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How open office plans are bad for productivity

If one of the office arrangements you’re considering is an open-plan office set-up, though, you might want to think again. While open office plans have been hailed as incubators for innovation, supposedly encouraging cooperation and conversation among colleagues, recent studies have implied that open-plan offices are in fact terrible for productivity.

Is there a way to maintain innovation and creativity without sacrificing focus?

The practical and intellectual logic of open-plan offices

Open-plan offices gained popularity in recent decades for several reasons. Up to 70% of U.S. workplaces eventually adopted the layout. One of the reasons has been entirely pragmatic: an open-plan office doesn’t involve having to furnish individual office spaces, and allows for more easily shared resources.

Some offices are even set up according to a strategy known as “hot desking”: a system that makes all office computers interchangeable across a series of large tables and open spaces. For many start-ups working on a limited budget, this was a serious draw.

There was also an intellectual rationale to open-plan offices. Teams that studied how innovation happens determined that a central requirement of any office is space where people can interact and engage in spontaneous conversation.

This is what made the water cooler or the office kitchen a lively locale. What would it be like if you could have the same kind of interactions all over the office?

That was the notion behind open-plan offices, but they haven’t played out that way. What researchers hoped to recreate did not come to pass. Something less desirable happened.

The reality of open-plan offices

Rather than fostering a creative, invigorating office environment, open-plan offices have proven to be a stressful distraction from work that needs to be done. Many employees who work in such offices have resorted to wearing headphones constantly or building folder barriers around their table area in order to block out the noise of coworkers.

Wearing headphones pretty much nullifies the goal of the open-office plan. It means workers have cut off communication and interaction, but apparently they’ve decided it’s worth the sacrifice.

This is one of the primary problems with the open-plan office: the chewing coworker or the endless phone calls. Known as low-intensity noise, such sounds make up the majority of what open-plan office workers are exposed to.

Those who haven’t experienced it might think it’s similar to the white noise we are surrounded by all the time — the white noise some of us even find soothing. But low-intensity noise is different.

It causes increased stress and frustration; it doesn’t soothe or calm. Low-intensity noise is more like a bee persistently flying around your head or someone using a blender in the next room, but never stopping. There is nothing pleasant about it.

Creating open spaces for employees is not necessarily a bad idea, but the way companies have gone about it has been all wrong. Studies show that public, collaborative places are valuable, but there still needs to be some isolation or privacy available to the workers.

Better than the open-plan office is the small-group meeting space that can be expanded or reduced, depending on how many people want to use it. Comfortable spaces and low walls are better than long tables and endless distraction.

The privacy problem

Big Brother may be watching in the office, and that may have been an ulterior goal of open-plan office designers and the employers who adopted such designs. By reducing privacy, you increase sharing and keep employees on task because they are held accountable by the watching eyes of others.

Unfortunately, once these offices were in place, researchers found that the only sharing that occurred was highly superficial. Instead of colleagues engaging deeply with one another, they only skimmed the surface.

They didn’t explore ideas more deeply or get to know each other better. Any talking that took place was simply chatter. That makes for more distraction and less productivity.

Opting out of open-plan offices

If you’re planning to renovate your office space or are choosing a new property, you enjoy the distinct advantage of knowing you might want to steer clear of the open-plan office trend. While many offices are still functioning under this regime, it has declined significantly in popularity as ambivalent studies continue to emerge.

What will ultimately fill the gap left by the open-plan office? The current leading contender is flexible, modular furniture.

Items that can change in shape and function to accommodate different activities and people are ideal for creating the collaborative yet private space that open-plan designers had been hoping for. Now’s the time to invest in furniture that’s also an office or conference space.

Creative accommodations are the wave of the future.

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