WORLDVIEW: Modern offices are hurting workers & companies

The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment states that a prisoner in a single cell should have at least 6m2 of living space, plus 1 to 2m2 for a bathroom. At full capacity, WeWork's Waterloo offices in the UK allocates a total of 4m2 to each worker (bathrooms included)..This is not to say, obviously, that WeWork is worse than prison (although some ex-WeWorkers basically make that argument). But it is to make a broader point – modern offices are increasingly terrible places to work..When asked, most office workers across the world agree that one of the most important things a workplace can provide is peace and quiet. One study by Oxford Economics, which included plenty of young workers, found that a distraction-free workplace was one of the workers' top three priorities..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Sadly, however, the trend in offices it to make them ever-more like noisy battery-chicken farms. Private offices are going the way of the dodo, cubicle walls are coming down, and open-plan offices with shared desks are becoming the norm..The bottom-line benefit of this to companies is clear: it's cheap to cram lots of workers into a small space, which means more money for other stuff (like, say, management bonuses). Plus, some managers seem to genuinely believe that having people sit less than 30cm apart will inspire new ideas. For such true believers, the idea of open office is to create a buzzing workplace where workers can have fun(!) while getting all creative and collaborative with their peers..Unfortunately, the reality is that as soon as the physical walls come down in offices, the humans who work in them erect mental walls. A Harvard study found that when companies switched from traditional cubicle farms and private offices to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%. People slapped on headphones and chose to send emails or instant messages rather than talk to their colleagues, who were suddenly seated mere inches away..Besides making the office a less social and collaborative place, open office design can have other downsides. When offices go open, employee stress levels rise, sick days increase (germs spread fast when you're breathing all over one another all day), and employee satisfaction slumps..Distractions also have a pernicious and sometimes hidden impact on productivity. For workers who need to concentrate intensely, like software designers, distractions can be a factor in increasing errors and reduced output. The same applies to creative workers in places like ad agencies, who generally need quiet to produce good work..Indeed, one study found that workers lose as much as 86 minutes a day to distractions in open offices. Assuming an eight-hour workday, that's almost 20% of your working hours down the tubes. Thus, while open offices may save companies on rent costs, they probably end up costing way more than that in wasted time – imagine simply setting fire to 20% of your employee costs (see an example of this here)..In short, open offices are a disaster for workers and employers. Yet office after office is embracing the model, driven by a combination of short-term thinking on costs and herd behaviour..What can we learn from all this – besides what we already knew, which is that management can be pretty dumb? And, I suppose, that it's hard to reel back from expensive mistakes – few companies that have implemented open offices have undone them, even when productivity falls, sick days increase, and turnover rises..Perhaps the best lesson is that solving this problem requires the creativity that open offices seem to suck from workers' marrow. If you're trapped in an open office purgatory, you may want to suggest working from home as a cheap alternative to your boss. Working from home saves your employer money on office space, since you provide the space, and it can offer you the peace, privacy, and quiet you need to be happy and productive. Plus, since you are probably already doing most of your collaboration over email in your open office, it shouldn't really hurt that aspect of your job..There are downsides to working from home, obviously, such as difficulties in separating work and leisure time and, for some people, difficulties in keeping their noses to the grindstone. But in the long run, those downsides are probably minimal compared to the horrors of the open office.

WORLDVIEW: Modern offices are hurting workers & companies

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