At my most recent job, I did all of my best work at home. I would actively try to avoid the office for as long as possible. At home, I had two desks and complete control over my environment. Distractions and breaks were choices.
Once I went into the office, the environment changed. There were constant distractions, from other employees, dogs barking (for the record: puppers were a net positive), impromptu meetings and birthday celebrations. It was very difficult to get into flow states and incredibly easy to be broken from them. Of all the places I could work, my desk at the office was often the worst option.
When I’m in a crowded space my thoughts also get crowded. I feel overwhelmed by stimuli and the inability to escape them. In contrast, when I have space (mental & physical), I’m able to challenge and understand both my thoughts and assumptions. The quality of my thinking goes up significantly.
I realized I kind of hated open offices.
The Rise of the Open Office
It sounds great in theory. Have an office with everyone in one room you’ll get more synergy than you can dynamically optimize. Marketing and Design will work side by side on skunkworks projects, Engineering and Product can knock out questions and bugs immediately, and communication will flow through the organization naturally.
80 percent of all offices now have an open floor plan. Traditional companies have moved towards open plans to inject some much-needed creativity and serendipity into their offices, just like the cool start-ups.
Makes sense, right? There’s one big problem:
Open Offices Don’t Work
Before I continue, I would like to call out that I am part of the "problem" with open offices. I’m extroverted and when faced with the choice of diving into a deep, complex problem or shooting the shit with my coworkers, I too often choose the latter. I’m not alone in this.
Workers who are in open office environments suffer by almost every measure. One study of an Oil & Gas company in 1997 showed that:
When comparing performance to regular offices, open office employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. Research also shows that open offices often lead to anti-social behaviors.
The addition of noise inevitable to the open offices was seen as a large obstacle to productive focus. Physical barriers also instill a sense of privacy—and a sense of privacy at the office has been shown to boost job performance.
Open offices are bad architecture. They represent a failure in psychology as much as design. In order to understand why the open office is so pervasive, we have to understand the underlying psychology and rationale. The most common arguments for the open office are outlined below:
Spontaneous Creativity over Focus
- Point: Having people in one large office naturally increases the amount of spontaneous collaboration and creativity.
- Counterpoint: How often are these serendipitous moments actually happening? And even if they are, does your company's structure allow for them to be utilized effectively? You’re optimizing for a long tail event at the expense of something every single employee will benefit from—focus.
Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity*
- Point: When everyone is in the same room, people are motivated to work more because other people can see what they’re doing.
- Counterpoint: This is a terrible way to judge performance. A manager who values the physical location of their employees does so because they have no real way or ability to measure output. If you’re judging the value of someone based on how busy they appear, good luck.
*Lifted from Cal Newport’s Deep Work
Cost Efficiencies
- Point: We save money by not having to build everyone their own office.
- Counterpoint: Cool, you’re going to spend a fuck ton of money on talented engineers and designers and then put them in an environment where they’re constantly distracted. Airtight plan.
Open concept offices also give workers the knowledge that they are constantly being watched, whether passively or actively. It encourages us to look busy and productive.
We look busier, but we’re less efficient, take more sick days and our communication and happiness suffers. It’s not a smart trade-off.
Alternatives
We should strive to create better environments for meaningful work. There are numerous concepts proposed, my favorites include:
Hub and Spoke
Potentially the best of both worlds. Hub and Spoke spaces feature a singular entryway into common spaces and hallways that spoke out to different individual offices.
People have the ability to choose to collaborate or to ensconce themselves in their offices. Hub and Spoke spaces have large, central spaces and hallways that need to be navigated that encourage conversation.