Open plan offices are often the subject of complaint, with workers finding them distracting, noisy and lacking in privacy. Research now suggests that open plan offices can also make you sick.
Nine out of ten offices in Australia are open plan, with those in charge believing that the open plan design helps to encourage collaboration and communication. It is also believed they help to save businesses money.
However, with increased absenteeism and increased worker distraction, perhaps open plan offices are not the money-saving vehicles many managers believe them to be.
Research in Sweden led by architect Christina Bodin Danielsson studied 1852 employees working in seven different work environments in order to determine the effect of open plan offices and hot desking on workers.
Work layouts in the study ranged from private offices, to offices with two or three workers, to open plan offices accommodating more than 24 people, to “flex-offices” (where workers have no assigned workstation and “hot desk” wherever a desk is available).
Researchers asked participants to report the number of short sick leave spells (where they were absent for one week or less) and any long periods of sick leave they had taken over the past year.
The study found that short sick leave had “a significant association with office type”, where workers in small, medium and large open plan offices were exposed to “elevated risks” compared to workers in private offices.
Workers in open plan offices with four to nine people per room, and workers in open plan offices accommodating more than 24 people were found to have the highest number of workers taking short sick leave.
“The evidence indicates that traditional open plan offices are less good for employee health,” the report’s researchers said.
Hot desking helps spread of disease at work
Closer to home, hot desking and an open plan office design is said to have contributed to the spread of tuberculosis at one business in Victoria.
A report published in the Medical Journal of Australia recorded the case of a 34-year-old male chief of staff who spread the disease at work. Ten per cent of his work colleagues tested positive to tuberculosis, and health workers pointed to the office design as a contributing factor.
“There were several factors in the workplace design that may have contributed to transmission, including a closed air-conditioning system, modern open-plan office design… that allows people to see and communicate directly with their colleagues without standing, and the practice of hot desking,” they said.
A better working environment for all?
Image: sciencedaily.com
As for claims that open plan offices create a better working environment, a University of Sydney study suggests the opposite is true. Surveying 42,000 workers in Australia, the US, Canada and Finland, the study found that open plan offices scored “considerably low” for satisfaction of visual privacy, noise and space.
The study also found that workers in open plan offices were not any more satisfied than those in private offices with the way they interacted with colleagues.
The answer? While most businesses are unlikely to abandon the open plan office, the University of Queensland Business School and Melbourne Business School are developing ways to make open plan work better, including a training program for managers to get the most out of workers in open plan offices.
“Managers put 20 people in the same spot and basically constrain them to work together without considering they have different personalities, different values and they work differently,” project leader Remi Ayoko said.
Some people who work in open plan get territorial,” Ayoko said. “It helps people work through stress when they’re protective of their environment. They express themselves in ownership of place, they bring in photos and pot plants that depict who they are. The more they feel at home, the more productive they are.”
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