Open offices may be as bad as you thought

A cubicle-free workplace without private offices is supposed to force employees to collaborate. To have them talk more face-to-face. To get them off instant messenger and spontaneously brainstorming about new ideas.

But a recent study by two researchers offers evidence to support what many people who work in open offices already know: It doesn’t really work that way. The noise causes people to put on headphones and tune out. The lack of privacy prompts others to work from home when they can. And the sense of being in a fishbowl means many choose email over a desk-side chat.

In an open office workplace, said study co-author and Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein in a recent interview, “I walk into this space, and I see everyone wearing big headphones staring intently at a screen trying to look busy because everyone can see them.” The result can be that “instead of interrupting people, I’ll send an email.”

Bernstein studied two Fortune 500 companies that made the shift to an open office environment from one where workers had more privacy. Using “sociometric” electronic badges and microphones, as well as data on email and instant messenger use by employees, the researchers found in the first study that after the organization made the move to openplan offices, workers spent 73 percent less time in faceto-face interactions. Meanwhile, email rose 67 percent and IM use went up 75 percent. “We were surprised by the degree to which we found the effect we found,” Bernstein said.

In a second study, the researchers looked at shifts in interactions in pairs of colleagues, finding a similar drop in face-to-face communication and a smaller but still significant increase in electronic correspondence.

There’s a “natural human desire for privacy, and when we don’t have privacy, we find ways of achieving it,” Bernstein said. “What it was doing was creating not a more faceto-face environment, but a more digital envioronment. That’s ironic because that’s not what people intend to try to do when creating open office spaces.”

JEFFREY MACMILLAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Open office plans were supposed to get people to interact more. One study suggests workers have found new ways to avoid each other.