Open office plans don’t work? What a surprise!

I’m pretty lucky.

I left the wonderful world of corporate for the freelance life before companies started implementing open concept floor plans. You know, the ones in which workers don’t even have cubicles anymore. Your desk is next to the next colleague’s desk, separated (in the best case) by an 8” high panel – probably frosted to let the light through. No physical, aural, visual, or psychological privacy.

The majority of my work years were blessedly spent in a private office. But I did log time in a semi-private office, and a few stints in a cubicle.

The semi-private was fine. My roommate had excellent technical skills and was pretty helpful when I had questions. We were friendly enough. But it wasn’t the ideal situation on either side, and we were both delighted when we each got a room of our own.

After the brief stint in the double, my time at that company (5 or 6 years) was spent in a private office, generally with a window. Yay! I’ve never worked with anyone who does not have a strong preference for a private office with a window. Never.

I left that company for a place that was primarily cubicles, and although techies at my level got private offices, senior product managers didn’t. It was dreadful. I could overhear every conversation within 10 yards of my cubicle, and the PA system, which paged employees all day, blared over my head. On my first day, I made a pit stop on the way home and got a Walkman with headphones.

Things got a bit better with the headphones. And improved even more when some fellows on my team found a cubicle door somewhere and installed that for me. (The company had stopped “investing” in cubicle doors a couple of years before I blew in, so only legacy employees had them.) My guys commandeered a cubicle door after someone in their area quit. Others in my area had made do. There were a couple of folks with beaded curtains, which made their digs look like a fortune-teller’s. And some people had put up cloth curtains.

The only “advantage” of this cubicle environment was that, on layoff days – and there were regular layoff days – people would stand on their desks and survey the floor. When they saw someone from HR swinging by a cubicle to drag the layoff-ee off into a private office so they could get fired privately, the town criers would holler out the name of the person who’d been tapped. “Alice is gone!” “They just came for Jay!”

At my next company, I always had a private office. Until I didn’t. After nine years, we were acquired by a company that mandated cubicles for everyone form the CEO on down. (The CEO, of course, had a private conference room next to his cubicle…) We were grandfathered into our private office situation, but when we had to move to another building, we were cubicled. The building we moved into was new, so we were able to design our floor and we made sure that there were plenty of meeting rooms – from phone rooms that people could use if they needed to work in peace to large conference room.

Although we did our best to make the new digs habitable, ain’t no one was happy to have been demoted from a private office to a cubicle. No one. Pissing, moaning, grousing were the norm.

At my next stop, I always had a private office which included enough room for a table where you could hold a meeting with four or five others. Sadly, most of the people who reported to me suffered in cubicles. My final corporate gig was in cubicle-ville, the hideousness somewhat ameliorated by working from home once a week.

At home, where I’ve worked for well over ten years, I have an office. It’s small, but it’s got a door and a window. And, since I live alone, really doesn’t have to be private. But it is.

I’ve worked with plenty of people over the years, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a preference – make that a strong preference – for an office of their own.

And yet, corporate space planners, HR-ers, whoever decides what the work-scape is, became ever so fond of those open offices. Not even cubicles. Open concept, all in the supposed service of communication and collaboration.

But a recent study by two researchers offers evidence to support what many people who work in open offices already know: It doesn’t really work that way. The noise causes people to put on headphones and tune out. The lack of privacy prompts others to work from home when they can. And the sense of being in a fishbowl means many choose email over a desk-side chat.

In an open office workplace, study co-author and Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein said in a recent interview, “I walk into this space, and I see everyone wearing big headphones staring intently at a screen trying to look busy because everyone can see them.” The result can be that “instead of interrupting people, I’ll send an email.”(Source: Washington Post)

In one company Bernstein studied, the finding was that “workers spent 73 percent less time in face-to-face interactions. Meanwhile, email use rose 67 percent and IM use went up 75 percent.”

There’s a “natural human desire for privacy, and when we don’t have privacy, we find ways of achieving it,” Bernstein said. “What it was doing was creating not a more face-to-face environment, but a more digital environment. That’s ironic because that’s not what people intend to try to do when creating open office spaces.”

I doubt that this study will put a stake in the heart of open offices. They’re cheaper to erect than cubicles, let alone offices, and you can cram more people into a smaller footprint. And communication and collaboration remain among the buzziest of corporate buzzwords. Still, it’s good to have the academics confirm what anyone who’s worked in an office for more than a week or two can tell you: pretty much everyone wants to work in a private office. Cubicles are bad enough, open concept – that’s fine on HG-TV, but in the work world. Thanks but no thanks.