Why Open Office Design Makes You Less Pproductive
525,000 square feet 300 million dollars 3,000 employees 1 open office You’ve probably heard about the recent expansion of Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. The new building, MK21, designed by Canadian starchitect Frank Gehry, is the pinnacle of today’s open office design trend. It's Facebook that made these open offices a major thing and I could never stand the idea. It turns out that i was right.
In 2018, Harvard Business School Associate Professor Ethan Bernstein published a study analyzing the impacts of open workspaces on collaboration.
It was the first study of its kind to look empirically at how a transition to open offices affected employees’ productivity and daily interactions.
The study found that employees had substantially less face-to-face interactions after switching to open office spaces.
With massive amounts of transparency comes the next issue:
“If you’re sitting in a sea of people, for instance, you might not only work hard to avoid distraction (by, for example, putting on big headphones) but — because you have an audience at all times — also feel pressure to look really busy.
This is why I'm a privacy advocate and against radical transparency.
A workspace that limits distraction isn’t just an HR decision — it’s a financial one. The Information Overload Research Group estimates that such distraction costs U.S. companies almost $1 trillion dollars annually.
Instead of fighting with distraction, our cross-functional teams collaborate openly, not self-consciously, with their team members, and build off of each other’s energy.
It’s amazing how much these rooms have increased their productivity.
One of The Most Important Management Tips Based on Research
7 is the magic number of team members for decision-making effectiveness. Once you reach that number, each additional member reduces effectiveness by 10%.
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Great article from a productivity perspective! I do my best work hidden from all people or in a small team.
Same here. Doing great work is always working for the long term. When there is constant scrutiny and micromanagement, you are just working for the short term which has become sort of a disease of our time. Startups used to plan on changing the world. But now everybody starts one and think of an exit strategy or worse; they have no plans at all.
Office designed as Open spaces are a big mistake, believe me, I work in one...
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I've had some experiences at school with about 40 students and it was already a mess. With few hundred at work and lots of responsibilities at hand, I can imagine it being a mess. I agree with 7 being the magic number because most of the productive teamwork I've been involved in had 5-10 members.
Since last year I used to work sharing my office with three mates, that was already noisy sometimes... now, my company has decided to demolish the walls between offices and we are 30 in the same floor in order to improve communications ;-)... I'm very upset, you can imagine.
That's basically just a hell on Earth for any introvert/lone wolf types. How can these executives be so disconnected from reality. Too much communication always becomes too much of a distraction and that's the nicer part.
People have their quirks and some of the best performers have some of the weirdest quirks. Lack of privacy can make these people really self-conscious and even criticized. That's just terrible both for the individuals and thecompany.
I have worked in offices in the past and I never liked when they were too open. It is just way too distracting to be able to see what everyone else is doing.