Cornell Study Favors Open Plan Offices | Hacker News Reader

Cornell Study Favors Open Plan Offices

iwsp.human.cornell.edu

12 pointsabalone6 comments

The premise of this remarkable study is:

"The officeʹs primary (not only) value, we believe, is as a place for face‐to‐face interaction: a place to meet co‐workers and managers, to inspire, coach, be motivated, share information, debate goals and objectives, socialize, make friends, and so on. It is as much or more a social setting as it is a refuge or technical or information center."

The above doesn't sound to me anything like going to work for... you know, working. True so: work didn't even make it to the values list. Now I don't know about you folks but I certainly don't get any pay for socializing, as much as I'd love to. Cornell somehow confuses the office space with cafeteria. That, or it makes the case for an open-floor cafeteria, which I fully approve.

"... the more open the ʺopenʺ plan office environment, the more conducive it is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are critical elements of the work process. Few jobs or professions donʹt qualify."

If those are the criteria, then I would agree that a shared office space's primary value is certainly to facilitate easy communication. There's very little point in going in to a shared office building if you are not going to be physically communicating with anyone there.

Put another way, and to address your point: you can do (office) work anywhere. A quiet space at home is just as good as one in a shared space for blocking out distraction and doing "heads-down" work. But the differentiating factor in the cases concerning this study (and many tech companies) is effective communication between team members. The study makes the case that open plans are better suited for that.

I see your point. In my environment communication makes only so much of a day's time and depending on how high this share is, an open office can boost or kill productive work. There's this concept of time slots which is completely failing in an open office environment - you can't honestly dedicate say 4 hours time at once for doing a certain task. Point is, an open office gives on one side (communication) while taking on another side (productivity time) and a certain company's mileage will vary way too wildly between these extremes. One compares always these schemes in terms of individual productivity vs. team productivity, but honestly said, all arguments seem to me completely random. There are no "standard" humans and when one will suffer from too much disturbance, its team will suffer too. And when one project will suffer from too little communication, the team will suffer too. What's the middle ground then? I strongly believe the "team room" is the sole setup which can be justified realistically.

I see my more "communication" inclined coworkers talking all the time in our open floor office. They talk about work for sure, but also jokes, women, soccer, etc. This is very good for socialization and building relationships but it's terrible when I'm trying to find out the root cause for a difficult issue.

It seems the has been too much emphasys on the socializing aspects of open floor offices and not the equivalent attention to concentration and flow required for the type of tasks we're assigned to.

I'm working on the same open floor with people from another company with completely unrelated duties. I fail to see how this socialization is helping my own team's work (incidentally my team is NOT colocated). Nevertheless, officially we're happy open office users.

You're saying inspiring, coaching, motivating, sharing information, debating goals and objectives "doesn't sound anything like going to work for"?

Even socializing and making friends with coworkers is something the study specifically notes as having work value in building trust. The study found a bunch of work value that was boosted by open plan and easier interaction:

1. More frequent communication. People in closed office plans considered "frequent communication" to be just "several times a week in a scheduled meeting". In open plan, the bar for "frequent" is raised to several times a day, much of it on the fly.

2. More trust. Stronger social bonds gave workers more courage to ask one another for help when needed and bounce "crazy" ideas off one another.

3. Using visual cues to manage interrupts. In open plan you can better "read" someone to see if it's a good time to interrupt. Not the case with knocking on a door or staring at someone's back in a cube. "Unexpectedly.. more visual contact actually contributes to fewer unwanted interactions, not more, by changing not so much the frequency as the timing of conversations."

4. Tacit learning. It makes it easier for the organization to pick up on and share "unwritten" learning not codified in documents.

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