Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2q5EiME">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Blake Walsh 
<h4>The “Open Office for All” Movement is Toxic</h4>
Recently, there has been a movement at many technology firms, including Microsoft, toward “<a href="http://ift.tt/2prAfOg">open space</a>” floor plans. My building is currently undergoing renovations to convert it to open space, and the temporary office space we are currently assigned to is also configured for open space, so I have already seen how this can go awry.
When you need to focus, typically you achieve this and signal to others by closing your office door. If your office door has been taken away, what is your new “office door”? Typically, this means resorting to brightly colored noise-canceling headphones. This is hardly a perfect solution as there are still visual distractions, and noise-canceling algorithms for headphones are better suited to canceling constant droning noise (such as a plane’s engine) than a chipper co-worker’s update on how the weekend went.
Historically, these open plans tend to be used by news organizations and financial trading floors, where the flow of information from person-to-person must happen with as little latency as possible, lest you miss getting the jump on breaking news or a critical price point on a trade.
Recently, other types of companies, particularly those in the technology sector, have been following suit. Google has been typically given credit for bringing the “open space” concept to Silicon Valley, and many firms have since backed away from the decision. Meanwhile, larger organizations like Microsoft are finally catching up on the “hip” office setup that everyone is using, getting around to converting spaces just in time for the industry to realize this was a movement fraught with peril.
Note: I am not writing this because “my office is being taken away from me” — as an employee of Microsoft with the company for well under a decade, you basically never get your own dedicated office, and end up doubling up with people you may or may not actually work with due to inefficient space allocation. People who have been at the company for ten or fifteen years and just worked their way up to a window office (it is based more on tenure than rank and success) have more to lose here, whereas young twenty-something peons like myself are seeing natural light for the first time from our desks. Even still, I don’t consider this a winning change.
So, why would you implement an open office, and why wouldn’t you?
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2q5CD9K">Don’t you just feel so collaborative and productive? (via <a href="http://ift.tt/2prDfKA">Wikimedia</a>)
<h3>Why Open Space?</h3>
Anyone from HR, recruiting, or high enough up the management chain will tell you in pristine “brochure prose” that open space office configurations foster an airy, positive, and collaborative environment that just cannot be had with private offices. Coworkers interact with each other far more often, which results in issues quickly coming to light and therefore being resolved rapidly.
It is easy to claim that more communication drives faster decision-making, conflict resolution, and faster forward progress as a business.
Particularly in the technology sector, recruiting divisions will tell you that if your office space is stodgy and lacks foosball tables and beanbag chairs, college hires will cite this as a reason to not take the offer to join your company. Facilities and management organizations take this as a cue to hop aboard the open space fad, but perhaps the problems with recruiting certain candidates are deeper, such as in the content of the work mission and the company culture around that mission that manifests in how the office space feels to a candidate.
Microsoft loves documenting its own attempts to modernize its office space, but the thing you’ll notice from articles <a href="http://ift.tt/2q5DOpy">such as this one</a> is the shocking lack of photos of actual workspaces, the “neighborhoods”. The emphasis goes wholly to the common spaces, the tiny focus rooms designed to be uncomfortable if you try to use them for more than a thirty-minute meeting, and precious little attention lands on the actual desk configurations to which employees are assigned. Even the title of the article is cringeworthy. If you over-index on recruitment and other short-term goals, you will in the long-term harm employee retention, satisfaction, and culture.
<blockquote>“Microsoft’s inspired new workspaces boost creativity and collaboration” [sure, keep telling yourself that]</blockquote>
Most importantly, though? It saves money. Sure, there is cost in converting to open space if you already have offices with walls built, but spartan warehouses can be had where all you need is to provide long rows of desks and not much else.
Bonus aspects of giant rooms with many employees toiling away include an easy at-a-glance way for management to see who is at their desk, who gets up to take a break every twenty minutes, who is browsing Facebook, who has not arrived for the day yet, and so on.
There are also benefits for building management in terms of keeping HVAC complexity low, since you only have a few large open spaces to manage instead of many offices and hallways that need their own thermostats and sensors, along with a plan for mitigating air flow.
Without rigid offices, it also is easy to scale team seating areas as people and join and leave the organization, since you would otherwise end up with empty offices or offices where people double or triple up.
