You are confusing what somebody may “Like”, and what results in the most productive work from that person. I’m not saying that 9 out of 10 people prefer open offices. I think almost anybody would choose a private office. There is much cultural baggage, prestige, and rank attached to being in a private office. I’m saying 9 out of 10 people will be more productive in their work in an open office. Even if they don’t “like” it.
Sorry - can’t link you to a citation. It comes from working with people designing workplaces.
At least you had a partition that you could have taped up a calendar or something to. I see an awful lot of tech offices that are just long cafeteria-style tables with rows of iMacs facing opposite each other on them, no partitions and no shelves (and thus no personal belongings.) The only way I can figure employees tolerating that is being fresh enough out of school that they don’t know the norms, and well paid enough not to complain when they figure out their environment sucks.
I’m saying that’s bullshit. I have a career in both open and closed offices that backs that up and you don’t have a citation that says otherwise and we also have all these articles over the last decade saying you’re wrong as well. You’re just asserting something and, when challenged, saying someone told you that it was so.
Hell, this thread is full of anecdotes that says you have the ratio wrong and that most people find open office plans horrible to work within and disruptive to thinking.
Ha! Yes, there are a couple of sensational articles per year that stir emotions, because again preferences don’t align with performance. But thats no more proof than my observations. If you want hard data you have to turn to the big systems furniture manufacturers who actually study these things and design and build furniture to out fit them. But don’t expect them to share their proprietary research.
Are you kidding? There is so much published research on office design, you have to have blinders on to not be able to find it. You want me to do it for you however. You want numbers on productivity, I’m afraid that level of documentation you will only find behind proprietary doors of manufacturers like Knoll, Herman Miller, Steelcase, Vitra.
But look, you go ahead and think whatever you want, I really don’t care. But my kind advice to you is there is nothing wrong with preferring to be in a private office. You don’t have to justify that preference by rationalizing it will make you more productive. I don’t know your situation or your work and an office may very well be the best thing for you. But its not for most, no matter how much you want to project your preferences on the situation.
Yeah and what I’ve seen says open office plans suck for productivity.
It isn’t a choice between open offices or all private either.
Yet you can’t prove that and just say “it’s so” when challenged on evidence. Everyone else in this thread who has been in an open office has complained about it as well. Where’s your 10:1 people who love it right here?
People who hate it are going to complain. People who like it or are indifferent have no reason to share. Yet there are still people here stating that they prefer the open office.
Where’s your 10:1 people who love it right here?
Again - few will love it, most will be more productive.
Teams, small open groups - these are all open plan office arrangements that are not the acres of open work stations that these reactionary articles criticize. And our internet argument won’t change any of the facts here. If I’m ineloquent and don’t convince you otherwise, it means nothing. But if you feel you’ve won the argument, cheers.
You really need to back that up if you want it to be taken as more than nonsense. Because you are right on one thing, it’s really not hard to look for studies and other reviews of open office design – e.g. it only took a cursory look on google scholar to find things like this, this, and this. And the dissatisfaction seems to be well-established, but beyond a few mentions of improved communication, the only things I could find about your supposed productivity increase said the opposite.
Okay, you wrote pretty much what I just did before I decided not to post it…I can’t find any reference to any increased productivity, and lots to reduced. Separate to satisfaction, which also seems to go down.
Research in open office design has shown that it is negatively related to workers’ satisfaction with their physical environment and perceived productivity.
Worker satisfaction, and how workers perceive their own productivity are not the same as an objective measure of their productivity, which may not be solely measured by how much “work” they get done, but rather their role in a team or larger office culture.
The second link you posted is a document by Micheal Brill, and his group Bosti, who has written a great deal on workplace design and conducted a great deal of research. The paper you have linked is in fact not a condemnation of open workplace design, but rather about how workplaces are designed within an open and otherwise framework. Note that related to the article above this article states:
In these questionnaires, we don’t ask people what they think affects their productivity or job satisfaction. Rather, we measure the effects of the workplace on their work and other important outcomes. Statistical analyses of their responses to questions about their work environment and activities are analyzed against responses to self-measures of individual and team performance, job satisfaction, learning, communication, etc.
What they are getting at is they are not simple asking the worker if they like their work setting to draw conclusions. In this piece you have linked they elaborate on the importance of distraction free work, and also on the importance of interaction. He shows open office systems using a variety of partition heights to achieve privacy, but also at a much higher density that offices built with fixed walls. For the sake of terminology I consider this open office planning. The office space is open without walls, the furniture system creates the spaces. I suspect that many complaining about open offices are thinking more specifically of spaces without any divisions between desks. But the kind of office space advocated by Brill in this document is open office planning.
Absolutely – put teams or small work groups in an isolated “open plan” room with minimal outside distractions, and they will be more productive.
Cram 40 people into a redesigned cube farm that previously held 25, with minimal active or passive sound cancelling, and the only way to even be minimally productive is to put on a pair of high-grade noise cancelling headphones and crank up the tunes.
Those optimal “small team” open office designs are rarely what corporations are deploying.
Well if you go back to my original post you see that this king of thoughtful arrangement of workspace is exactly what I am talking about. And when I say 9 out of 10 people will be more productive in an open space office, I mean a well designed open space office.
I am in no way trying to justify a thoughtless cube farm, or a wide open space of hundreds of people. However, that said there are really effective spaces organized just that way for particular uses. Traders and salesmen are often pile in an open space like that where the competitive personalities have the success and failures of their surrounding coworkers thrown in their face. And it motivates them. This is an extreme situation where it works - albeit it works for the organization, the worker be damned if they are miserable.
But most situations a balance between these factors yields the best productivity, and people are happy. But the knee jerk reaction is to want a walled office with a door on it. It simply does not make it the right solution.
Well, since “well designed” presumably means “designed in a way that increases productivity” this sounds borderline tautological. The question is, what is good design and what is not and how that varies for different professions. This article is about a particular kind of office design that is not working well. It sounds like what you are really objecting to is that we are using the term “open office” to mean a particular kind of bad design and you would like it to also be used to refer to a range of good designs that are more open than individual offices for all.
This would vary wildly by job role. If there’s a good bit of phone communication going on then having an open environment is kind of bad by definition. It also only helps to have an open environment if people can actually interact creatively without having to worry about getting ‘shushed’ (huge issue)
As I mentioned earlier, I’m more of a fan of small offices/privacy cubes (unless the job is primarily collaborative, which case with the openness designed specifically for that collaborative group) and plenty of large and readily available meeting and war rooms that people can use when you want to have more than a couple of people talking freely.
I think ‘9 of 10 people’ was a VERY high estimate unless you’re specifically talking about an outlier working population.
Bingo! It is even better, because as the workers who need to get stuff done flee for their home offices, the justification for lowering even the reduced floor space can be applied.
It is too bad, but people have to be willing to invest in design - hire a thoughtful architect to design a good space. There are lots of good corporate offices out there where the company put forth the effort. In fact its more common among big companies than smaller companies. But a smaller organization has a better shot at still ending up with a decent space just because the number of people are in their favor. That said there are still companies that just pile the endless cubes into a floor plate with little thought. They for the most part are relying on a furniture dealer to layout the space, which has the double jeopardy of asking the person you are buying furniture from to decide what you need.
