My first draft of this post started with a righteous rant about the attempts of management to justify open offices with talk of increased communication and collaboration. It was gratifying to write but probably wouldn’t be as amusing to read. Nevertheless, I had a point. There’s no longer any excuse for that excuse: many studies have debunked it.
Now Cal Newport posts about a study that shows that open offices actually decrease collaboration and employee interaction. Some are expressing surprise but it’s really obvious when you think about it. Imagine you’re an engineer or some other type of “thought worker” working in an open office. You have to concentrate on the task at hand but there’s all this noise and disruption going on. What do you do? You put on your earphones, crank up the volume, and retreat into your private place. You’re not communicating, you’re not collaborating, you’re doing your best to block out those around you.
The study reveals that workers in an open office spend an astounding 72% less time interacting face-to-face after shifting from a conventional office configuration. In the study, face-to-face interaction dropped from 5.8 hours to 1.7 hours per day. At the same time, digital communication increased: more emails and more IMs. Revealingly, the management of the group studied reported that their own metrics for employee effectiveness had decreased too.
As Newport says, this is just one study of 52 employees but the results are so much what you’d expect that it would have been surprising if they had found otherwise.
If you’re a manager, please stop the madness. Your employees and bottom line will thank you.