Goodbye to open office spaces? How experts are
rethinking the workplace.
The coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating workers’
worries about returning to jobs in these often debated floor plans.
BY SARAH
GIBBENS
PUBLISHED
APRIL 30, 2020
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/will-coronavirus-end-the-open-office-floor-plan/
DISTRACTING,
INTRUSIVE, AND now a potential health hazard. The list of grievances against
crowded open office floor plans is mounting, and as state officials mull how to
safely reopen offices shuttered by the coronavirus, some people are wondering
whether the design is on its way out the door.
“Before
[the coronavirus outbreak], I requested to move to a corner desk to kind of get
away from the coworkers who were more social and talkative,” says Ayla Larick,
an employee at a Texas insurance broker. Larick is set to return to her office
on May 1, as Texas reopens non-essential businesses, though her asthma puts her
at heightened risk for COVID-19 complications, and she’s requested an extension
to work remotely.
“I am a
little nervous about returning, only because I’m less than six feet away from
three other people the entire time I’m working on my computer,” she says.
Most
companies are only just beginning to think about how they might change their
corporate workspaces, with some experts saying the open floor plan could be
redone with better consideration for personal space and stricter cleaning
schedules. Others, however, say the pandemic is the final straw for the open
office.
“The broad
stroke is that the open office is over, [but] there’s a bunch of different
things that that means,” says Amol Sarva, CEO of office interior design firm
Knotel, whose clients include Uber and Netflix.
In the long
run, Sarva says, getting back to work is not just about floor plans, but about
a dramatic shift in office life as we know it.
Surrounded
by COVID-19
In one
office building in Seoul, South Korea, 43.5 percent of workers on one floor of
a call center tested positive for COVID-19.
Barriers to
productivity
As both a
design trend and a cost-saving measure, open office arrangements have become
increasingly common. The modern concept was made popular by early 20th-century
architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed the design would democratize the
workplace by tearing down walls both literally and socially. Eighty years
later, designers and architects tout similar benefits, saying the open
environment allows employees to collaborate more easily.
Today,
there’s no standard definition of what constitutes an open office, but
generally the space is considered distinct from cubicles and characterized by
having a short barrier or no barrier at all between employees. As office jobs
increased after the 2008 recession, open office plans grew even more popular as
a way to save on operational costs. Unlike Wright’s original concept, which
emphasized natural light and space between desks, today’s open offices are
often used to cram more employees into smaller spaces. The effect has been a
more distracted workforce.
One 2018
study published by the Royal Society measured changes in employee habits when
offices transitioned to open layouts. In each case, they found face-to-face
communication declined by 70 percent, while electronic communication increased.
Worried about distracting others or being overheard, the study says employees
began to “socially withdraw.” Another study also published in 2018 shows fear
of infection makes crowded spaces more psychologically stressful.
“Personally,
I liked being in a coworking space because I was new to the city, and it was
great for being social and meeting people,” says Madison Dapcevich, a reporter
for IFL Science whose office is based in a San Francisco WeWork. But
Dapcevich’s company has been working remotely since January, and she now
worries about returning to the office where shared spaces present a risk of
infection.
An
investigation recently published by South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control
shows how easily the coronavirus can spread in a crowded office space. On one
floor of a call center where 216 employees worked, 94 people tested positive
for the virus. Investigators believe the outbreak happened over the course of
16 days beginning on February 21, and over 90 percent of the cases were
concentrated in a densely clustered portion of the office.
“You could
space people out, and if you’re doing that in combination with a reasonable
amount of ventilation and sanitation, you should be able to have a reasonably
safe space,” says Donald Milton, an expert in airborne disease transmission at
the University of Maryland.
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He says a
cubicle would prevent something like a cough from traveling across a table, but
he worries the contained desk space could retain infectious droplets that
anyone who walks in could be exposed to. Research from MIT published earlier
this month shows a sneeze can blast potentially infectious droplets as far as
27 feet, well beyond current social distancing guidelines.
Barriers
can help prevent disease transmission from physical contact or from large respiratory
droplets released when someone sneezes or coughs, but surfaces such as coffee
pots and door handles also play a role in spreading disease. One recent study
in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the coronavirus could live on
some nonporous surfaces like plastic for up to three days.
Healthy
buildings and home offices
In addition
to desk arrangements, designers and public health researchers will have to
consider all the spaces people move through in an office—both open and
sectioned off. “What do you do in an elevator? Corridors? Hallways?” asks Joe
Connell, a commercial and corporate designer at architectural firm Perkin +
Will.
To reduce
this kind of contact, employers are considering solutions such as staggered
arrival times, directing office foot traffic, staging areas for elevators, and
temperature checks at work. WeWork is reducing the amount of seating in lounges
and conference rooms and creating one-way hallways, and it plans to issue new
distancing guidelines to its 600,000 clients. And Sarva says that Uber is
planning to get its staff back to their offices in San Francisco, but with only
20 percent of staff allowed in the building on a given day.
Many
experts hope the pandemic will spur employers to take steps to make offices healthier
overall. After all, before the coronavirus outbreak forced us to stay isolated
in our homes, most Americans were spending 90 percent of their time inside.
“We’re an indoor species,” says Joe Allen, the director of Harvard’s Healthy
Buildings Program.
