OFFICE SPACE SURPRISE

Open is anti -social

Open-plan offices may break down walls — but they don’t break the ice.

The hip architectural style favored by the likes of Google and Facebook makes use of large accessible spaces and does away with stuffy closed-door offices in an attempt to get workers to chat and collaborate. But a Harvard University study published this month found that the newer designs actually make employees less likely to communicate face to face.

Researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban looked at two Fortune 500 companies transitioning to modern offices and found the new layouts decreased the amount of face-to-face interaction by 70 percent and increased e-mails and IMs.

Such designs “appear to have the perverse outcome of reducing, rather than increasing, productive interaction,” they wrote in the study, published in the scholarly journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Staffers in open-plan offices might feel exposed and vulnerable, the study found, so they make sure to look as if they’re working by staring at screens and avoiding eye contact.

“People put on huge headphones to avoid distraction. They stare intently at their screens because they know people are watching and want to look busy,” Bernstein told The Times of London. “Then people looking at them from across the room see someone working intently and don’t want to interrupt. So they send an e-mail instead.”

One of the companies the study looked at did away with walls. Employees were fitted with sociometric tracking devices that showed where they stood, whether they were talking and to whom for 15 days before the change and 15 day after.

When in the “walled” offices, each worker spent an average of 5.8 hours of in-person interaction per day, but after the walls were removed, they spent an average of only 1.7 hours.

They also sent 56 percent more e-mails and 67 percent more instant messages.

A second company got rid of cubicles for its international headquarters. Even though the workers were still sitting close to each other, in clumps of about six to eight desks, their in-person interaction decreased by 67 percent and they, too, sent more e-mails.

Bernstein used an example familiar to many New Yorkers to explain the findings.

“I’ve spent enough time on the [subway] at rush hour to see that being packed together doesn’t necessarily lead to interaction,” Bernstein said.

While other studies have previously questioned the efficacy of the fad, this is the first one to make use of the digital sensor badges instead of relying on selfreported surveys.