David Brooks: The ideology of open plan workplaces associates walls and rooms with authoritarianism, hierarchy and social isolation.
An office concept at Google’s office R&D lab at Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif., April 7, 2021.Oscar Wilde is said to have quipped that “God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” Our species is capable of folly on a grand scale. Exhibit 4,000 in this litany of woe is the continued existence of open plan workplaces.
This high-minded theory nicely dovetails with the somewhat less idealistic logic of cost per square foot. If you jam a lot of people into a crowded space with no separations, you can squeeze in more employees at lower cost. It turns out that if you take out physical walls, people will create norms that discourage communication, what Bernstein and Ben Waber call a “fourth wall.” As they wrote in Harvard Business Review, “If someone starts a conversation and a colleague shoots him a look of annoyance, he won’t do it again. Especially in open spaces, fourth-wall norms spread quickly.”
A 2020 study by Helena Jahncke and David Hallman found that employees in quieter one-person cell offices performed 14% better than employees in open plan offices on a cognitive task. A lot of the evidence I’m citing here is not new. It has been around for years. And it confirms the rhythms of human creativity that have been observed for centuries. To do creative work, most people need periods of solitude when they are gestating their ideas, then they need periods of sociability when they are testing their ideas and then they need more periods of solitude when they are refining their ideas.
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