The Immortal Awfulness of Open Plan Workplaces

By David Brooks 

Oscar Wilde is said to have quipped that "God, when he created man, somewhat overestimated his abilities." Our species is capable of folly on a grand scale. Evidence No. 4000 in this litany of grief is the continued existence of open workplaces.


For decades, research has found that open offices are bad for companies, bad for employees, bad for health and bad for morale. And yet they just won't die. Human beings, if they are to thrive, need some privacy - walls and doors. And yet, decade after decade, employers neglect to give employees what they need, refusing to do what is in their own best interest.


The ideology of open workplaces associates walls and rooms with authoritarianism, hierarchy and social isolation. If you put people together in one big room or in low cubicles, the popular idea is that they will work together, there will be a spirit of egalitarian togetherness.
This considered theory fits nicely with the somewhat less idealistic logic of cost per square foot. If you cram a lot of people into an overcrowded space without departments, you can squeeze in more employees at a lower cost.





The first problem is that open floor plans don't encourage more personal collaboration; they grow less. Humans can only take so much social interaction. When you press them face to mouth, they put on their headphones and burrow into each other. A much-cited study by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban found that when companies moved to more open-plan offices, workers had 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions, while the use of email and instant messaging increased.
Another study of open office workers in large American cities found that 31 percent withheld their honest thoughts on phone calls because they didn't want their co-workers to overhear them.


It turns out that if you remove physical walls, people create norms that discourage communication, what Bernstein and Ben Waber call the "fourth wall." As they wrote in the Harvard Business Review: “If someone starts a conversation and a colleague gives them an annoyed look, they won't do it again. Especially in open spaces, fourth wall norms have spread rapidly.”
The second problem is that open floor plans hurt morale and productivity. In 1997, some employees at an oil and gas company in western Canada switched to an open plan. Six months later, psychologists found that employees were generally worse off—stressed, dissatisfied, and less productive.


We're going to grandma's house. Another door.
In 2011, psychologist Matthew Davis and others reviewed more than 100 studies on office environments. A few years later, Maria Konnikova reported what she found in The New Yorker — that open-plans “damaged workers' attention, productivity, creative thinking and satisfaction. Compared to standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation.”


A 2020 study by Helena Jahncke and David Hallman found that workers in quieter single-person cubicle offices performed 14 percent better on cognitive tasks than workers in open-plan offices.
A third problem with open space floor plans is that they are detrimental to employee health. It should be obvious that people have trouble concentrating and maintaining a calm demeanor when bombarded with noise.


A study led by Elizabeth Sander found that noise in open-plan offices increased negative mood by 25 percent and sweat response by 34 percent. A study published in The Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health found that compared to people in one-person cellular offices, people working in two-person offices had 50 percent more sick days, and people working in open offices. had 62 percent more sick days.


Much of the evidence I present here is not new. It has been around for years. And it confirms the rhythms of human creativity that have been observed for centuries. For creative work, most people need periods of solitude when they present their ideas, then they need periods of companionship when they test their ideas, and then they need more periods of solitude when they refine their ideas.
And yet this ancient wisdom and the more recent flood of evidence has had limited influence on how many companies actually design their offices. There are regular articles heralding the end of the open floor plan office, and yet the end never quite arrives. Fortune reports that in the wake of the pandemic, many companies are increasing the number of conference rooms and reducing the number of individually assigned desks — which could exacerbate the privacy problem.


It could happen that short-term budgetary considerations outweigh the company's long-term self-interest. It is possible that Taylorism will never actually die. Managers want the illusion that they can see and control their employees, ostensibly to maximize efficiency. Perhaps the ideology of transparency will never die either, the false assumption that making all organizations transparent will increase trust. It could also be that there are power dynamics at play. If people have their own offices, they can control what they are, not the employer.


Either way, this suboptimal workplace lives on, another sign, as Oscar Wilde would no doubt have noted, of human folly.