“The biggest challenges of working in an open-plan or shared workspace are open conversations, meetings in the open, stinky food, stinky people, dogs demanding attention, people interrupting, and over-scheduling that leads to stress, which is distracting in itself because it (also) makes it hard to focus,” says Alan Ibbotson, founder of The Trampoline Group, a consultancy that works with companies on leadership development and employee engagement. The architects and designers reported “significantly more unfavorable working conditions in terms of acoustical privacy, workplace effectiveness, attractiveness, and satisfaction compared with those working in the private offices, and, not surprisingly, they found it “significantly” more difficult to concentrate. “Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM,” the study reads.Īnother study of 456 employees in 20 regional office locations of an architectural firm published in Frontiers in Psychology, also found the negatives of shared workspaces to outweigh the positives. Open-plan offices or workspaces (which comprise approximately 70 percent of American offices) were designed to encourage collaboration and engagement, but a 2018 study called “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration” has caused a bit of a rethink.

Open the office