Businesses
could increase cleaning rotations, use virus-killing ultraviolet light to
disinfect surfaces, install air filters, and invest in more touch-free
technology, such as automatic doors and sinks. Allen says people also need
personal space, natural lighting, and enough quiet to concentrate in order to
be fully productive.
Still,
having a central place to gather and collaborate in person will likely remain
essential to most businesses, and where open offices persist, the spaces with
employees packed in like sardines will be scrutinized—which may lead to design
changes that give employees more space and flexibility.
“People’s
expectation about their buildings will change,” Allen says. “The next time we
go back to our offices, we’ll think about it differently.”
An aerial view of office cubicles.
‘Cubicles
turned into the worst-rated setting in workplace satisfaction surveys.
Covid will force us to reimagine the office.
Let's get it right this time
Kerstin
Sailer
Dreams of reinventing the workplace gave us cubicles
and hotdesking as utopian ideas gave way to cost-cutting
Tue 4 Aug
2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Tue 4 Aug 2020 22.11 BST
When
offices in the UK closed in mid-March and companies instructed their staff to
work from home – without access to their usual materials and tools, their
physical workspace or to many of their colleagues – people already sensed that
this was an unprecedented experiment. No one was prepared for this, not even
the banks, with their elaborate business-continuity plans focused on terrorist
attacks but not on completely avoiding human contact. Against all odds, working
from home was more successful than anyone would have predicted, with many
people reporting their productivity had increased during the first two months
of lockdown.
Months
later, most office workers have not returned to their shared workplaces, and
those that have come back are finding themselves catapulted into a strange new
world of plastic dividers, distancing, mask-wearing and hand sanitising. Amid
the turbulence of second waves and local lockdowns, the best that employers can
do right now is offer a phased and flexible return to the office, closely
evaluating risks as they go.
The much
more interesting debate is about what kind of office we would like to return
to. Now is exactly the right time to think ahead, and understanding history is
instructive. Two particularly pioneering ideas of the past on the spatial
organisation of workplaces offer valuable lessons.
In 1968,
designer Robert Propst carried out studies of people’s working processes and
came to the conclusion that the typical office “saps vitality, blocks talent
[and] frustrates accomplishment”. On this basis, he developed his ideas of the
“action office”, a modular furniture system allowing flexible configurations
and changes in the degree of privacy and community, mainly through movable
partitions. Almost two decades later, the architect Robert Luchetti defined a
series of different locations that office workers could use for various
activities, thus creating the foundation for what later became known as
“activity-based working”.
Both of
these concepts were human-centric and idealistic, aiming to improve office work
for people. They also suffered a similar fate of becoming distorted and
misunderstood over time. Propst’s action office was meant to liberate office
work, but soon it got reduced to the idea of partitioning, and thus the cubicle
was born, creating dense, almost factory-like, conditions. Workers battled with
the worst of all worlds: being distracted by endless noise while being denied
the community-building aspects of seeing and being seen. In fact, cubicles
turned into the worst-rated setting in workplace satisfaction surveys.
Activity-based working did not fare much better: it became synonymous with the
dreaded hotdesking, a cost-saving exercise whereby office workers shared desks
but did not benefit from alternative work settings being provided.
What can we
learn from these two episodes for the post-pandemic office? That space is not
neutral. Spatial design always has consequences. It gives rise to a pattern of
opportunities: how often we see others, who we see on the way in and out, where
we bump into people, how easy it is to strike up conversations with colleagues
from different departments – all of these occurrences emerge from workplace
design. Whether an office makes people lonely or inspires solidarity and a
sense of togetherness,is often due to a combination of spatial structures and
organisational cultures. Moreover, space is not neutral because it doesn’t just
happen – it is human-made, based on purposeful decisions.
In the same
way that the ideas of Propst and Luchetti ended up in workplace miseries, we
might experience a cost-driven crush on offices when we emerge out of the
pandemic, exactly at a point when everyone is vaccinated and eager to meet
again in person. The tech giants seem to be leading the way. Having built
massive cathedrals of innovation before the pandemic, they seem to have made a
strategic U-turn, with physical workspaces declared unnecessary overnight, so
that everyone is asked to work from home for longer. This is even more puzzling
because their previous approach which celebrated co-presence with fancy office
design, from slides to beanbags, ping-pong tables and ice cream chefs on site,
does at least side with academic research on the importance of encounters for
creativity and innovation. Research suggests that unplanned face-to-face
interactions are important drivers of new ideas, an effect often known as the
“strength of weak ties”. In fact, research has shown that weak-tie interactions
have suffered disproportionately during the working-from-home period.
Therefore, we should not give up on the idea of a shared workspace for everyone in the future. Not only is it impractical to suggest working from home as a standard response during a housing crisis, where many may lack the opportunity to set up a permanent and adequately equipped workstation. Being together and sharing experiences is fundamental for both individual and organisational health and wellbeing. In the long term, getting rid of the office completely may even harm an organisation’s bottom line, as good ideas dry up, onboarding of new staff becomes tricky and teams begin disintegrating. We can surely make it through more months or years until we have a Covid vaccine, but we should not sacrifice the idea that we will all meet again regularly in a space, a space that provides the best design possible for people to share a sense of togetherness and purpose.
Kerstin
Sailer is an associate professor in social and spatial networks at University
College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture
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