The death of the open-plan office? Not quite, but a revolution is in the air

Four decades on, we have the answer.

But Covid-19 doesn’t spell the end of the centralised office predicted by futurists since at least the 1970s.

The organisational benefits of the “propinquity effect” – the tendency to develop deeper relationships with those we see most regularly – are well-established.

The open-plan office will have to evolve, though, finding its true purpose as a collaborative work space augmented by remote work.

If we’re smart about it, necessity might turn out to be the mother of reinvention, giving us the best of both centralised and decentralised, collaborative and private working worlds.

Cultural resistance

Organisational culture, not technology, has long been the key force keeping us in central offices.

“That was the case in 1974 and is still the case today,” observed the “father of telecommuting” Jack Nilles in 2015, three decades after he and his University of Southern California colleagues published their landmark report Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff: Options for Tomorrow. “The adoption of telework is still well behind its potential.”

Until now.

But it has taken a pandemic to change the status quo – evidence enough of culture resistance.

In his 1979 article, Schiff outlined three key objections to working from home:

• how to tell how well workers are doing, or if they are working at all
• employees’ need for contact with coworkers and others
• too many distractions.

To the first objection, Schiff responded that experts agreed performance is best judged by output and the organisation’s objectives. To the third, he noted: “In many cases, the opposite is likely to be true.”

The Covid-19 experiment so far supports him. Most workers and managers are happy with remote working, believe they are performing just as well, and want to continue with it.

Personal contact

But the second argument – the need for personal contact to foster close teamwork – is harder to dismiss.

There is evidence remote workers crave more feedback.

As researchers Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber note in their Harvard Business Review article The Truth About Open Offices, published in November 2019, “one of the most robust findings in sociology – proposed long before we had the technology to prove it through data – is that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction”.

Waber’s research at the MIT Media Lab demonstrated the probability that any two workers will interact – either in person or electronically – is directly proportional to the distance between their desks. In his 2013 book People Analytics he includes the following results from a bank and information technology company.

Experiments in collaboration

Interest in fostering collaboration has sometimes led to disastrous workplace experiments. One was the building Frank Gehry designed for the Chiat/Day advertising agency in the late 1980s.

Agency boss Jay Chiat envisioned his headquarters as a futuristic step into “flexible work” – but workers hated the lack of personal spaces.