The Shadowy Results of Open Offices

Create an open, mobile work space filled office, they said. It’ll be great, they said. Your people will collaborate and innovate at record levels, they said.

According to a recent HBR article, when the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%. As people today have vastly more options for communicating (email, IM, text, Skype, Slack, etc.), that number doesn’t seem so bad, until you realize digital communication is prone to radical misinterpretation (anybody ever get upset over a text that was later found to be no big deal?), and collaboration for remote employees has actually been found to decrease significantly — as much as 80% less as co-located colleagues, according to some studies, with 17% saying they never communicate about their projects at all!

All hope has not been abandoned just yet, of course. In some studies (albeit mostly looking at IT teams, so the bias should be considered there), employees embraced the autonomy of deciding where they worked (office/remote, desk, cafe’, or social hubs), but some people really struggle in the seeming chaos of open/mobile working environments, and this can lead to even less connection as people retreat behind noise cancelling headphones, sunglasses, and even portable “Study Cubby” accessories. Add on concerns around germs (or crumbs! Ewww…), the daily struggle to get your laptop connected, chairs adjusted to the right height (and woe to the person who gets “That Chair”… you know the one…), and you get the idea.

Worst of all, in the absence of a formal framework, people may develop territorial, cliquish or other defensive techniques to protect their “real estate”. And that processing power people are using every day to reset their environment to ergonomic or personal standards? Wouldn’t you rather they spend that energy on… well… work??

There is no single magic bullet for engagement. It will always require that you understand the needs of the people involved, and open and mobile offices are no exception. There are many reasons why a company might choose to shift to an open or mobile environment, and it’s 100% fine if one of those reasons is $$$. In many situations, desks sit empty for a considerable part of the day, and companies can save considerable overhead by changing the way their teams do business. Be honest if that’s part of your decision — people will still grumble, but at least they’ll understand what the desired outcome is. Have the courtesy to treat your employees like the intelligent problem solvers they are. You’ll benefit a lot more from THAT than from any office re-design!