The Washington Post has a nice article by Lindsey Kaufman entitled Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace. As the title suggests, the article is a crie de coeur on the horrors of the open-office.
Kaufman is in advertising and enjoyed a private office until her company decided to “improve communication” by moving to an open-office plan. No longer able to work in silence and concentrate on her copy, Kaufman found herself seated at a long shared table next to a woman “who I suspect was an air horn in a former life.”
It’s hard to believe that this nonsense is still going on. There’s plenty of research to show that productivity and morale plummet, easily swamping any benefits from increased communication. David Heinemeier Hansson has a suggestion as to why this is still going on.
Open-office plans are another common hallmark of those whose no longer need concentration to do their work: The organizers and the talkers.
— DHH (@dhh) December 30, 2014
Really, though, we all know the answer: it’s cheaper. That wouldn’t be so bad if the people imposing an open-office on their workers were honest about it. Instead, we get self-serving nonsense about “improving communication.”
I remember that the CEO of a company I once worked for decreed that all the company executives should move to the bull pen so that we could have “improved communication.” Oddly, he stayed right in his private office while everyone else suffered an environment not unlike the food court at a particularly bad mall.