Wonky logic: open-plan offices foster less face-to-face collaboration, not more. Photograph: Cyclopes/iStock/GettyOscar Wilde is said to have quipped that “God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability”. Our species is capable of folly on a grand scale. Exhibit 4,000 in this litany of woe is the continued existence of open-plan workplaces.
The ideology of open-plan workplaces associates walls and rooms with authoritarianism, hierarchy and social isolation. If you put people together in one big room, or in low cubicles, the popular thinking goes, they will collaborate, and a spirit of egalitarian togetherness will reign. People can take only so much social interaction. If you shove them together cheek by jowl they will just put on headphones and burrow into themselves
It turns out that if you take out physical walls, people will create norms that discourage communication, what Bernstein and Ben Waber call a “fourth wall”. As theyin Harvard Business Review: “If someone starts a conversation and a colleague shoots him a look of annoyance, he won’t do it again. Especially in open spaces, fourth wall norms spread quickly.”
Says bitter alcoholic cat person journalist with no friends and who 'works from home', presumably.