Do you love open plan offices?

Do you work in an open plan office – do you find them fun, stimulating and more dynamic, or are they irritating, noisy and even unhygienic?

Love them or hate them, open plan offices are probably here to stay. Organisations find them cheaper to run, more flexible when reorganising space, find that they increase communication between workers and that more people can fit in the same space.

A recent systematic review of the research concerned with open plan offices found that despite the many good aspects of open plan layouts for organisations, many people who worked in open plan offices were unhappy with their working environments. High levels of noise and distraction can easily lead to loss of concentration with consequences for productivity job dissatisfaction and irritation levels. More abstractly, but no less importantly people associated open offices with loss of privacy, feelings of insecurity and lack of status; if only the boss has a closed office how does that make you feel?

Perhaps more seriously open plan offices were found to be related to higher levels of reported stress, more communicable sicknesses such as flu, increased fatigue and increased blood pressure levels. Also worryingly they can actually lead to greater costs because of increased staff turnover.

Like much psychological research, if you wonder whether your office might be badly affected when going over to an open plan office, the answer is “it depends”, the answer being influenced by a complex interaction between your personality, the type of tasks you have to do and the organisation’s attitude and flexibility in using such workspaces.

At QoWL we analyse comments from thousands of office workers, and open plan offices are often singled out for criticism which includes many of the issues described above. It seems however, if the task employees need to complete requires a high level of social interaction and is facilitated by a high level of easy communication: "Hey, Bob someone here wants to know what grade we got on that big review?" then open plan offices are generally very good. However, if a job is characterised by periods of intense concentration, especially when personally or commercially sensitive information is being used, a more private office space works best.

Indeed, some people love open-plan offices with all their attendant problems, as where else can you catch up with gossip, pass round sweeties and work all at the same time!


Reference

Oommen, V. G., Knowles, M., Zhao, I. (2008). Should health service managers embrace open plan work environments? A review. Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management. 3 (2),37-43.

Commuting Stress?

Almost whenever we get to chat to representatives of a client organisation we can guarantee that the issues that will get the most moans and groans from everyone in the room are 'parking' or 'travelling to work'.

When examined across all our data sets parking and travelling to work seem to have little effect on the average experience of quality of working life. However when we look at individuals these issues can have a major impact.

In almost all of our surveys where people are able to comment in an open question, parking or commuting comments are in the top 10 most mentioned issues and if the overall impression is negative, people's comments often show they are hopping mad about it!

Why should people be particularly upset about such peripheral aspects of a job?

Well, there are a number of reasons, but the best explanation appears to be related to the idea first suggested by Herzberg that there are certain elements of job satisfaction called Hygiene factors where the minimum level you expect is for them to be good. Such Hygiene factors are usually to do with access to the basic resources you need to do your job. For an office worker this might be having the email system up and working, but even extends to whether you are allowed to make personal phone calls at work. Perhaps counter-intuitively having such factors at a better than average level does not seem to improve QoWL by very much, but having them at a less than average level seriously reduces QoWL!

In addition to building more car parks and improving the roads generally, there are many ways organisations and individuals attempt to overcome problems with Parking & Commuting.

Flexi-time is a time honoured method for staggering travel and parking times, quite often commuting just one hour later or earlier can make all the difference. Allowing staff to stagger their start and end times can also have good effects on general home-work interface issues as well, such as not having to rush to drop the kids off at the start of the day.

Car pooling or car sharing potentially helps both travel times and parking issues, but can be frustrating and cause a perceived loss of control if someone wants to leave early and the other person does not!

If you really cannot change anything practically it might be that thinking about the problem in a different way, perhaps by trying to see the advantages of the situation (e.g. Getting fit by having to walk the last half a mile to work). Tony Cassidy has talked about this and other psychological approaches to dealing with commuting-related stress.

Finally, one of the reasons people feel free to voice a negative opinion about issues such as parking or travelling to work is that they are a shared gripe, and they won't be embarrassed moaning about it even to the big boss.



Selected Research Articles

Herzberg, F. (1966). Work and the Nature of Man. Cleveland: World Press. 4 (2) 15-21.

Cassidy, T.(1992). Commuting-related Stress: Consequences and ImplicationsA scale for measuring email overload. Employee Counselling Today. 4 (2) 15-21.