Is an open office plan hindering your productivity? Here's how to make it work for you.

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These adjustments will help when you have no choice but to work in a noisy, chaotic environment.

By Nicole Spector 

Once I switched from full-time employment to full-time freelance (aka, being self-employed and working from home), there were a lot of things I came to miss about office life, such as the set schedule and being around co-workers. One aspect I’ve never been remotely nostalgic about was the open office setting, which the last company I worked for transitioned to shortly before I left.

Cubicles aren’t great (and I don’t miss those, either), but at least they afforded me a sense of privacy and clear boundaries. Much of my job as an editor required quiet time to read, write and call sources and little of this work could get done comfortably in an environment stripped of privacy and gushing with noise. I was also constantly distracted by the conversations around me. It was tough to book a conference room because editorial was competing with every other department whose employees were just as eagerly seeking peace. My colleagues and I mostly used email and online chatting to communicate so that we wouldn’t have to shout.

Noise pollution is real, and it’s impacting employees' lives

These problems seem to come with the territory of open office life. The Harvard Business School recently published studies showing that in open offices, employees have significantly less face-to-face interaction (by about 70 percent) than they do when they have spatial boundaries, while electronic communications surge by as much as 50 percent. A separate study by Oxford Economics concluded that noise pollution in open offices has reached “epidemic levels,” with 63 percent of employees stating that they lack quiet space for work, which in turn has a “negative effect on their productivity, satisfaction and well-being”.

These findings are troubling, particularly since the open office plan is becoming increasingly common, fueled not only by cost-efficiency, but by the idea that being in a boundless space nurtures a collaborative spirit, ultimately enabling you and your teammates to work more fluidly together — resulting in sort of the opposite effect of cubicles.

Open office plans are aimed to bring us together

“We actually saw the rise of the cubicle in the 1960s as a means of trying to inject personal identity and private space into the one-size-fits-all open office,” says Jonathan Webb, VP of workplace strategy at KI. “Over the course of time, people began to associate cubicles with a lack of individuality, which is part of the reason we see a rise of open offices today, [which were] also popularized by tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Google seeking to bolster collaboration. Firms in other industries have taken note of tech companies' rapid growth and popular work cultures, so CEOs across the board have opted for open office plans. They see the innovation coming out of firms in Silicon Valley and think that open offices might be a part of fostering that success.”

Flexibility is paramount

It’s a great idea, but one that, in practice, evidently isn’t working for everyone. This could come down to execution. CEOs need to take the time (and possibly, the money) to implement open office plans that are designed with workers’ various needs in mind. Webb suggests they these four main work styles: “focus, interaction, regenerative and ideation.”

“In practice, most workers transition between all of these work styles at different points in their work day or week, [and] all of these require different workspaces,” says Webb. “For workers who prefer more privacy or who seek an area to focus on individual work, walled-in spaces or cubicles can be useful. Height-adjustable screens allow workers to create both shared and private spaces and switch between them with a quick push or pull. They help balance offices with open floor plans for when employees want to take a private phone call or tune out possible distractions. Employers can also create a sense of openness while maintaining privacy through movable walls and glass walls.”

Webb adds that CEOs often get it wrong by “going too far to one end of the spectrum with the open office. Workplaces can't be one-size-fits-all, whether that's a completely open office or a cubicle farm.”

The workplace needs to be something in-between and then some, with a commitment to balance.

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