Corporations think that open offices are an architectural gift to their bottom line. In some ways, they’re correct: Open-plan offices save the biggest companies in the United States millions of dollars by reducing the square footage each employee requires them to lease, according to one analysis. An open-plan office also has the added benefit of making a company look innovative, even if the organization is anything but.
So it’s no wonder this paradigm has reigned for decades: These offices don’t just save money, they make companies look good, too. Yet this year, something changed. The conversation around how these office designs affect the people inside them got louder. Meanwhile, a slew of new research suggested open-plan spaces are actually remarkably bad for workers.
This is the architecture trend that needs to die in 2019. Here’s why it’s so detrimental–and how companies can take action.
THEY’RE SEXIST, BAD FOR PRODUCTIVITY, AND MAKE PEOPLE MISERABLE
Open offices promised more collaboration–and thus more productivity–between workers. But a 2018 study out of Harvard Business School found that moving to open offices leads to a decrease in face-to-face interactions between employees, with the number of emails and messages shooting up. The study shatters the myth that the open office truly makes workers more collaborative.
Open offices can also make employees less productive, especially people who need to focus on execution-based tasks. These offices are so distracting, in part, because they lack acoustic privacy. That means that you can overhear every one of your neighbor’s phone calls and conversations. It’s a problem for creative people in particular, as a 2018 survey of creatives showed: 65% of creative people need quiet or absolute silence to do their best work. Open offices can’t deliver on that desire.
Open offices also tend to lack any kind of personal privacy–and that has an outsized affect on women. A remarkable study from 2018 reported what happened when two local government agencies in the U.K. moved from a traditional office to an open plan. They were surprised to find that many of the women suffered from feeling like they were on display all the time, which led to some women feeling like they needed to dress up more. Others noticed their male colleagues ranking female job candidates on their attractiveness, which was easy because there was so much glass in the office. “Visibility enabled these men to judge and rank women according to their sexual attractiveness, just like men on the nudist beaches,” the researchers wrote.
This subtle sexism the study described elicited a strong response in Fast Company readers, who wrote in with their own stories.
One woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said that the open plan in her workplace further enabled sexual harassment. Another called the impact of being visible all the time and the implicit judgment of being on display at all times “ambient sexism.” Others found their offices made it harder to manage their anxiety; one woman who would go to a nearby hotel when she needed privacy learned that many of her other female coworkers had similar “hiding spots.”