Open Vs. Closed and the Battle of Collaboration
Posted on by T. Patrick Donnelly
The prevailing trend is for planners to provide individual personal space that is open making workers more accessible to one another combined with the right proportion of enclosed spaces for heads down work and the opposite condition to control acoustically active group work.
The challenge is how to make the 180 degree change from closed to open, requiring change from one work method to the other, where the group has determined that working together is more effective for the success of the organization.
Frank Becker’s comments on the future of the closed office are especially helpful here, from page 29 of his book Offices at Work, with reference to a study from the University of Michigan.
“In the face of corporate America’s vaunted commitment to productivity, one might expect the lure of the enclosed office (or enclosed cubicle) would have faded long ago. I’ve seen little convincing evidence the people working in a private single occupant enclosed office are more productive than their counterparts working in an open office. Indeed, in one of the few recent studies with hard performance data (based on actual output rather than self reported measures of performance) University of Michigan researchers on software development teams in terms of both quantity and quality of code written, was almost twice as high for teams working in a shared “war room” compared to individual workstations. This is attributed to an enhanced level of free flowing communication and interaction between the programmers in team space.”