Open Office Enmity

Foreword: This post will probably only be valuable to anyone who currently works in an open office, is about to work in an open office, or is just interested in what a strange man on the internet might have to say about open offices.

I have been fortunate, in my opinion, to avoid working in a typical open office. Two of the positions I've had in the last three years used five-foot tall cubicles, and the other had two people sharing an office while providing a team room full of workstations that could seat up to eight people. So before I continue I want to make it clear that I am already somewhat biased against open offices, even given that I have never worked in one. That said, I want to provide a limited summary of the arguments I've heard against open offices along with my own.

One of the most cited problems that workers in an open office, or those in the shorter varieties of cubicles, have is noise. Conversations that typically would have been muffled by having the acoustic dampening walls provide reverberate across a space, and so instead of only being able to hear the people within four feet of you, you can now pristinely hear the intimate conversation of someone forty feet away. In an open space with few people this isn't likely to be a major concern, but as there are more people the chance that someone will be talking increases until it's almost a certainty. This is only further exacerbated by the requirements of some functional groups; for instance, sales and business development are highly communicative roles which more or less assure that someone is talking, even for small groups. And this says nothing about the intentional and unintentional noises that people create at their desks. I am an example of one such perpetrator as I tend to tap drum beats against my desk while I concentrate.

To combat these particular sources of noise, a lot of workers flee to the sound isolation provided by headphones. What you cannot hear cannot bother you after all, but headphones have drawbacks. Workers might inadvertently ignore conversations they should be a part of, or their headphones act as a form of social shield that keeps people from bothering them even when it might otherwise be perfectly fine or helpful to do so.

Workers also tend to note that these additional sounds make it difficult to have important conversations of their own. It becomes a lot more difficult to concentrate on what the person in front of you is saying when you can hardly understand them or you can't help but eavesdrop on such-and-such's conversation. A solution proffered by employers to this is often the installation of sound paneling to the space or white noise generators. These measures are not completely effective, but from what I hear they do help somewhat.

Then of course, because private conversations cannot realistically be conducted in a space which carries sound so well, they are typically moved to conference rooms, or if lucky, someone's private office. Nevermind that conference rooms have a tendency to be booked solid throughout a day. So consequently, some conversations which ordinarily should have been private are conducted essentially in the open out of necessity.

This leads to the next concern of many workers: privacy. I hope that it goes without saying that we human beings are intensely reliant on physical reassurances of our privacy. Whether or not our actual privacy is impacted, the progressive removal of physical constructs impacts our perceived sense of our own privacy. The removal of the door suggests we aren't allowed to dictate whether something is private or not. The removal of walls suggests that someone may disturb our privacy at any moment. As a result, without a great deal of trust of their coworkers, workers find themselves stressed and worried that someone will take notice they aren't working or aren't working effectively.

Thus the company, whether they intended to or not, subtly provides a mechanism by which their employees could police each other. Of course, I think this is rubbish as the culture could always rubber band in the other direction, i.e., everyone mutually agrees not to care if anyone else is actually working. There are incentives that prevent this, but at the same time, the kind of work environments that would cause this are also the kind that probably wouldn't have these incentives.

Both noise and privacy then contribute to another solution commonly employed by workers: working remotely. If you can do this, then you can avoid both problems by choosing where you work. Obviously there will generally be less noise in your home office, and even if it's not completely private, for instance because your family is around, it's still a significantly less people overall. Even working from a coffee shop provides some remedies to the aforementioned problem: the sounds are often dominated by the noise of the machinery, and though what you're doing isn't really private, most people don't really care about it either.

However, what this informs us of, is that the problems with open office are not fundamentally about how noisy or how private the environment is. Instead, they are really about two things: autonomy and trust.

When there are less people in a room, a worker has the ability to ask people to be quieter. The privacy of their work is naturally more restricted to those people that inhabit their space. As more or more people inhabit the space, the worker slowly loses choices. Instead the worker must don headphones to drown out the noise, the only semblance of choice they feel they have left in the matter. As anyone can see what they're doing, they no longer choose to work, but instead work out of peer pressure.

Open offices are cited as improving the number of personal interactions (which acts as a proxy for innovation and productivity), but in the contexts where that mattered, people were actively choosing to leave their workspace. I think most notably of Bell Labs where engineers had their own offices. The accidental interactions were not taking place within these engineers offices but as they walked through the hallways. Jamming a bunch of people in an open office ironically removes the choice to be open to interacting with someone, instead replacing it with the choice to be closed to an interaction so you can keep working.

And in the grander scheme of things, most workers do not choose to move to open offices. These choices are made from above and thrust upon them. Anecdotal evidence I've heard of open offices suggests that it can go very well as long as leadership involves employees throughout the process.

But to do so requires trust. And frankly open offices do not seem be the result of trust. Most would not allow someone to make a choice for them unless they trusted them. This applies equally so to employers, though the power imbalance means that employees will sometimes turn a blind eye. When leadership teams make these decisions unilaterally or ignore employee opinions, they present the view that the employees cannot be trusted to make the best decision for themselves or the company. In situations where leadership is deceptive about their primary motivations, they tell employees that they cannot be trusted. Self-deception is a huge element of both. For instance, employees may be ignorantly concluding open offices wouldn't be better, while employers delude themselves that they're doing this to improve productivity when it is really about reducing wrap rates.

Ultimately, to have your cake and eat it too, both parties must be amenable to compromise, but that can only come about through honesty, transparency, and trust. You have to let people decide for themselves what they think will help them be the most productive, while also encouraging everyone to make suggestions on what would be in the best interest of the organization. There's nothing that says that won't be an open office anyway, but at least it'll have been a cooperating, trusting organization that made that choice for itself.