Open Concept Office

Has your office adopted on these 'open concept' layouts?
Where those 'unfriendly' cubicle walls are lowered or removed, desk spaces are reduced, and you can read the typos off your colleagues' screens.

According to its fans (and office consultants and furniture suppliers), the benefits of the open concept are as follows:

• Reduces space required per worker, resulting in compaction of total office space and rental
• Reduces isolation and increases face-to-face interaction, resulting in more creativity and team spirit, which in turn would increase productivity 
• Increased visibility also allows for ease of management

Sounds really good. What can beat a list of quantifiable and qualifying advantages?! This is a proposal which no manager can refuse! Especially managers who are making the decisions in their nicely-decorated and insulated offices.

However, if the manager had some common sense and been a user of the open concept, one ought to realise in an instance that it is one of the most ineffective 'office innovation trends' ever. There is absolutely no savings, nor increase in productivity. Instead, the company would suffer in the long run.

Not only does it hinder the worker's reading and thought processes (of course, only important for workers who are expected to perform a certain level of thinking in their work), the open concept provides the office extrovert with the perfect platform to solicit his daily hour of attention. Once Mr Extrovert starts sharing his terrible day with the poor guy nearest to him, everyone has no choice but to listen. This excites Mr Extrovert even more, resulting in a longer speech, and sometimes urging responses from others at the other end of the office.

Now, in addition to that 1 hour of desperate extroverted performance, think about those daily couple of 10-minute phonecalls by those few colleagues with booming voices. Anyone ought to realise that at least 25% of office hours have become impossibly unproductive.

(With a stroke of good luck, sometimes both colleagues with booming voices would be on the phone at the same time. YAY! You've saved 10 unproductive minutes for the day! That's usually the cue to go for a tea/toilet break, as it's impossible to even fill out HR admin forms under such circumstances.)

Hence, while the open concept saves upfront costs for the company, these costs are transferred to the individual workers directly and immediately. And in the long run, at the loss of 25% of productive work hours per day for x years, the company has to be worse off.

So what exactly are we trying to achieve here with the open concept again?

Of course, this is not to say that everyone ought to be in separate rooms with sound-proof doors and walls like Yamaha jam studios. But, as with most mundane knowledge in life, taking anything to the extreme is not a good idea.

Adopting the open concept for workers who are required to perform thinking functions is freaking extreme, OK, Mr Emperor without clothes?! Following corporate trends blindly is clearly not an act of management. It's an act of lack of management.

Having said the above, not all readers of this entry should start to feel indignant his open concept seat in the office, coz he may not be performing a genuine 'thinking' function in the office.