The Guardian: 'Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell'
Source: The Guardian
In case you still needed persuading that open-plan offices were devised by Satan himself in one of the deepest caverns of hell, the Harvard Business Review delves into new research showing just how frustrating people find them – and just how paltry, on the other side of the scale, are the benefits they bring. Using data from surveys of 42,700 American office workers, researchers Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear conclude that it’s not other people’s mess that bothers us the most, nor lack of personal space, nor even noise level per se, so much as a “lack of sound privacy” – hearing other people’s conversations, and perhaps equally crucially, knowing that other people can hear yours.
... We already know that open-plan offices have been associated with less persistence at challenging tasks, lower motivation, higher stress and blood pressure, and more. But Kim and Dear’s work, published in the December 2013 issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, puts paid to any suggestion that the benefits of easy communication between workers – effortless exchange of information, useful chance conversations sparking new ideas – outweighs these irritations. Employees in private settings actually rated "ease of interaction" as better, overall, than those in open offices.
... Of course, these studies don’t tend to focus on one other major benefit of open-plan: it’s a cheap way of cramming more people into less space.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/nov/18/open-plan-offices-bad-harvard-business-review
