Open-Plan Offices Are Making Us Less Social

In recent years, a number of big companies – IBM, Bank of America, Aetna, Yahoo! under former chief executive officer Marissa Mayer – cut back on their telecommuting programs in the name of more interaction and cooperation between employees, supposedly fostered by being stuck together in an office. The business model of companies providing co-working spaces, such as $20 billion “unicorn” WeWork, is also based on the proposition that if people find themselves in a shared space, they’ll network and cooperate more.

It doesn’t quite work like that, though, recent research shows. At the office, be it a corporate one or a WeWork-style environment, workers these days are housed in vast open spaces designed to break down barriers. But in a just-published paper, Harvard University’s Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban showed, on the basis of two field studies of corporate headquarters, that the modern open office architecture tends to decrease the volume of face-to-face interaction by some 70 percent and increases electronic communication accordingly. With such a communication pattern, the workers might as well be anywhere.