I don’t buy the argument that bean counters are unable to account for vaguer aspects of productivity loss. For one, bigger corporations invest huge amounts of money into productivity research and take the topic very seriously. They aren’t unsophisticated or naive and corporations will really study the internal incentives they create for cost cutting, to make sure they aren’t mistakenly cutting costs that actually lead to other, unanticipated costs. Sure, bureaucracy makes this imperfect, and some companies are worse than others, but it wouldn’t explain 80% or more of all companies shifting to known productivity-destroying office spaces.
Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this:
< https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/hr/2016/... >
I’ve also seen sources claiming that an open plan developer is less than 9% cheaper in real estate terms than a private office developer, without any consideration about interruptions, distractions, communicable disease, lower morale, changed vacation or sick time habits, etc.
9% might sound like a lot of savings on a naive glance, but when these employees are costing you $150K of wages and a bunch more in overhead & benefits, you would be hugely sensitive to big, publicly discussed sources of productivity reduction, because it’s immediately obvious, especially to corporate finance, that saving 9% on floor space means nothing if you’re losing 15% of labor ouput from distractions, 5% from increased sickness or vacation habits, 2% from widely reported morale issues, etc.
I think really the issues are much more status driven, seeking to force flow-requiring knowledge work into a commodity, to push down the age and wages of employees.
And part is cosmetic. If you think of a start-up itself as a product, and the investors as the user, and the VCs as the company, then VCs optimize cosmetic attractiveness to create start-ups they can sell for as little substance as possible.
So if grand visions of hoodie-clad developers sipping craft coffee in an exposed brick, glass, ductwork open plan hell will convince the dimwitted actor or retired athlete to invest on visions of the next unicorn, then why would they care about worker productivity?
The whole point is credential and cosmetics to lever up the known-to-be-unrealistic valuation to foster an inflated IPO or acquisition, and it’s not a function of actual economic product of employees.
Then after some unicorns hammer this strategy, everyone else (including big corps trying yo look hip) just start cargo-cult copying it.
My only remaining surprise is at how long this open plan bubble can persist before people realize these companies are not about any type of productivity.