The usual rationale for open plan offices is that they help people to collaborate more effectively. But this premise is challenged by a new study from researchers at Harvard Business School which suggests that employees at two large Fortune 500 companies actually engaged in less face-to-face contact after switching to entirely open workspaces. As published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban sought to conduct a real-world comparison of people’s behaviour in different types of offices to test a hypothesis that open plan layouts reduce communication.
For their study, they recruited 52 employees from an organisation, given the pseudonym OpenCo1, and asked them to wear a device known as a sociometric badge every working day for three weeks before the workspace was opened up, then every working day for three weeks after the transition about three months later. The infrared sensor on the sociometric badge recorded when wearers were face-to-face with others, when a person was talking or listening to another using a microphone. Movement, location and posture were also monitored monitored spatial location using a Bluetooth sensor and accelerometer. Data was gathered in 10-millisecond intervals.