Finally Out in the Open

I read with great interest an article that appeared on the BBC home page this week regarding open-plan offices. If you’ve never been afflicted with one, the term refers to those arrangements without offices or even cubicles, where everyone’s desks are just sitting out in the middle of the floor. In extreme cases, people aren’t even assigned a specific desk; there’s just a communal work space, and everyone sits wherever they want to. There has been a lot of effort made in recent years to sell the open-plan office as “new” and “innovative,” as a reaction to the common “cubicle farm” arrangement, all of which ignores the fact that open-plan offices were used for decades before the cubicle became common. And, as anyone who has ever had a desk in the middle of the floor can tell you, there’s a very good reason that cubicles did become common…

As it turns out, open-plan offices are based on not one but two common fallacies. The first is simply that people who are sitting together in the shared space will spend their time talking about work-related topics. This can happen, of course, but unfortunately, people aren’t usually that disciplined. This results in a lot of extraneous conversations about whatever the employees happen to be thinking about at the moment, which both wastes time and distracts all of the people around them who are trying to work. Which brings us to the second problem: having people all around you working, talking, and making noise turns out to be really, really distracting…

Modern research on multitasking – some of which is cited in the BBC report – has revealed the very interesting fact that most of us can’t. The average person needs to focus on a single activity in order to have anything like full efficiency; splitting time between two or more activities just makes all of them take longer. This has turned into a perennial problem for college instructors, by the way, because too many of our students believe that they really can write emails, text with their friends, and surf the Internet while also paying attention to lectures. The truth is that, with very rare exceptions, anyone trying to do this will end up with memories of what they were texting about and some of the things they saw online, but not so much about the lecture they were nominally present for…

Now I don’t want to sound as if I am picking on college students in particular. On the contrary, if business leaders with years or decades on the job fall victim to the same fallacy every time they approve of things like the open-plan office concept, what can you expect from undergraduates who have been brought up to believe that they can do everything at once if they try hard enough? The real question, in my mind, is how anybody who has ever tried to get anything done in a noisy environment with multiple people talking and several different people trying to get their attention could possibly believe that having all of their employees sitting around a single table was a good idea in the first place…

Of course, it is possible that since most decisions regarding office furniture and organization are made by managers, who will generally have been given offices with real walls and doors as one of the perks of their position, that no one with the authority to reject the open-plan concept had realized how counter-productive it really was until recently. If this is the case, I think we can expect to see more and more companies going back to cubicle farms as the consequences become clear to those in charge. At least, we can all hope so, right?