The decline of the open office: how horizontality and the absence of walls can play against the worker

In

On (1928), King Vidor's splendid silent feature film, the camera climbs up the façade of a New York Art Deco skyscraper and slips through one of the windows on the upper floors.

Once inside, we are shown a sinister landscape of labor alienation: a hundred employees, each clinging to their desk, shuffling through mountains of paper in a huge open space, like ants in an underground colony.

Vidor brings us to the table of one of them, number 137. An individual, but one who has a terrible time preserving his individuality and his sense of dignity, immersed as he is in this dehumanized environment.

The film was released a year before the Wall Street crash, and these images are proof of the centuries-long prevalence of a corporate organization model, that of the open office, which has not ceased to be used ever since, despite the fact that, at Apparently, a large part of those who continue to work on it hate it.

On September 12, David Brooks published an article in

that could be titled

.

Brooks put forward a provocative thesis: these collective spaces designed, in theory, to stimulate contact and cooperation between employees "do not encourage cooperation, they reduce it".

Jack Lemmon in 'The Apartment' (1960).LFI/Avalon.red / Cordon Press

Human beings are programmed to tolerate “only a certain degree of social interaction”.

Past that threshold of tolerance, thrown against our will into a jungle of uncontrolled interactions that we will perceive as a loud and inhospitable space, “we all tend to become abstracted, put on headphones and lock ourselves in our inner rabbit hole”.

The supposed “horizontality and transversality” of these barrier-free offices is a mirage.

To be their best, "people need privacy: a wall and a door."

It is very difficult to be effective, proactive and coercive when you feel thrown out into the open, a drop of water in an ocean.

New formulations of an old idea

Of course, the open plan offices of the 21st century are no longer like those in

or

(Billy Wilder, 1960), another great cinematographic dissection of work environments.

In some aspects, the current ones are much friendlier and more democratic.

Following the model that established Silicon Valley in the 1990s, they include areas for informal interaction, meeting and even leisure.

In other details, however, they seem to have regressed into an even more intense stage of alienation and collectivization.

Many have even dispensed with individual desks, replaced by rows of collective tables on trestles in which the frontiers of each employee's personal space are only delimited by each one's chair, computer, telephone and side drawers.

In some cases, in the image and likeness of the most disruptive workspaces on the planet, the offices of Apple, Google, Meta or Microsoft, those individually assigned spaces do not even exist.

A random assignment policy is followed (

, that is, hot chairs) in which each employee brings the corporate laptop from home every day, or leaves it in their locker at the end of the day, and sits where they want or depending on the specific tasks that you have to carry out and the group of colleagues with whom you are going to cooperate in them.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, in his office in Mountain View, Calif. Brooks Kraft (Corbis via Getty Images)

For Brooks, an aberration disguised as non-hierarchical voluntarism.

The cubicle model, based on small individual offices or for very small teams, is much more humane and coherent.

Respect, for starters, our sense of privacy, territoriality, and ownership.

He insists so much on the need to get workers out of their comfort zone to be more productive and "disruptive" that often "it is forgotten that there is nothing wrong with comfort zones."

Where is the problem that an individual feels treated as such and assumes that they have their space, their privacy area, their computer, their table, their right to a private telephone conversation?

Brooks adds that the supposed idealism of proximity, limitless cooperation and non-hierarchical use of space on which the supporters of the open office are based hides, in reality, “the much less idealistic logic of costs per square meter”.

The open-plan office tends to be cheaper, and that is the key to its persistence, whether in its pre-29 crack versions or in the cosmopolitan and visionary post-Silicon Valley model.

the office never dies

In the words of José María Peiró, Professor of Occupational Psychology at the Valencian Institute for Economic Research, "by generalizing teleworking and demonstrating its viability as an alternative, the pandemic was going to put an end to offices as we know them, but the experience It has ended up proving, once again, that the dead that you kill are in good health.”

As soon as sanitary conditions have made it possible, there has been "a massive return to the offices, because it is very difficult to renounce overnight the organizational systems and mental frameworks that have governed work activity for decades."

What did not seem so predictable is that it would return to the most obsolete and rigid office models, barely covering them with a layer of cosmetic innovation.