<h3>What are the problems? Or, why *not* Open Space?</h3>
Where to begin? Let us start with the most commonly cited benefit, the forced interactions that boost collaboration. While employees do interact with each other more often, there is no guarantee that topics of discussion are centered around work. This really just means bringing “water cooler conversation” to more places than just the water cooler.
Via the <a href="http://ift.tt/1nNpwAy">New Yorker</a>:
<blockquote>In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation.</blockquote>
Per the <a href="http://ift.tt/2q5zNl3">Washington Post article</a> on this matter:
<blockquote>I’ve formed interesting, unexpected bonds with my cohorts. But my personal performance at work has hit an all-time low. Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It’s like being in middle school with a bunch of adults.</blockquote>
Conversations happen more commonly, but is there reason to believe these conversations are ever about work itself? Or are they just platitudes about the weekend or the recent game of “<a href="http://ift.tt/2prKlyL">sportsball</a>” that took place? Is this demonstrably better than Slack channels? <a href="http://ift.tt/2j3xrmr">People do talk more, but it is not about work-related things</a>. A mitigation often used is the provision of “phone booths” or focus rooms, giving employees a place to go to simulate the office they wish they had. However, if you have to go to this other location to be productive, then why bother even having a desk? Why even come to work when you could focus best at home? Is it really just for the face-to-face time?
<blockquote>“The best thinking has been done in solitude — the worst has been done in turmoil” -Thomas Edison</blockquote>
<h4>A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words</h4>
The cost of interruptions when you are focusing on a task involving deep thought cannot be emphasized enough, particularly for those in a discipline that involves working with code:
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2prAgli.">via <a href="https://twitter.com/detly/status/394755439314755584">@detly</a>
To further emphasize that focused time is essential, <a href="http://www.cc2e.com/">Code Complete</a> is an aging book remains relevant far beyond its time:
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2q5BZsR"><a href="http://www.cc2e.com/">Code Complete</a>, Steve McConnell
And, this wouldn’t be a commentary on office life without <a href="http://ift.tt/2lYWF8i">a relevant Dilbert comic</a>:
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2q5gXL5.">(je suis Dilbert)
<h4>Down with the Sickness</h4>
Not only is working in close proximity to others without separation distracting, it also leads to <a href="http://ift.tt/1nNpwAy">more spread of disease</a>, and therefore more sick days used by the workforce. Studies have shown that employees in open floor plan setups have significantly more sick days (<a href="http://ift.tt/1fj4e9H">in the case of this study</a>, 50% more sick days were had) than those with cubicles or dedicated offices.
It’s a cost-cutting measure, generally speaking — more employees per unit of square footage (but what if you factor in lost productivity due to employee discomfort and an increase in sick days?). If you do a <a href="http://ift.tt/1WplYrC">cost-benefit-analysis taking these factors into account</a>, the conclusion you get to seems to suggest that even if you ignore conversion and startup costs from moving to an open space from one that is not, this is still not a wise move, or is at minimum not broadly applicable as the C-suite might like to think it is.
<h3>Mitigations when Open Space is Inevitable</h3>
Employees do not get a choice when their management decides that they will be subjected to open space seating. There are ways that management can execute open space in a way that makes it more tolerable, and there are things that you as an employee can do to help maintain your sanity.
