Many people wonder why their offices are designed in a certain way. Surely executives must have carefully considered how each option would impact work patterns, and then logically chosen the best option, right? Not really. More likely, their decision was made when they saw a picture like this:
I’m amazed how many CEOs tell me they made a decision to have an open office plan because “The vision Google has for their workplace deeply resonated with me.”
Designing your office by copying Google doesn’t make much sense. Still, many companies are jumping on the open office bandwagon. They believe that open offices help employees interact more, which increases collaboration both within and between teams.
But do these designs actually help employees be overall more productive?
Because my company analyzes communication data from hundreds of thousands of employees at dozens of companies, we’re in a unique position to analyze this question.
First off, based on our analysis, we know that proximity increases the likelihood of interaction. If two people sit next to each other, they communicate more frequently than people a few meters away, even over e-mail or chat. We could hypothesize, then, that open offices would increase collaboration due to increased proximity and “collisions” between people. But when you remove barriers, you invariably increase the potential for distraction, so we might expect that making such a move would simultaneously reducing the amount of focused work (15 minutes or more without interruptions).