During the pandemic, Peiró saw it likely that "the return to normality would bring about an extinction of the most superficial and harmful aspects of office culture."

That is to say, that it would contribute to sweeping away "a routine based on anchoring professionals to their desks with a rigid schedule and abusive hierarchies and arbitrary rules".

A man lights a pipe in a 1960s architect's office in the United States.H.

Armstrong Roberts/Classic Stock

All of this has returned, with nuances, perhaps because not even a months-long confinement can erase ingrained habits at the stroke of a pen.

As the British journalist and writer Catherine Nixey recalled in a brilliant article on the "death" of the office published in

, this institution was born in the colonial dependencies of the British Empire in the first third of the 19th century, it was already hegemonic in West before World War II and refuses to die.

What's more, it even resists transforming itself, although on occasions, as in the case of the horizontal or open office, it tries to disguise itself as something else.

Among the data that eloquently conspires against the diaphanous model, the one provided by a study by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban stands out: in open offices, face-to-face interactions are reduced by 70%.

Most employees resort more intensively to mail and instant messaging.

Even more: another study indicates that 31% of those who work in offices of this type tend to reserve their opinions in telephone conversations because they do not want their colleagues to hear them.

If it's about encouraging honesty and openness in communications, this doesn't seem like the way to go.

Back and forth innovations

Brooks even cites the example of a Canadian multinational that adopted an open office program in 1997 and gave it up months later, finding that incidents in the company's psychological services had skyrocketed and that more than half of the employees were leaving. they declared “more stressed, less satisfied and less productive”.

Google offices in Tel Aviv (Israel).

In 2020, a comprehensive statistical study by Helena Jahncke and David Hallman found that employees working in cubicles, with a sufficient degree of privacy and control of ambient noise, are 14% more productive than those who work in open spaces.

Noise pollution is another decisive factor.

Open offices tend to be noisy, or at least not quiet and calm enough, and this increases stress and anxiety conditions and translates into a substantial increase in sick leave, according to a report in

.

Of course, the rejection of open office models is not unanimous.

The journalist specializing in corporate and labor issues Samantha Peña does not hesitate to act as devil's advocate and ensures that the absence of offices, walls and physical barriers "enhances communication between workers, allows spaces to be organized more flexibly and optimizes costs, it encourages horizontal or at least much less hierarchical relationships" and it is even more attractive from an aesthetic point of view, given that "offices organized by offices or cubicles are a model that was consolidated in the 1960s and has hardly evolved since then" .

She produces, in her opinion, rather outdated-looking spaces.

Above all, Peña considers that open spaces "are a trend" (or perhaps they never stopped being so at all), and that any alternative will seem, in comparison, typical of the past, of a type of company not entirely adapted to the sign of the times

It does acknowledge, however, that "frequent distractions, noise, or lack of privacy," as well as the increased likelihood of germs and infections spreading rapidly among employees, are "significant drawbacks" of the open office. .

Panoramic interior view of the Googleplex, the offices of Google, Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. Brooks Kraft (Corbis via Getty Images)

Science writer Adam Grant concludes that "the evidence is overwhelming: open offices are bad for both workers and businesses."

In his opinion, it can be assumed that they "produce a 27% increase in sick leave, tend to reduce the frequency and productivity of social interactions, and cause the intellectual performance of workers to decrease by 14%."

For Grant, "in the name of health, cooperation and productivity", the time has come to "redesign spaces with doors".

Not even the supposed hierarchical horizontality of this type of space is perceived as an advantage by David Brooks.

In his opinion, "the fact that bosses do not have offices and mix with the rest of the staff is perceived as an inconvenience by most employees", who thus feel immersed in a panopticon space, under the continuous surveillance of their superiors. , which tends to cause them restlessness, anxiety and lack of comfort.

fantasy

" many bosses succumb to, "the idea that continuous monitoring and control of your employees increases productivity and effectiveness."

In reality, always according to Brooks, "workers who feel that their privacy and their own criteria are respected tend to act more responsibly and are, consequently, more productive."

Ignoring this elementary truth has more to do with "power relations than with a true criterion of effectiveness."

It is part of the persistent “open office delusion”.

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