The Open Office Reconsidered

The open-plan office was not, at its origin, a cost-saving measure. When the German designers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle set out their ideas in the late 1950s, the aim was explicitly social: to dissolve the hierarchy that private rooms made visible, and to allow information to move sideways rather than upwards. That the arrangement also allowed more people to be seated in less space was, at first, a secondary observation. It did not remain secondary for long.

By the 1990s the open plan had become the default in much of the world, and the justification had shifted almost entirely to collaboration. Removing walls, the argument ran, would multiply the chance encounters from which good ideas emerge. This claim was repeated for two decades with remarkably little evidence behind it, until the organisational researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban decided to measure it directly.

Their method was unusually careful. Rather than relying on surveys, they fitted employees at two large firms with badges that recorded face-to-face interaction, and tracked email and messaging volumes, before and after each firm moved from cubicles to open plan. The prediction was straightforward. What they found was the reverse: face-to-face interaction fell by roughly seventy per cent, while electronic messaging rose sharply. People had not started talking more. They had retreated into their screens, sitting a metre from the colleague they were emailing.

Bernstein’s interpretation is worth stating precisely, because it is often simplified. He does not argue that openness reduces the desire to interact. He argues that when privacy disappears, people construct it by other means — headphones, screens, turned backs, terse replies. The wall does not vanish; it relocates, and the version people build for themselves is less permeable than the one that was removed.

A separate line of research has examined what open plans do to concentration. The Danish researcher Jan Pejtersen, analysing sickness records from more than two thousand employees, found absence rising with the number of people sharing a space: those in offices of more than six reported around sixty per cent more days of illness than those working alone. Pejtersen was cautious about causation, noting that infection and noise are difficult to disentangle, but the pattern held across sectors.

Not all findings point one way. The environmental psychologist Sally Augustin has argued that the debate has been distorted by treating open plan as a single thing. Her position is that layout matters far less than control: whether a worker can choose where and how to sit. In her account, a varied office offering quiet rooms, shared tables and enclosed booths outperforms both the traditional cellular office and the undifferentiated open floor — not because any one setting is superior, but because different tasks demand different conditions, and only the worker knows which task is at hand.

This may be the most useful reframing available, and it is also the least convenient. Providing genuine choice requires more floor space per person, not less, which returns the discussion to the economics that the Schnelle brothers considered incidental. An organisation that takes Augustin seriously must accept that good workspace is expensive. Most, faced with that arithmetic, have preferred to keep the open floor and add a wellbeing programme.

What the accumulated evidence does not support is the confident collaboration claim that justified the transition in the first place. Openness may still be defensible on other grounds — cost, flexibility, the ease of reconfiguring teams — but those are different arguments, and they were not the ones made. Two decades of office design rested on a proposition that nobody had tested, and which turned out, when finally tested, to be false.