Why Openplan Offices Suck

We’re 15 Percent Less Productive, We Have Immense Trouble Concentrating, We’re Twice as Likely to Get Sick – and It’s Affecting Our Brains!
 

- Walton Golightly

OPEN-PLAN offices are nothing new. A long time ago they consisted of rows of desks aligned with military precision and were the white collar equivalent of Henry Ford’s famous assembly lines.

Efficiency expert Winslow Taylor made the connection explicit in 1911 when he wrote that ‘faster work’ can only be assured ‘through enforced standardisation of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced co-operation’. After World War II, such regimentation was frowned upon. The emphasis was on creativity and management methods that were more egalitarian. A new generation of efficiency experts began to speak of the importance of the ‘office landscape’. This saw desks, chairs, curved screens and large potted plants arranged ‘organically’ to create ‘work groups’ on large, open floors. By the 1970s the office furniture companies had taken over with their cheap desks and moveable partitions, and we had entered the age of the cubicle.