About 10 years ago, a team of researchers in Arizona conducted a study to see how fast a virus can spread inside an average workspace. The team placed a nonpathogenic virus on the door to an open office, a floor with central seating—in this case partly divided by cubicles and individual offices—with 80 employees. Open offices, introduced in the 1960s, were in theory intended to increase hard-to-quantify things like collaboration and creativity. Viral spread, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward. Within four hours, over 50% of the commonly touched surfaceshad been contaminated. By the end of the day, every surface they tested had some trace of the virus, from the coffee pots to bathrooms, other handles, and the break room.
“People are aware of the risk of germs in the restroom, but areas like break rooms have not received the same degree of attention,” said microbiologist Charles Gerba, who aided the study, in 2012. “Contamination can be spread throughout the workplace when office workers heat up lunch, make coffee, or simply type on their keyboards.”
Since the 1980s, survey data has shown that workers find the open office to be stressful, but a generational crisis is turning that unease into revulsion. And that was before “breathing room” came to be deployed literally in American life. As states begin to contemplate lifting stay-at-home orders months into the pandemic, the researchers’ observations about office life have never been more relevant. But it’s a certain type of open office, the panopticon-like floors where workers are practically forced to violate social distancing, drawing the most reflexive disgust. Rumors abound that tech companies are buying up plexiglass to use as barriers in open spaces, and the remote work so many employees have spent the last two months practicing has never been as attractive.
A few years ago, Ethan Bernstein, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, realized that most of what we knew about the widespread distaste for open offices didn’t address whether or not an open office did actually lead to more measurable collaboration. Using modern tools—sensors, cameras, and software to analyze digital communications—he and a research team planned to figure out what happens when a team transitions from cubicles and self-contained offices to a completely open floor plan.
He wasn’t surprised to see that people were talking less. “In the open offices I’d seen before, unless it’s a newsroom or a factory floor, they’re usually pretty quiet,” Bernstein said. “I knew the result might be counterintuitive, but I was surprised by how significant the change was.” In the office his team observed, employees’ use of email, instant message, and other digital forms of communication measurably increased, while their face-to-face interactions fell by 70%. He theorized that moving to a more public-feeling setup changes the dominant social norms drastically, prompting employees to avoid spontaneous conversation and switch to modes of communication that keep the workspace silent.
These changes often come alongside expanded amenities or updated design, so they don’t seem so dire. But the bottom was bound to fall out of an economy that competed for young employees with snacks rather than wage increases. The open office now feels symbolic of two bygone eras—a booming economy, and a world that could afford to think less about viral spread than many other concerns. But the open office has already persisted through multiple recessions and aesthetic shifts, and if history is any guide, it will outlast this one too.
“In many cases, open offices are still the cheapest way to fit the most people into a given area with the least discomfort.”
That was Timothy K. Smith for the Wall Street Journal in 1985, documenting a return to walls and partitions 10 years into the 1970s open-office revolution. He mentions the experience of Hewlett-Packard in the years after they opened up their office. The workers were startled by the noise, to the point that their corporate nurse began handing out earplugs. They added back partitions and cubicles over the course of the next decade—first three-feet high, according to one employee who spoke to Smith, then higher—but the company’s commitment to the philosophy was unchanged, and they never went all the way back.
From the beginning, open offices were intended to be flexible and contain a mix of public and private spaces. In the early 1960s, Robert Propst, the head of research at Herman Miller, set off to design a new type of office furniture, though he had never worked in a traditional office himself. After interviewing white-collar workers in various fields, he came up with an idea that would do away with walls altogether. The company called it the Action Office System, and conceived of it as a three-pronged modular system composed of vertical panels, work surfaces, and filing cabinets.
There were plenty of ways you could organize the Herman Miller system, but people defaulted to four padded walls, and thus the cubicle was born. Though Propst wrote at length about the philosophical goals of change and project-oriented offices, the system was also a technological breakthrough. By threading electrical wire through fabric and metal barriers, he made it possible to avoid complex wiring work when setting up an office with electric technology, and the savings were real. Even companies that weren’t interested in creativity or flexibility saw a financial advantage in getting rid of their walls, and cubicles became a stepping stone on the way to increasingly open workspaces stuffed with more and more employees.