Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled The Truth About Open Offices: There are reasons why they don’t produce the desired interactions (November-December 2019).
It is worth noting that the article was published prior to ubiquity of Zoom meetings, but the general insights on human behavior likely stand the test of time.
« It’s never been easier for workers to collaborate—or so it seems. Open offices, messaging, and virtual-meeting software in theory make people more visible and available. But as the physical and technological structures for omnichannel collaboration have spread, evidence suggests they are producing less interaction—or less meaningful interaction—not more. This happens because individuals, not companies, decide when and how to engage with others. They become adept at shutting people out and reading signs that their coworkers wish to be left alone. Many companies don’t understand how to achieve the kinds of collaboration they want. »
« The Architecture and the Anatomy of Collaboration. Workers are surrounded by a physical architecture: individual offices, cubicles, or open seating; a single floor, multiple floors, or multiple buildings; a dedicated space for the organization, a space shared with other companies, or a home office. That physical architecture is paired with a digital architecture: email, enterprise social media, mobile messaging, and so forth…
When employees do want to interact, they choose the channel: face-to-face, video conference, phone, social media, email, messaging, and so on. Someone initiating an exchange decides how long it should last and whether it should be synchronous (a meeting or a huddle) or asynchronous (a message or a post). The recipient of, say, an email, a Slack message, or a text decides whether to respond immediately, down the road, or never. These individual behaviors together make up an anatomy of collaboration similar to an anthill or a beehive. It is generated organically as people work and is shaped by the beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of thinking that define the organization’s culture. »
« Until recently the anatomy of collaboration was hard to observe. But technology has made it possible to detect and analyze the flows of communication. Sensors are all the rage. Sensors in chairs measure how long workers are at their desks. Sensors in the floor measure when and how they move. Sensors in RFID badges and smartphones track where they go. Sensors (in the form of video cameras) track whom they are with. Panasonic has added WiFi sensors to lighting systems, which can monitor face-to-face interactions across entire buildings and workplaces. » [creepy]
« Collaboration’s architecture and anatomy are not lining up. Using advanced wearables and capturing data on all electronic interactions, we—along with Stephen Turban, one of Ethan’s former students, who is currently at Fulbright University Vietnam—tracked face-to-face and digital interactions at the headquarters of two Fortune 500 firms before and after the companies transitioned from cubicles to open offices… We found that face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly 70% after the firms transitioned to open offices, while electronic interactions increased to compensate. »
« Proximity Matters. A separate finding of our and others’ research is that team members’ location has a big impact on both their physical and their digital interactions. In general, the farther apart people are, the less they communicate. Research that one of us (Ben) was involved in at the MIT Media Lab shows that the probability that any two people on a corporate campus will interact physically or digitally is directly proportional to the distance between their desks. More broadly, one of the most robust findings in sociology—proposed long before we had the technology to prove it through data—is that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction.
Consider a study conducted at the headquarters of a major consumer products company by Humanyze, an organizational analytics software firm headed by one of us (Ben) that helps companies understand how their teams interact. It found that people on the same team were six times as likely to interact if they were on the same floor, and people on different teams were nine times as likely to interact if they were on the same floor. A study we conducted at the main campus of a Fortune 500 retailer with more than a dozen buildings showed that just 10% of all communications occurred between employees whose desks were more than 500 meters apart. These findings suggest that locating people in proximate buildings won’t improve collaboration; to increase interactions, workers should be in the same building, ideally on the same floor.
And remote work, while undeniably cost-effective, tends to significantly inhibit collaboration even over digital channels. While studying a major technology company from 2008 to 2012, we found that remote workers communicated nearly 80% less about their assignments than co-located team members did; in 17% of projects they didn’t communicate at all. The obvious implication: If team members need to interact to achieve project milestones on time, you don’t want them working remotely. »
« Conduct Real Experiments. The best way to find the optimal workplace design for particular groups is to run rigorous experiments. That means collecting and analyzing data on interactions, developing a hypothesis about how to improve them, and testing your hypothesis against a control group. Mori Building, one of the largest property-management companies in Japan, did this in early 2016 when it sought to create more-productive collaboration among the teams in its corporate headquarters. The office architecture was open, but by using wearable sensors (some of which were supplied by Humanyze) to track face-to-face interactions, Mori discovered that employees largely communicated only with those on their own team. People generally stayed in their team’s reserved seating area and rarely ventured into the open seating areas—which accounted for some 20% of the space.
So Mori’s building-environment-development division staged an experiment to see whether it could influence anatomy with architecture. It chose a corporate floor on which seating was arranged by team (interior design, real estate consulting, sales, and so on). Part of the space remained the same (the control group), and part was turned into “free address” space—open seating, with no desk assignments. When Mori measured face-to-face interactions in that configuration, the results were clear: Although interactions between teams increased, those within teams fell drastically, with people spending 1.26 times as much of their day working in isolation.
Mori was initially pleased with the results. The rise in cross-team interactions meant that people were going directly to others to resolve issues and get things done—bypassing managers, whom the data had revealed to be “communication bottlenecks.” And although this was an unintended consequence, the reason people spent more time on solo work was that meetings lasting 30 minutes or longer diminished (people just found one another when they needed to talk). But there was a dark side: It turned out that managers were not only communication bottlenecks but also gatekeepers of quality. In bypassing them, workers caused problems downstream; within six months, productivity had dropped and client complaints had risen. And although the reduction in meeting time seemed beneficial, in retrospect it seemed that those who gained more solo work time would have produced better work, more efficiently, if they had attended more meetings to receive guidance, while employees who had relied on meetings to ensure an orderly way of dealing with issues now felt burdened by people coming to them on a whim (until they began hiding out in the coffee shop downstairs). In the end, Mori went back to fixed seating by team and reduced the amount of open space. »
« Less Can Be More. Optimizing collaboration doesn’t have to entail a radical overhaul of office space; tweaks can make a difference, and it pays to test their potential impact. Mori is now collecting data about what size the tables in its corporate headquarters should be. Its initial conclusion: Large tables, prescribed by many new office designs in place of individual desks, are about as good at fostering intimate conversations as expansive dining-room tables are—in other words, not good at all.
A manufacturing company found that small changes to furniture can have a big impact. Its headquarters had two types of meeting spaces in the main work areas: ones that were totally open and ones with movable whiteboard barriers on two sides. Over 50% more interactions occurred in the whiteboard areas. Adding more whiteboards was a trivial expense.
Sometimes the best answer doesn’t involve changes to the physical structure. Experiments showed Mori that events deliberately designed to achieve particular interactions between specific individuals and teams had a more precise and valuable impact on interaction patterns than did changes to the office space. »
Ethan Bernstein is coauthor of Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career (2024)
Ben Waber is the author of the book People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us About the Future of Work (2013)
Articles of Interest 