Most employees hate them, so why do they persist?

irst, you tear down the walls and dispense with the soulless cubicles. Then you put everyone at long tables, shoulder to shoulder, so that they can talk more easily.

Ditch any remaining private offices, which only enforce the idea that some people are better than others, and seat your most senior employees in the mix. People will collaborate. Ideas will spark. Outsiders will think, “This place has energy.”

That is the myth of the open office, a workplace layout so pervasive that its presence is taken for granted, and its promises of collaboration and innovation are sacrosanct. According to a 2010 study by the International Facility Management Association, 68 percent of people worked in an office with either no walls or low walls, and the number has undoubtedly grown.

There’s just one problem. Employees hate open offices. They’re distracting. They’re loud. There’s little privacy.

“The sensory overload that comes with open-office plans gets to a point where I can barely function,” says one

47-year-old graphic designer. “I even had to quit a job once because of it.”

According to survey data collected by Bospar PR last year, 76 percent of employees surveyed said they hate open offices.

And, for as long as these floor plans have been in vogue, studies have debunked their touted benefits. Researchers have shown that people in open offices take nearly two-thirds more sick leave and report greater unhappiness, more stress, and less productivity than those with more privacy. A 2018 study by Harvard Business School found that open offices reduce face-to-face interaction by about 70 percent and increase email and instant messaging by roughly

50 percent, shattering the notion that they make workers collaborative.

And yet, the open plan persists, too symbolically powerful and cheap for many companies to abandon.

As with so many things today, we have Google, at least in part, to thank. Open floors have existed since the secretarial pools of the 1940s, but when the then 7-year-old Google renovated its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., in 2005, the lofty, light-filled result signaled the dawn of a new professional era.

Architect Clive Wilkinson eschewed the cubicle-heavy interiors of the company’s previous office for something that resembled a neighborhood. There were still some private spaces, but also lots of communal workplaces and small, glassed-in meeting rooms.

Around the same time, a more radical version of the open office was emerging from other startups founded during the dotcom boom of the late ’90s. As these companies proliferated, they looked for cheap ways to differentiate themselves from each other and their predecessors. They found inspiration, Wilkinson says, in the more playful offices that had long been common in the advertising industry.

Some moved into the unfinished lofts of San Francisco’s South of Market district and left them that way. Walls only make things complicated when you’re rapidly adding (and eliminating) staff.

“Those places were terrible,” says Joel Spolsky, who co-founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and is currently the co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow. “They were so loud, because there were no drop ceilings. It was painful for everybody. But (dotcom startups) were doing it because they had literally no choice.”

Out of necessity, an aesthetic was born.

By the time Facebook opened its Frank Gehry–designed Menlo Park headquarters in 2015, the open office had become not just the face of innovation in Silicon Valley but a powerful metaphor. Facebook now houses roughly 2,800 employees in a 10-acre building that the company claims is the largest open floor plan in the world.

“The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together,” founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote when he announced the design in 2012.

The whiff of disruption that open offices carried became irresistible to startups and established companies alike.

“When you talk to leaders in corporate real estate or CEOs about why they designed their space (in an open plan), most will give some fluffy answer,” says Ben Waber, co-founder and CEO of workplace analytics company Humanyze, which uses sensors to track how people use offices and interact with each other. “But when you dig down, it’s because this is what the workplaces look like at a couple of highly successful tech companies.”

Calvin Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University who studies how people work, takes an even more skeptical view: Open offices have become a way to indicate a company’s value to venture capitalists and talent. The goal is “not to improve productivity and collaboration, but to signal that the company (is) doing something interesting.”

Lost amid the symbolism are the employees themselves. According to Humanyze, open plans are great at encouraging interaction between teams, which is useful when a company is trying to create new products. But they are terrible at encouraging interaction within teams, which is necessary for execution-based work, like writing code, when employees need to be in sync.

An open office might be suitable for a company coming up with new ideas, but when someone has to implement them, it becomes distracting.

Of course, one of the main reasons that business leaders default to open plans is simply that they’re inexpensive.

According to commercial real estate association CoreNet Global, the average space allotted to individual employees globally fell from 225 square feet in 2010 to 176 square feet in 2013, and is projected to keep decreasing. This adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings per year at the country’s largest companies.