What are the negative effects of open offices?
Hortense Cousin
2025-06-02 17:14:29
Nombre de réponses: 7
The study concluded that the new configurations actually reduced interaction, contrary to the intended result. Open offices also ramp up digital engagement, instead of talking directly, workers tend to send colleagues electronic messages if they appear busy or engaged in a conversation with someone else. The open concept has met with mixed reviews in recent years, driving collaboration for some but driving others crazy. Open offices seem to discourage interaction. Because those norms are happening in open spaces — because everyone can see and hear them — they spread faster than they do in more modular spaces. Letting employees simply choose their preference isn’t optimal, they note, because some will opt for closed offices, others open spaces, and still others will work from home — meaning staffers will be even less likely to collide and collaborate than before.
Arnaude Brun
2025-05-26 05:25:58
Nombre de réponses: 10
Open plan offices result in lower performance, especially for tasks that require concentration and memory.
Moreover, open plan offices result in less, not more, interaction and face-to-face communication.
The interaction also becomes less meaningful and job-relevant.
Maintaining the fragile fourth wall demands mental energy and is stressful and exhausting for many, especially over time.
Open plan offices therefore cause increased levels of stress and often a significantly higher rate of sick leave.
This also applies to two-person offices.
The research in this area is extensive, and the results strongly suggest that the costs associated with open plan offices are substantially higher than the benefits.
Both in terms of productivity and the psychological wellbeing and health of employees.
The evidence is clear: open plan offices are bad for people and organizations.
For the sake of health, productivity, and collaboration, let's design spaces with doors.
Roger Bouvier
2025-05-16 18:46:26
Nombre de réponses: 2
Open plan offices result in lower performance, especially for tasks that require concentration and memory.
Open plan offices result in less, not more, interaction and face-to-face communication.
The interaction also becomes less meaningful and job-relevant.
Maintaining the fragile fourth wall demands mental energy and is stressful and exhausting for many, especially over time.
Open plan offices therefore cause increased levels of stress and often a significantly higher rate of sick leave.
The research in this area is extensive, and the results strongly suggest that the costs associated with open plan offices are substantially higher than the benefits.
Both in terms of productivity and the psychological wellbeing and health of employees.
The evidence is clear: open plan offices are bad for people and organizations.
For the sake of health, productivity, and collaboration, let's design spaces with doors.
Open plan offices have significant negative effects for employees as well as organizations.
Jeanne Blanc
2025-05-16 15:10:29
Nombre de réponses: 6
Les open office spaces présentent plusieurs inconvénients.
Loss of productivity.
Employees are distracted faster because of noise or colleagues moving around.
It takes on average 25 minutes to resume a task after distraction.
In an open office space employees are distracted faster because of phone calls, people walking by or nearby conversations.
Problems with noise, temperature and fatigue.
Noise is one of the main distractions in an open office space.
Temperature is managed centrally and it could therefore be too cold of one person and too warm for another.
Fatigue is a side effect from noise and temperature and the fact that people have a constant overload of information with the introduction of multiple screens like phone, tablets and computer.
Increase of sickness.
As employees are in closer proximity of one another diseases can spread faster.
Decrease of overall well-being of employees.
The main cause for the diminishing of well-being is the level of stress.
The idea of being watched all the time increases the levels of stress in an open office space.
Alphonse Toussaint
2025-05-16 13:11:46
Nombre de réponses: 14
Concentration, performance, communication, mood, satisfaction, health: everything suffers.
The result: although management believed that open offices increase the productivity and satisfaction of the workforce, the opposite is actually the case.
They felt disturbed more often by other people's conversations at work and complained more often about stress and physical complaints such as tiredness or headaches.
The consequences for health were also documented in a survey of more than 2,400 office workers in Denmark.
They counted 62 percent more sick days in open-plan offices with seven or more people compared to individual offices.
Having to listen in on other people's conversations is the biggest disruptive factor when concentrating on work.
No partitions, table dividers or sound absorption on the ceiling can help: a room-high partition is needed.
In surveys, only up to 30 percent of employees complained about distracting conversations from others if they had such opportunities to retreat - without this, the figure was up to 70 percent.
For open-plan offices, this means on the one hand: allowing free choice of space, for example via booking systems.
The main thing is to show consideration, for example by speaking quietly or moving telephone calls to designated areas.
Not involving employees at lower hierarchical levels - or only involving them in order to convince them of something that has already been decided.
Open-plan offices inhibit communication.
When employees moved from small offices to open-plan offices, the number of face-to-face meetings fell by around 70 percent - instead, they sent up to 50 percent more emails and other electronic messages.
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- Does being in space cause health problems?