The Open Plan Paradox
When a company takes down its internal walls, it is usually buying one thing: conversation. The argument has been made so often that it is no longer defended — remove the partitions, the reasoning goes, and colleagues who once had to knock will simply turn round and talk to each other.
In 2018 two researchers at Harvard Business School measured what actually happened. They fitted employees at two large firms with badges that recorded who spoke to whom and for how long, first in a conventional office with walls and then, after those walls came down, in an open one. Face-to-face conversation fell by roughly seventy per cent. Email and instant messaging rose to fill the space it left, and the effect appeared at both firms.
The explanation the authors offer is not that people like each other less in the open. It is that being visible costs something. In a room where anyone may be listening and anyone may be watched, a four-minute conversation about a delayed delivery is performed rather than simply had, and the cheaper option — a message nobody else can see — wins. The walls were never obstacles to conversation. They were the privacy that made conversation cheap.
Glossary
- a partition
- — a thin wall that divides one room into two
- a paradox
- — an outcome that contradicts what everybody expected
- performed
- — done with an audience in mind rather than done naturally