How Open Plan Office Is Ruining Your Productivity At Work, And Why It's Doomed To Stay That Way

Porcelain mugs are being washed, noisily kept aside. The guy washing them is wastefully splashing water. Not too far away, a coffee machine sputters dispensing froth into a cup of synthetic milky cappuccino. Flat leather flip flops courtesy of millennials tap off, someone swivels in their crisp-n-crunchy clothes, a punch machine clicks loudly in the distance.

And you can hear it all.

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Throughout the 8-hours you spend at work every day, there's almost a relentless assault on your ear, which has the capacity to directly impact your performance. Julian Treasure, Sound and Communication expert, in an NPR podcast estimates that in the absence of earlids, you have enough bandwidth for one conversation and a bit of an internal monologue.

So what happens when you can overhear not one but at least half a dozen different conversations and other noises around you? It's a recipe for disaster, which makes you realize why headphones are less of an accessory

and more of a limb these days.

The origin of office noise

Much of this nonsense traces its origin to one significant but devastating workplace change -- the cursed open plan office. A Harvard study in 2018 discovered that the Open Plan office was actually decreasing productivity than increasing it, and it was also reducing face to face interaction and collaboration.

Yet, somehow companies persist, and most people even claim they do this primarily because its cheaper. I think the answer might not be quite so simple.

In India, the trend of offices adopting open plans started in the '70s, but does that mean our offices were fairly silent over half a century ago? In fact, one could argue that India always had the cacophony I am complaining about at the beginning of this article, something the Brits lovingly referred to as 'Sounds of India.' But that cacophony is different from the sounds of a centrally air-conditioned office in Gurugram, a thousand cell phones beeping and noisy chappals prowling the floor!

If you take our own Indiatimes office, all of this third party noise adds up -- our floor even has a foosball machine, which means the noise isn't just the game or the ball hitting the wooden sides, it's also the WhatsApp, Hangouts and Email notifications, in addition to voice calls on our digital appendages (mobiles).

But here's the worst part: most of the offices which we've celebrated over the last two decades for their pools, free food and beanbag culture have all been open-plan, so are all the new ones coming up.

But in sharp contrast, some of the biggest inventions and seminal works have all been created by people working alone rather than in the middle of a busy office with an auditory circus all around.

Murakami gets up at 4 am and writes, Hemingway used to write in the morning as well, primarily because no one would be around to disturb him. Dr Seuss wrote his books alone.

Benjamin Franklin and Oliver Sacks used to get up early to work primarily because of the solitude that it offered. But they all did work primarily alone. Even Facebook, an open advocate of the open plan office, was invented by a guy in a dorm-room, so was Amazon founded in a garage. But much of their offices across the world are open-plan, both do have pods in their offices where people can sneak in and 'work' (steal a wink from time to time). Steve Wozniak in his book iWoz advises “Work alone. Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

In fact, if you dig a little deeper you’ll find an amazingly large number of defining figures to be actual introverts (they work better alone than in groups) -- people like Bill Gates, Albert Einstein and even JK Rowling. Would the current new offices make room for solitude and quiet contemplation? Give creativity and innovation a chance to flourish, by dialing down all the unnecessary noise?

Time for a change

The question then, is why haven't things changed? It's pretty simple: a) people who make these decisions don't sit in the larger office structure they put in place to realise just how noisy modern offices can get, and b) It's cheaper to design an open office.

As research for this story, when we were looking at Indian offices from 1970s and '80s, we hardly found any which weren't open planned. So you could argue that we never knew what we were missing. Below is a side-by-side picture of a government office in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra in 1983, and a PTI (Press Trust Of India) office in 1994. With and without computers, but the lack of walls and doors remain common, and even newspaper offices in 1970 were open plan. We may have gotten the Summer Of Love two decades late, but the concept of the open plan office came here on the very next flight.

Do yourself a favour, download a free app like Sound Meter to measure noise on your phone, and you'll realise a lot of offices have noise between 65 - 75 db on an average. German sound engineers had actually defined the noise that is congenial to problem-solving or intellectual work to be at 55 db. So the noise in an open-plan office is an issue whether or not you are in close proximity to the pantry or a passage. It's just not good for productivity.

So, what are we going to do about it? Precisely nothing. The only hope is, either for your co-worker to be replaced with a computer programme, or a larger, more tectonic shift towards WFH, it’s not a fight corporates are going to fight for you, nor can they be expected to.

You could invest in noise cancelling headphones and ignore the studies on their ill effects on your ears. Or you could just do what Ross did.

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