For a while, open plan offices were all the rage. Companies everywhere, from trendy startups to major corporations tried them. But over time, it became clear that they weren’t the promised land of office design. Instead, they were a drag. And for some businesses, totally inappropriate.
Office designs for businesses have moved on significantly since. Businesses are now including open plan designs only where the evidence says they should. Otherwise, they are thinking of more intelligently to assist collaboration and break up the workspace.
Recently, a bunch of Scandinavian scientists looked into the evidence on the downsides of open plan offices. Here’s what they found.
Open Plan Offices Can Spread Germs
The study looked at the effect of office design on the health of the workforce. They wanted to see whether the layout of the office was related to the number of days taken off sick. For women, they found that open plan offices of any size resulted in a sizeable increase in the disease burden. Women took way more sickies, in other words, when their offices were open plan. The same was broadly true for men too. Men working in open offices, or offices with shared rooms, were particularly at risk.
Now that we know a thing or two about epidemiology, the reasons for this should be obvious. When somebody sneezes in an open plan office, the germs go everywhere. Thus, open offices have the capacity to derail entire teams in one fell swoop.
Background Noise Raises Stress
Doing work well is difficult at the best of times. But it’s next to impossible when there are a load of conversations going on around you. Most workers resort to doing one of two things. They either put their headphones in to try and drown out the noise. Or they waddle through their work without complaining and do a bad job as a result. The scientists found, not surprisingly, that background noise was bad for worker stress levels. The more background noise, the more stress. The more stress, the less work done.
Lack Of Privacy Activates Fight Or Flight
Human beings are animals - even when we’re at work. And so when we’re in a room filled with people, it activates our fight or flight mechanism. They might just be our work colleagues. But our biology doesn’t care. It sees them as a threat, and it thinks we need to be ready to respond. The researchers found that having lots of people increased adrenal fatigue. And this, in turn, made people more liable to suffer from reduced immune function.
Less Ability To Control Personal Space
The ability to control one’s personal space is important for our sense of agency. Feeling that we are masters of our own little patch of the world is essential for keeping us feeling as if we matter. But with the rise of flexi-offices, this is becoming impossible. Flexi-officers - where you never know which desk you’re going to get - remove personal ownership from office areas. Office workers forever feel like nomads. And, as a result, they feel cut off from their home.
