Over at Second Nexus there’s an article that discusses the Harvard Study on open office spaces that I wrote about previously. If you missed that post, the TL;DR is that the study showed that far from improving collaboration, open offices actually decrease employee communication and effectiveness. The Second Nexus article covers those details and further notes that besides being significantly cheaper, open offices also enable continuous surveillance of employees. It’s no wonder management loves them.
The most interesting part of the piece, though, is their judgment of what’s coming next. They believe that the open spaces are merely a transition phase until offices all but disappear. Some employers are already trying to “bring nature into the workplace” but that’s expensive and out of the reach of most employers. Rather, the authors believe that virtually everyone will become a digital nomad. You should read the article for the details.
Doing away with offices seems attractive to me and even employers should like it because it will be even cheaper than open spaces. Of course, that will make employee surveillance much harder but aside from those addicted to micromanagement, ROWE should prove to be a better alternative.
There’s been a spate of articles on open offices lately and they all make the point that they’re not delivering their promised benefits. Those who suffer in the environment can only hope that those articles presage the end of this deplorable trend.