The Open-plan Office Hell

The tray clacks and spinning rollers pull the sheet in. It flows through a set of belts and pulleys to the center where toner roll makes a sliding noise and imprints it with the image. The printer loudly pushes out the paper on the other side. Draga Da Da...Draga Da Da...it goes through the rest of the pages in the job. Then the coffee machine starts whirring, grinding the beans for a "fresh" cup. A paper cup drops and it starts gushing coffee out through its udder. Someone presses start on the microwave and it goes into its own buzz. Sometimes you can smell what they plan to eat. Conversations from three directions enter your head through your ears and create random interference patterns. This maybe good for a science experiment but its not good for concentration. An ordinary morning at work. 

The open office was adopted around the world like blue jeans. The thought process behind it was that it creates an environment that is more conducive to collaboration and communication, which is supposed to accelerate work. But in fact it does precisely the opposite. The noise and sensory overload of open office is detrimental to productivity. This setup may be good for 24 hour news channels and stock markets but not for software development, which requires high concentration.

A bit of History 

The first of these open offices were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1906. It was based on the open plan of factories. The purpose of these office plans, while creating a lot of space utilization, was also to give managers and supervisors the ability to keep an eye on the staff.

In the 1950s a German company Quickborner introduced the concept of Bürolandschaft or "office landscape" as means to improve on this situation by making more organic groupings with partitions. Then the Herman Miller company did some research on what bothered most people about open environments and came up the with the Action Office system which gave us the Cubicle.

As a resistance to this grey dehumanizing world of little boxes we went back to open joyful environments. 

Why Open Offices?

The short answer would be cost. 

In London's West End, space for one desk (4 sq m) costs £8,500 ($13,000) a year. A private office would cost much more than that - and have a larger carbon footprint.

Companies are trying their best to keep the costs down while they have to maintain central offices for business reasons. But there has to be a point where the curve that represents the cost saving aspects of this model meets the productivity decline curve, representing the ideal level of compromise. Where is that? I don't know.

Silence and Productivity

The original open offices used to be silent spaces as well but the new modern highly collaborative knowledge worker environments brought with them the open plan where a lot of small meetings could take place, anywhere. But I only realized how annoying these meetings must be to others when my neighbors were having similar micro meetings.  

" We have the capacity for about 1.6 human conversations, so if you're listening to one conservation particularly you're only left with 0.6 for your inner voice that helps you write," he says, claiming that office workers are 66% less productive in an open-plan office than when left on their own.

" Now that's key when we're talking about open-plan offices, because if I'm trying to do work, it requires me to listen to a voice in my head to organise symbols, to organise a flow of words and put them down on paper." If someone else is speaking your "auditory bandwidth" is full, he says, and it becomes very hard to listen to that voice in your head.

For any kind of work that requires a lot of thinking such as software development, silence is of prime importance. As Jeff Atwood puts in his 'programmer bill of rights':

6. Every programmer shall have quiet working conditions
Programming requires focused mental concentration. Programmers cannot work effectively in an interrupt-driven environment. Make sure your working environment protects your programmers' flow state, otherwise they'll waste most of their time bouncing back and forth between distractions.

Headphones and Health

How did we respond to all the noise around us? We put on headphones and switched on loud music to drown the noise. This isn't a great idea itself. Piling noise over noise will only increase your stress level and will lead to health problems in the long term. In fact, as current studies are discovering that people who work in open office environments as less happy with their work environments and suffer from more health problems. The number of sick leaves are also higher with people in open office environments. 

" People who are seated closely together in an open-plan work environment may suffer from physiological or psychological reactions such as stress, fatigue and increased blood pressure levels," reported Vinesh Oommen, a senior project officer for the Queensland University of Technology. Workplace experts have even come up with a term to describe this new phenomenon: "sardine rage."

Introverts and Extroverts

Like everything in this world, the office plans are suited to the majority. Introverts that are a minority otherwise but majority in creative and technical professions, such as software development, have to bear the brunt. Introverts are not good at handling sensory stimulation for too long as they need to get away from it to recharge.

While extroverts need sensory stimulation like coffee to keep them awake an going. Extroverts thrive on the "collaborativeness" of the open-office environment, while Introverts are the one with headphones on, trying to get some work done in the incessant noise.

Possible Responses

The office environment has to adapt to the needs of different groups and balance the need for collaboration with the need for privacy and quiet.

A possible compromise could be a layout with spaces for collaboration (usually called meeting rooms) and spaces for productivity. The meeting rooms are always full and people constantly use the productivity space to meet their needs in the process hurting it. The separation should be adopted as a culture so that we can get the best of both worlds. 

Second could be to group people according to their need of collaboration. People who spend a lot of time in meetings and calls, such as managers or sales staff could be grouped and those who spend a lot less should be given separate space to work. After a daily stand-up which uses a shared space, people could retreat to their corners. 

Third could be to have flexibility in terms of hours and location. There could certain high-noise hours, for example from 10am to 3pm, and the rest low-noise hours. People should be able to choose their working hours according to their need for collaborative vs productive work. Working from home or offsite could give people looking to do more productive work the necessary space.