A Bad Idea That Won’t Go Way

The writer traces the so-called open office back to the 1950s and a team of designers from Hamburg, Germany. Today about 70 percent of offices have an open floor plan, perhaps because, as one study found, it fosters “a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise.” That was about it for the positives in a number of studies cited by the author. The rest – psychologically, physically, in terms of production – was unremittingly negative. It’s worth noting that this analysis looks only at the employees and the work done, not at the factor that probably makes the open office the design of choice in many situations: Given a large open space, a new enterprise, and the imperative to get production going asap, it’s the cheapest way to go.