Hirst and Schabenland studied the effects of office design on employees’ psychological comfort. A press release Anglia Ruskin University issued related to their research reports that the duo found that, “Employees subconsciously act and dress differently in modern open-plan office environments…[Hirst and Schabenland] over the course of three years analysed the behaviour of around 1,000 employees at a UK local authority that moved from six separate departmental buildings into a…building [that] made extensive use of glass and incorporated large, open-plan offices and collective spaces…[Hirst] said: ‘When changing from a more closed, compartmentalised office space to a new open-plan, transparent and fluid working space, office workers were more conscious of their visibility and often found this unsettling rather than liberating. Women in particularly felt anxious about the idea of being constantly watched, and felt they had to dress in a certain way…[working] in an open space…was seen by some as a chance to dress more smartly and fulfill a new identity.”
In their journal article, Hirst and Schabenland (2018) state that, “The new office encourages an image of the ideal worker which brings together ways of acting and interacting that have been characterized as both masculine and feminine – active movement and spontaneous encounters, but also intensive face-to-face interaction and deep relationship-building.”
“New Offices Make Us More Image-Conscious.” 2018. Press release, Anglia Ruskin University, https://www.anglia.ac.uk/news/new-offices-make-us-more-image-conscious
Alison Hirst and Christina Schabenland. 2018. “Doing Gender in the ‘New Office.’” Gender, Work and Organization, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 159-176, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12200
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.