Harvard Business Review: The truth about open offices

Open plan offices aren't quite as collaborative as they seem. Photo / File

It's never been easier for workers to collaborate — or so it seems. Open, flexible, activity-based spaces are displacing cubicles, making people more visible. Messaging is displacing phone calls, making people more accessible. Enterprise social media such as Slack are displacing water-cooler conversations, making people more connected. Virtual-meeting software such as Zoom is displacing in-person meetings, making people ever-present. One could argue that designing workplaces for interaction between two or more individuals has never seemed so easy.

But as the physical and technological structures for omnichannel collaboration have spread, evidence suggests they are producing behaviours at odds with designers' expectations and business managers' desires. In a number of workplaces we have observed, those structures have produced less interaction — or less meaningful interaction — not more.

In this article, we discuss those unintended consequences and provide guidance on conducting experiments to uncover how your employees really interact.

THE ARCHITECTURE AND THE ANATOMY OF COLLABORATION

Workers are surrounded by a physical architecture: individual offices, cubicles or open seating. That physical architecture is paired with a digital architecture: email, enterprise social media, mobile messaging and so forth.

But although knowledge workers are influenced by this architecture, they decide, individually and collectively, when to interact. Even in open spaces with colleagues in proximity, people who want to eschew interactions have an amazing capacity to do so. They can avoid eye contact or take a walk. Ironically, the proliferation of ways to interact makes it easier not to respond: For example, workers can simply ignore a digital message.

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. The recipient of, say, an email decides whether to respond immediately. These individual behaviours together make up an anatomy of collaboration similar to an anthill. It is generated organically as people work and is shaped by the beliefs, assumptions, values and ways of thinking that define the organisation's culture.

Until recently the anatomy of collaboration was hard to observe. But technology has made it possible to detect and analyse the flows of communication.

Sensors in chairs measure how long workers are at their desks. Sensors in the floor measure when and how they move. Sensors in smartphones track where they go.

Another way to detect interactions is by collecting the digital "breadcrumbs" people leave when they book a meeting or send an email, thanks to systems designed to save communication metadata. Increasingly, employers can use advanced analytics tools to study that data to understand employees' collective behaviours. Algorithms that assess workers' movements and interactions can learn to distinguish collaboration from mere copresence.

These advances have allowed us to confirm something many people have suspected: Collaboration's architecture and anatomy are not lining up. Using advanced wearables and capturing data on all electronic interactions, we 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 per cent after the firms transitioned to open offices, while electronic interactions increased to compensate.

Why did that happen? People in open offices create a what is known as a "fourth wall," and their colleagues come to respect it. If someone is working intently, people don't interrupt her. Especially in open spaces, fourth-wall norms spread quickly.

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.

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 per cent less about their assignments than co-located team members did.

NOURISH AN ANATOMY OF COLLABORATION

Some people believe that a better blueprint could solve the collaboration conundrum. Architects and manufacturers of office systems reinforce that view by building "flexible," "agile," "activity based" spaces to allow workers to craft their own spaces to suit them. But collaboration is a team sport. Offices that are overly focused on supporting individual preferences are unlikely to do an optimal job of supporting the overall team.

Leaders need to make the call about what collective behaviours should be encouraged or discouraged and how. Their means should include not just the design of workspace configurations and technologies but the design of tasks, roles and culture as well.

To boost collaboration, you need to increase the right kinds of interactions and decrease ineffective ones. You'll have to carefully choose your trade-offs. That means you need to understand current patterns of interaction and consider how you want to change them. After using technology from Humanyze, an organisational analytics software firm headed by one of us (Ben Waber), to track interactions, a major energy company decided to increase communication between departments that had strong process dependencies and reduce communication between other departments by co-locating some in a new building and moving others off-site.

CONDUCT REAL EXPERIMENTS

The best way to find the optimal workplace design for particular groups is to run rigorous experiments. That means collecting and analysing data on interactions, developing a hypothesis about how to improve them and testing your hypothesis against a control group.

Boosting productivity in an open-plan office requires a clear strategy. Photo / Getty Images

A major software company did this and discovered that 90 per cent of face-to-face interactions took place at people's desks. Just 3 per cent occurred in common areas (the rest took place in meeting rooms). The company had been planning to move to unassigned seating to increase interactions among teams, but it realised that would be highly disruptive to collaboration and abandoned the plan.

When conducting such experiments, you need to consider the privacy implications of collecting the necessary data. Email and especially sensor metadata is sensitive. In addition to questions about the legality of amassing such information, which depends on local laws and regulations, there are ethical concerns. Companies should be transparent about what data they are collecting and sensitive to employees' feelings about who owns it.

Organisations that get all this right typically have a single executive overseeing both human resources and real estate. That said, a single best physical or digital workspace architecture will never be found — more interaction is not necessarily better, nor is less. The goal should be to get the right people interacting with the right richness at the right times.

Written by: Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber
© 2020 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group