. The authors point out that this is the primary intention behind such office designs, and yet we now know that cramming people together and hoping for the best produces unimpressive results productivity-wise.
Anxiety and Health Issues
Working in an open-plan office has been linked to worse posture, anxiety and distraction. If you haven’t heard of iHunch, now’s the time to learn. Take it as a cautionary tale. Workplace noise has also been shown to raise risk factors for heart disease. Distraction is a whole other problem. In an era of constant information, a distracting place of work is not something anyone needs.
Information overload
Information pollution is one of the worst forms of distraction. This describes unsolicited and irrelevant information. This includes social information that, although meaningful, is not always valuable. Yes, it’s nice to talk about the weekend, but not 10 times a day every Monday and Friday.
The brain cannot listen in on every piece of information it senses and has to selectively pick out items in other people’s speech, the things we see and feel to understand if it’s relevant. This is made hard by endless streams of nonsensical information and lowers the quality of the knowledge we receive, and because of that, our decision making.
Is there a way out?
Calling for all open-plan offices to be banned immediately may not be the solution. Seeing as 80% of the offices in the US and 49% of those in the UK are open plan, that sounds like no mean feat. Besides that, the shortcomings of the open-plan office don’t mean we have to abandon ship just yet.
There is a way to keep offices open and liveable. A flexible space, combining collaborative areas, shared desks and focus stations is a type of open office plan that caters to a range of personality types and roles. It may sound obvious, but those deciding on an office space have yet to discover that not everyone needs to participate in every dynamic taking place at a workplace, all the time. A space is a part of the company culture. The space embodies priorities and values and it should also be responsive to people’s needs, including quiet areas and brainstorming corners.
If removing divides is what the zeitgeist has deemed the way forward, let’s hope more people begin turning open spaces into friendly spaces. The quality of our work, and our mental and physical health depend on it.
