Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber wrote an article for the November-December 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review that is likely to receive lots of attention (“The Truth About Open Offices; available here: https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices).
People in the design world and in the client world will be reading and commenting on Bernstein and Waber’s work for some time to come, at least in part because they have been very frank about the positive and negative consequences of including more open spaces in workplaces.
In their article, Bernstein and Waber are clear that the design of an organization’s workplace needs to align with among other things, the strategic objectives of a particular firm. In the rush to complete projects on time and on budget (which are indeed both important objectives), it is regularly the case that design solutions that are developed for one group are also suggested for another that may be quite different. This “re-use” can be facilitated by the fact that many design clients are rarely involved with design decision making and are not used to thinking about even common-sense implications of design decisions made.
Bernstein and Waber are clear that it is the responsibility of firm management to make difficult choices regarding design: “Leaders need to make the call about what collective behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how. Their means should include not just the design of workspace configurations and technologies but the design of tasks, roles, and culture as well.”
Bernstain and Waber go on to state: “If the aim really is to boost collaboration, you need to increase the right kinds of interactions and decrease ineffective ones.” An example of the nuanced implications of choices made: “Using sensors and digital data to track interactions at a large German bank, MIT researchers found that in cases where intrateam cohesion was more predictive of productivity and worker satisfaction than cross-team collisions were, increasing interactions between teams undermined performance. So they moved teams into separate rooms.”
Workplace designers and managers need to develop programming tools and processes that collect the sort of information that results in planning that supports activities in an organization’s strategic best interest. It is difficult to do this sort of analysis without spending time with executives who understand how the organization can be successful, or even more successful. Sometimes effective communication with these leaders can require educating them about how people actually think and behave in various environments. Regularly clients come to discussions of future spaces only knowing about places that they have visited or seen on television or in glossy business magazines, etc., and their objective during conversations with design teams is to insist on one form of the environment or another based on this limited knowledge.
Client conversations that include an “educational” component are likely to result in better design decisions being made. As Bernstein and Waber report in their conclusion, “A single best physical or digital workspace architecture will never be found…The goal should be to get the right people interacting with the right richness at the right times.”
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com). Research Design Connections reports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.