<ul>
<li>Establish ground rules with your peers (i.e. Is food at the desk okay? What about hot food? Odiferous food? Loud chips?). That said, don’t go overboard with the rules, lest we recreate our junior high days with the need for hall passes.</li>
<li>Make it clear whether phone calls are permissible at one’s desk or not. Work or personal? Does it matter?</li>
<li>Make it clear that when you are using headphones, you are not to be bothered.</li>
<li>Embrace the fact that there will be noise at all times, and use your headphones. Get the best ones that money can buy. Get your office cost center to comp them if possible.</li>
<li>Use a signage solution like a <a href="http://ift.tt/2lf0bGS">Luxafor</a> or a <a href="http://ift.tt/2q5mQHU">Blync</a> to communicate from a distance whether you are working up against a deadline or available to give an opinion on a project’s progress. No need for this though if everyone adopts headphones as a means to communicate busyness.</li>
</ul>
As an employer, the onus is on management to provide means and resources for employees to adapt to the space in a way that best suits the individual, not the organization at large:
<ul>
<li>Have a no-stigma approach to working from home, if your business permits it. If you work in software development, this should always be permissible. After all, it is not like you are at Boeing, for example, where the plane won’t get built by you not being physically present to put the wings together.</li>
<li>Let your employees be adults and choose an approach to hours and telecommuting that works best for them.</li>
<li>Have a mixture of bookable offices, focus rooms, cubicles, and conference rooms on hand with some sort of <a href="http://ift.tt/2prst7c">hoteling</a> policy.</li>
<li>Have a budget for employees to pick their own headphones, perhaps from a pre-approved list. Give options for Bose, Beats, V-MODA, and other major brands. Give options for wired headphones for those who care about sound quality, and options for those who prefer wireless so they don’t snag anything when standing up from their desk. Get models that have microphones so they can also be used for conference calls when getting up to go to a phone booth or focus room.</li>
</ul>
<h3>So, what have we learned?</h3>
Open floor plans do work for some industries, such as news media or a trading floor, where the flow of information is essential to the time-sensitive rhythm of business. <a href="http://ift.tt/2q5awr2">For software developers, designers, or really any discipline requiring creative focus</a>, employees benefit from a solitary space where they can do their very best work. While it is possible that in open space you may overhear a conversation that lets you jump in and save someone some time or frustration, it is far more likely that these distractions are just that — distractions that harm your productivity more than they help others’ ability to get work done.
If you are honest with yourself, here are the three core reasons to adopt an open space plan as a business:
<ol>
<li>Money: Cutting costs, plain and simple. More heads per square foot.</li>
<li>Paranoia: You want to make sure your employees are always working.</li>
<li>Not understanding different people or organizations have different needs: Extroverts in charge of the decision failing to understand how introverted people feel comfortable working, for example, and news media has different needs from concept art divisions.</li>
</ol>
To reiterate the second point above, Quartz has a great piece on this titled, “<a href="http://ift.tt/2jJaSSf">if you don’t trust your employees to work remotely, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place</a>”. Really, the tension between open space and permitting employees to work from home comes down to the old-school nature of management centered around “butts-in-seats” time versus the more modern, always-connected, flexible “results-only work environment” (ROWE). If you can deliver great work by being in the office for five hours per day and supplement that with creative focus time at home for a number of hours each day, is that not better than being at work for exactly eight hours every single day from 9-to-5 sharp but just going through the motions in an uninspired manner?
Some people are early risers, some are night owls, some have kids to pick up or drop off at various times — it is important to respect the fact that your employees are adults, and solutions that assume “one size fits all” never work at scale.
In the write-up from Quartz, an observation is made around the fact that there people will always find a way to “slack within the rules”:
<blockquote>[if you find yourself saying:] “I can’t give these people freedom and autonomy to do work in the best way they see fit:” You should consider finding different people for your organization instead of pursuing an authoritarian regime.</blockquote>
The other thing that I have not seen much documentation on from businesses that are not just acquiring open spaces for use, but are investing millions of dollars as Microsoft is to convert existing buildings with offices to open space: it may be cheaper due to more heads per square foot for space allocation in the long run, but what is the expected time frame for netting out with that initial colossal investment to modify the property you already have?
Again, the motivations here are driven by finances, so it would do employers well to be upfront about the fact that this is a cost-cutting measure in the long run and to help employees adjust by providing alternate workspaces and the ability to work from home to ease the transition.
If you have run the numbers and have decided that open space is the right move for your business (i.e. if you anticipate 40% savings on real estate square footage but an associated 15% drop in employee productivity due to the increased interruptions and discomfort with the open layout and that you are okay with this), then more power to you, but you need to own that decision. Do not try to convince yourself you are modern, hip, and collaborative because of this decision (you may just so happen to be “modern, hip, and collaborative”, but how few walls you have in your office won’t be the determinant).
Like all businesses, you are running the numbers to make a calculated, economically sound decision, and that is fine. Your employees are adults, and if you respect them as such, they will in turn respect you.
In an always-connected workplace with the advent of smartphones and telecommuting, work should be able to happen from anywhere, just so long as it gets done. Don’t make this harder than it is.
Next post: Digital Anthropology in Public Places
Thanks for reading!
Blake &lt;<a href="https://twitter.com/b_t_walsh">@b_t_walsh</a>&gt;
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<a href="http://ift.tt/2prw8lg">Concentrative Work: Concentrating on Work, or Concentrating the Workers?</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">Prototyping: From UX to Front End</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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