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How productive these open office environments?
13-03-17
Open offices that allow people work together for 8 hours. It is a very cost effective way to place workers as you do not need many separated offices, doors, walls, special arrangements for each office rooms. And you can allocate each next to each other in a very space effective way. The workers would not feel that they are working in a few cubical meters because actually the office is very big. They see the walls are very far away, it is a big space. And you think you saved a lot of money creating an open office environment. But, did you save money actually?
I wonder how open office usage started: Once upon a time a researcher measured the work delivered in a period of time in separate office environments for some employees. He again measured the same employees in an open office environment with similar work items for the same period of time. And he compared those two data and published as a new thing to do to improve the workers’ productivity. Who did this research? Why it is so popular and thought with a pre-judgement that open office environment improves the productivity?
Well it certainly improves some things but I am not sure it improves the overall productivity for a company. If you have a look at the communication channels, how they exponentially increase with one worker more at the same office:
Let's say we have Andy and Suzanne sharing the same office. There is only one channel between these two workers from one to another bio-directional. If you add one more person, Dave there will be three channels from Andy, Suzanne and Dave: Between Andy and Suzanne, Suzanne and Dave and finally Andy and Dave. You do not need to do anything, without any effort their messages will start to go between these three people continuously. When Suzanne put her lipstick on it will take the attention of the other two others, When Andy sneeze the other two will say “God bless you”. When Adam comes from the other office to talk to Dave, then Suzanne and Andy will be all ears. Let’s put another worker in our growing open office. The bio-directional communication channel number will increase to six; Andy-Suzanne, Suzanne-Jane the new worker, Jane-Andy, Adam-Jane, Adam-Andy and Suzanne-Adam. When Andy has a new office ornament all other three will comment about it, when there is an office announcement four of them will have a good chat about that.
And we are talking about 30-40 employees in the same office! Can you see the communication channel increase? What kind of productivity increase you are expecting? And some companies tries to fix this with planting leaders and lower level managers around them, so that they can keep an eye of workers, so that the communication would not become out of control. Computer screens are wide open, everybody can see what you are working on, your manager is behind you staring at over your shoulder, your 45 other colleagues watching you as well. Everybody starts to keep an eye on each other. When you start to walk out of the office, all the others ask where are you going? Who is talking to who? Did she break up with her second boyfriend in one month? What a…! Gossiping goes all around. Deputy gossip-leaders appear. They know everything going on in the office. A worker cannot do anything without explaining to them. Or you should not do anything, and become a robotic worker: appearance is "working" but, clearly a person cannot work all the allocated time every day. It becomes a non-productive environment within a very short period of time.
These increasing communication channels and pressure over the workers block motivation and effective working environment in open offices . The focus shifts immediately from “work” to “the appearance”; how do they look in the eyes of others. The punishment is humiliation, bad judgement and reveal of the personal life, who can keep focus on the work?
You thought that open office will be the quickest and effortless solution to improve your productivity and forgot about investing in changing your organisational culture. And it turned to a disaster…Therefore, the culture, organisational culture is the key, very important. It is not the open office environment; it is the culture you need to work on if you want any kind of improvement at work performance.
Derya Milner
MA Leading Innovation and Chance
