The science is clear, open-plan offices are not the silver bullet for collaboration. So now what?
From conventional wisdom to contemporary science.
It’s actually quite astounding that it wasn’t until 2018 that we were able to empirically investigate the connection between open-plan offices and the level of collaboration within an organisation. After all, architects and design companies have been extolling the virtues of creating open workspaces for decades and claimed again and again that it helps engender collaboration.
Still, very little actual research has proven this to be the case. Indeed, in her PhD. thesis on the topic Irene Lopez de Vallejo from the Bartlett School of Architecture claimed that the causal relationship between the two was taken as a given within much of the research community, but as of yet, technically remained unproven. In the meantime, a growing number of media channels from Dezeen to the BBC have lamented the fact that open workspaces actually tend to reduce collaboration -alongside trust and productivity. However, the majority of this literature is based on surveys and anecdotal evidence leading to inevitable bias.
The challenge is of course that the causality between workspace layout and collaboration is incredibly difficult to measure. First, collaboration is a very intangible concept which is difficult to quantify or translate into actual proxies. As of yet, the closest indicator we have, and one that is used promiscuously, is face-to-face interactions, but unfortunately interaction and collaboration are not necessarily the same thing. Secondly, measuring interactions in physical space has historically been difficult, not only because of limitations in the technology available, but also because of complexities related to privacy and data ownership.
In addition, the companies who are actively pushing for the open plan office, that is, the architects and design companies, have historically been very reluctant to put any real research effort behind this. In fact, the Royal Institute of British Architects states that only 10% of UK architecture practices offer any analysis of how the spaces they’ve built actually impact the people using them.
Enter Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban from Harvard Business School. Using the sociometric badges developed by MIT and applied commercially by Humanyze the two researchers recently undertook a comparative study of two companies that converted their office spaces from cellular offices to open-plan. Analysing employees’ face-to-face, email and IM interactions the researchers concluded that in both cases the face-to-face interactions decreased significantly by approximately 70% with an associated increase in digital interactions of 20–50%.
The research immediately went viral and was cited in articles with hyperbolic headlines such as “We just got more evidence open plan offices suck”, “Open office plans are as bad as you thought” and “Here’s the final nail in the coffin of open plan offices”. Of course little attention was given to the substantial limitations of the study, including that the comparison only included two points in time, respectively 15 days before and 2 months after the redesign (a very tight turn-around for an organisational culture change initiative), nor do we know anything about the nature of the new layouts provided and whether these included any break-out or social spaces.
Still, at a time where the science on spatial workspace dynamics is very thin on the ground the report had a profound impact and helped to move the conversation beyond mere speculation. And more importantly, it helped people realise that simply converting your office space into open-plan alone isn’t going to make your organisation more collaborative. It just isn’t the easy, quick-win silver bullet that people have been claiming for all these decades.
So where does this leave us?
Firstly, we need to come to terms with the fact that workspace science is a messy, interconnected beast and that direct causality between a single intervention and a single outcome will be difficult, if not impossible, to distill.
Take for instance collaboration, an outcome that many organisations want to foster. It is itself inter-connected with other outcomes, like levels of trust, sense of motivation and employee engagement within an organisation. It is affected not only by the design of the workspace itself (as we’ve concluded above), but also by how the organisation operates and the culture that it fosters. No matter how great your workspace is designed and how much it engenders “casual collisions” — if your boss is more concerned about a cheap printer than they are about people and like 68% of the (US) working population you’re disengaged at work, then collaboration is most likely a far fetch.
Creating the right conditions for some of these outcomes requires us to think across space, operations and culture, and to carefully orchestrate a series of targeted, interconnected interventions across these spheres.
But most importantly, it challenges us to constantly and actively gather feedback and data in order to learn and improve. As a result, we need to see a change in the relationship between client and say workspace architect, so that it’s no longer enough for designers to make grand claims of what their space will achieve, only to bugger off once the shiny photos (often without any people in them) have been taken. Instead designers should be an active, long-term partner to their client — constantly tweaking, reconfiguring and improving in real-time to ensure that the space is always working better than it did yesterday.
In an era characterised by an insatiable appetite for data-driven decision-making and where everyone, from Google to MIT to Humu, are looking at Big Data and data science to inform strategies for making organisations more collaborative, this iterative and data-informed (rather) approach to workspace environments might seem counter intuitive. Still, it’s a big step forward from the not-so-evidence-based approach that has been propagated so far, and one that is direly needed, if we genuinely want to create the fertile ground for truly collaborative workplaces.
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Get in touch if you want to talk about the work environments of the future and how we can create truly amazing and nurturing spaces that help people be and do their best at work — @timahrensbach
