Do You Need an Open Office?
We’ve been raised in the belief that all humans are social animals, as the theory of evolution has it. If you’re wondering how being a social animal is ever related to work in software development, or, more precisely, how it stands in the way of personal and organizational productivity, that’s exactly what my today’s article is about.
Social Animal ≠ Productive Performer
What strikes me most is that we keep on going with the axiom that humans are social animals, seemingly forgetting that evolution never stops. With the advances in technology and infrastructure that have happened over the last 30–40 years, the “social animal” concept has suffered some severe cracks. If we look at animals, why are they social? Why they stick together? It helps them feel secure in their natural environment (a flock of deer senses the danger from the wolves approaching better than one deer does), and it helps them get the food easier than on their own (lions, or wolves, hunt in families and then share the meal). Now, do we humans have to gather into a herd, like those animals do in the wild, to secure ourselves or to escape starvation? Obviously, no. But, for some reason, many appear to stick with this thinking as they arrange open space office layouts for knowledge workers.
Even evolution-wise, the purpose of humans working in an office, to maintain their living, deep down, is no longer to be just fed or to seek shelter. If a contemporary human wants to stay secure and to bring food to the table, the evolution is supposed to lead to finding the optimal ways of performing well at work. “Optimal” stands for “achieve best results with the reasonable amounts of personal energy consumed”. Staying in physical proximity in one room at work no longer helps our natural evolution, from what it looks, but rather presents a big obstacle. With the knowledge work, it would be a counter-evolutionary and a self-sabotaging act to expose ourselves to the environments that drain us. Numerous research reports prove what people feel intuitively: to keep good health and to perform well, we need to arrange for a space that helps, not blocks, personal productivity.
Think about it. If you were to count the cases when staying in one room with your co-workers actually contributed to your individual performance, and hence to your own well-being and to the well-being of the whole organization vs. how often it’s been an annoying distraction that sucked your energy which could have been invested into doing the meaningful work? Our co-roomers’ activities might affect us in the same way as many apps running in the background affect our smartphones. It seems that the phone is doing nothing and just idles, but the battery charge gets lower. The energy is drained. If we throw in to the mixture the other stresses that people experience daily, things get even worse.
If not an open office, then which one?
How to approach designing office spaces, then? The short answer is: it depends on the setup of the work processes at your organization. Sometimes sharing a room might work better for a small group, if they rely heavily on real-time offline communication. Like, for a team of software developers and QA who call on each other, as they verify commits, or if QA need help from developers to reproduce a bug, etc. Or, for customer service employees in technical support and in accounts. It would make sense for them to stay in a shared open space for their evolution and well-being (=for their ability to do their work better). However, an open space office would be a productivity killer for a strategizer, or for someone who comes up with creative concepts or designs that the development teams would then carve out from the digital rocks of software code. Could you imagine Winston Churchill or Steve Jobs working in an open space office, let me ask? Hardly anyone would doubt that privacy is a must for the work that requires focus and deep thinking.
There’s another questionable consideration that stakeholders might have in mind about open space offices. They might assume that physical proximity cements a sense of belonging to a team of individuals who share common goals and values the more, the more time they spend together. Hardly so. Belonging to a group can be promoted by other means, such as sharing a company’s philosophy through the space itself, or, most importantly, by doing some good job together. Besides, we wouldn’t assume that a family of 4 develops a stronger bonding by being squeezed into a 200 sq ft apartment, would we?
This is all about how the specifics of work correlates with the space. While some companies simply do not feel that they can (or should) allocate larger budgets to fine-tune their offices, some people can do just OK working at home, if their home is better suited for their job than the open space office. What and how works better might also depend on the office demographics. Some say that millennials are more likely to put up with distractions merely due to the fact that they appreciate their office as a space where they can socialize. This fact provides just another example that shows how deep stakeholders need to think as they approach the job of planning/designing an office. There are so many factors to consider and to write about, that it would take a huge article just to list them all. For each and every company, there will be a unique solution.
Related:
5 Things We Need for Sustainable Performance At Work
Continuous Problem-Solving Is No Accident
Further reading:
The secret to getting work done in an open office
Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more likely to get sick
This story is based on an earlier article.
