We have received some questions on whether open office plans are better working environments than closed offices in terms of stress and productivity. Here is our view on this, based on scientific studies. Open offices have been created to increase collaboration between employees. Now, new research has questioned the usefulness of open offices, and have identified an unanticipated problem with these: stress.
Open office spaces, rather than enclosed offices with a single desk, have become standard office design over the last decades. Although larger spaces where people work together have been around for a long time, the open workplace really started out with an originally German concept in the 1960s, known as “Burolandschaft” ("office landscape"). The idea behind this concept was to increase collaboration and communication by grouping desks and teams together in an open space, with plants instead of partitions, creating organic boundaries between the teams. Burolandschaft is considered as the first type of open office design, of which modern open office design has evolved.
Today, open offices come in all sorts of different shapes, from classical ones remotely looking like Burolandschaft offices to trendy ones with a living room-like atmosphere full of technology and fun colors.
Do open offices indeed foster collaboration?
While open offices have been designed to increase collaboration between team members, several scientific studies have questioned whether this actually occurs. A study published in the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions B in 2018 showed that so-called face-to-face interactions by colleagues working in the same open space dropped by a staggering 70% following the transition from closed offices to open space. Instead, people interacted more electronically (email, messaging).
This result is completely contrary to what has always been believed. Rather than promoting collaboration and interaction, open offices block direct communication. The researchers concluded that open offices trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and instant messaging.
To put things in perspective, employees interacted directly almost 6 hours per day before the transition from closed offices to open space. This dropped to 1.5 – 2 hours per day after moving to the new open space workplace. And the lost hours of direct interaction do not reflect a loss of small talk. The quality of interactions decreased along with the quantity. And this was reflected, as executives of the companies that participated in the study reported, by a decline in productivity.
Thus, the idea that open offices increase collaboration and productivity may not necessarily be correct.
What is wrong with open office spaces?
The obvious question to ask is why open spaces do not increase collaboration. Two causes have been identified in a scientific article that appeared in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2013.
The first problem is noise. Colleagues talking on the phone, the sounds of keyboards, coughing and sneezing, and other acoustic contamination are detrimental to concentration, and can simply be annoying. People don’t communicate if they are annoyed by the noise and people around them.
The second main cause of workspace dissatisfaction is a lack of privacy. Many people feel the need to withdraw from ongoing work activities, even if just for a short moment. This is hard to do in an open workspace environment, but people may, for instance, put music on, and listen through their headphones. This is not only to withdraw, but also to filter out unpleasant noise.
The problems associated with acoustics and lack of privacy do not outweigh the benefits of enhanced ease of interaction in the open workspace.
Does stress contribute to the failure of open office space?
If you were to browse through websites and blogs, you will find many articles stating that open office workplaces induce stress. This is indeed what you would expect. After all, noise and lack of privacy do reduce the quality of working conditions. This makes employees less satisfied with their work, and this could potentially lead to stress. An open office space can induce a sense of loss of control (or ownership) of the place somebody is working in.
Surprisingly enough, there are hardly any studies addressing the effects of open workspace on health in general, and stress in particular. There is thus to date no convincing evidence that open workspaces provoke stress. Nevertheless, the few studies that have looked at human health have all concluded that open work offices lead to more sick leave, and less productivity. For example, a study performed in Denmark in 2011 has shown that employees working in open space offices have 62% more days of sickness absence than employees working in a two-person private office.
While the available data suggest that open office space correlates negatively with health, a recent American study provided evidence for the opposite for stress. In this study, scientists equipped 231 workers in four office buildings with wearable sensors. Some of these workers had private offices, whereas others were allocated to cubicles or open workspaces. Scientists monitored physical activity and perceived stress.
It turned out that workers in open workplaces were physically more active than those in private offices or cubicles. Also, they appeared to be less stressed. The authors concluded therefore that open workspace might be beneficial, not detrimental, to health.
This study, unfortunately, did not take any other factors into account that might promote stress in an open workspace. For example, if an employee needs to be on the telephone many times for private reasons (sick child, aged parent needing help), this would increase stress in an open office because of lack of privacy. Also, the reason why workers are physically more active in an open office space is not clear. Perhaps they were trying to find some privacy to make telephone calls? Also, it is known that physical activity reduces stress, so that this becomes a confounding factor when measuring stress levels in an open office space.
Conclusion
While there are many papers out there describing the pros and cons of open office space, the precise consequences of working in such an open space on human health have not been sufficiently investigated. While most of the available data indicate a negative effect, the study on physical activity and perceived stress in an open workspace suggests differently. Therefore, the claim that open office space leads to stress has some merit, but needs more backing from future scientific studies.
