Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: In View: Repercussions

Bernstein and Turban’s work underscores how important it is to provide workers with spaces where they can work, at least occasionally, out of view of others.

The researchers found that, at two organizations, when employees transitioned from workspaces with employee cubicles to ones in which there were no visual dividers between workers that “Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interactions decreased significantly (approximately 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction, in short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.” Bernstein and Turban collected data using sociometric devices worn by employees and from email and instant messaging (IM) records.

The workplaces at each organization were only briefly described in the paper published. Transitions involved “transformation[s] from assigned seats in cubicles to similarly assigned seats in an open office design, with large rooms of desks and monitors and no dividers between people’s desks.” At one of the two test sites “In the first phase, desks were in cubicles, so seats were roughly 2 m[eters] apart and directly adjacent to one another. In the second phase, seats still lay roughly 2 m apart and directly adjacent to one another, but were grouped at undivided and unwalled tables of six to eight.” As always, it’s important to note that design execution can vary dramatically between workplaces of the same basic type.

In some situations, for example, when extensive documentation of employee interactions may be necessary, encouraging electronic communication may be desirable.

Bernstein’s previous research has shown that working in view of others can distort behaviors. For example, people may be reluctant to write something on a white board during a meeting if someone not attending the meeting and merely passing by might possibly interpret the written message in an undesired way.

Bernstein and Turban state that their findings indicate that “open, ‘transparent’ offices may be overstimulating.” This conclusion is consistent with a lot of previous research in both environmental psychology and neuroscience generally. Humans are interested in each other and pay attention to what other people are doing, regardless of personality. We cannot simply ignore each other when we have visual access to one another. Some hypothesize that this may be because our brains developed when we needed to be very attentive to each other to survive, for example, while we were hunting in our early days as a species. This attention to each other contributes to overstimulation in real world environments. Research has also shown that when individuals are overstimulated their professional performance is degraded.

Orienting seats in more open work areas, whenever possible, so that individuals do not see other people, and making sure people are visually isolated in “solo work” sections of ABWs seem like straightforward ways to counter, to the extent possible, the overstimulation that Bernstein and Turban report in visually open work environments.

Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban. 2018. “The Impact of the ‘Open’ Workspace on Human Collaboration.” Philosophical Transactions Royal Society B, in press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239

Sally Augustin, PhD,a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. 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.