Bach Seat

Sarah Green at the Harvard Business Review reported on research by Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear at the University of Sydney. They looked at the impact of office cubes on office-dwellers productivity. The brainiac’s found furniture design impacts how the staff works. There are three key factors sound privacy, visual privacy, and temperature.

The study found that 30% of workers in cubes were dissatisfied with the noise level of their workspaces. 25% of workers in partitionless offices, were dissatisfied with the noise level of their workspaces. Worst yet, according to the data, is that these workers can’t control what they hear or who hears them.

Most despised feature

HBR says the lack of sound privacy was the most despised issue in the survey. They found that 60% of cubicle workers and half of all partitionless people indicating it as a frustration. Researchers guess that the partitionless people are slightly less bothered by it because at least they can see where the noise is coming from. This gives them a sense of control — no matter how illusory. It’s likely that partitionless office dwellers are listening to music on headphones to block out distractions.

Susan Adams at Forbes reports that workers assigned to cubes are the least happy among us. With open plan dwellers are not far behind. In addition to the sound privacy complaint, more than 30% of people who don’t have their own offices feel frustrated by a lack of “visual privacy.”  In other words, they have to look at their colleagues whether they like it or not. Almost as many find the general noise level frustrating.

Cubes decrease work satisfaction

Forbes cites researcher Kim who said that open office plans decrease work satisfaction in a statement:

Open plan office layouts have been touted as a way to boost workplace satisfaction and team effectiveness in recent years. We found people in open-plan offices were less satisfied with their workplace environment than those in private offices.

The researchers found the single most important issue was a lack of space. That held true no matter what kind of office you had — an enclosed office, cubes, or an open layout.

So if workers hate cubes why do architects and bosses love cubes? Most likely they looked at studies that have shown we only spend 35% of our time at our workstations, so they decided to make everything modular or abolish the office to save money and let the collaboration flow. But Ms. Green says not so fast. Previous research, cited by Kim and de Dear, has already shown that noise decreases key productivity.

… the loss of productivity due to noise distraction … was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices, and the tasks requiring complex verbal process were more likely to be disturbed than relatively simple or routine tasks.

Forbes explained that the idea behind open-plan offices is that workers will be more likely to talk to each other and collaborate. But it turns out that was a theory that was not based on empirical evidence. HRB ran a piece that described a study of employees at Scandinavian Airlines. Apparently, after the airline made their HQ über comfy and management encouraged employees to hold “impromptu meetings” and “creative encounters.” Instead, just 27% of employee exchanges happened in public spaces. Two-thirds of employee exchanges still took place in private offices, most likely because people can hear each other better and protect themselves from being heard by unwanted ears.

Unintended consequence

Another unintended consequence of open office spaces: they aren’t good for people who tend to be more on top of their work, according to a study covered by Annie Murphy Paul in Time magazine. Open office planners thought that workers would help one another with challenging tasks. But it turns out that while those who need help do better, those who offer help fare worse. Forbes concludes that is not surprising when you think about it. If I know how to do a task, I’m better off getting on to the next thing, and not losing time trying to teach a less-able coworker.

The not-so-surprising bottom line of the study according to Forbes is that workers in their own offices came out ahead in every category studied. Those who sit in cubicles are the most miserable, expressing the highest degree of dissatisfaction in 13 out of 15 categories.

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Not only do cubes kill worker productivity, but they are also a major pain to support. First, the floors have to be trenched and then underground pathways have to be built and inspected before the floor is patched. Hopefully, the cement guys don’t fill the boxes with cement and then the furniture people miss their marks so cable gets exposed and the owner complains about a sloppy install.

Ban cubes !!!

Related articles

• 24 Reasons Your Open-Plan Office Sucks
  (buzzfeed.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.