animeger.blogg.se - Open the office

In this study, removing barriers instead decreased these interactions while increasing the amount of electronic distraction. My critiques of open offices (c.f., Deep Work) assumed that removing spatial barriers would generate more face-to-face disruptions. What is surprising, however, is the fact that face-to-face interactions declined so sharply in the first place. “ an internal and confidential management review, executives reported to us qualitatively that productivity, as defined by the metrics used by their internal performance management system, had declined after the redesign to eliminate spatial boundaries.” Not surprisingly, this shift from face-to-face to electronic interaction made employees less effective. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc’d 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%. At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication.

After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day.

To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day.

Contrary to what’s predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout.

They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue. “he notion that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction - driving the formation of social ties and therefore information exchange and collaboration - is one of the most robust findings in sociology.”īut when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed.

As the study’s authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, note: Why do companies deploy open office layouts? A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence.Īs I learned in a fascinating new study, published earlier this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, there was good reason to believe that this might be true.

On Spatial Boundaries and Face-to-Face Interaction