New Study: Open Offices Kill Teamwork — from inc.com by Suzanne Lucas
People don’t like to have serious conversations in public, it turns out.
Excerpt:
Employees hate open office plans, but at least they help employees collaborate and work together? It saves companies money and it increases teamwork, right? Well, wrong.
Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, at Harvard Business School and Harvard University, took a look at people who switched from individual cubicles to an open office plan. What they found wasn’t more collaboration after the switch but less. Participants in the study spent
- 73 percent less time in face-to-face interactions
- 67 percent more time on email
- 75 percent more time on instant messenger
Not exactly what you want to see when you move your employees into an open office plan. Instead of looking up across the table and saying, “Hey, Jane, what do you think about this?” they are sending text messages.