Do open offices boost creativity
Startups have open offices – mostly. Everyone from the twenty year old founder to the twenty one year old employees are all sitting around in open cubicles. It is a visible symbol of a non-hierarchical work culture. In a country where hierarchy is everywhere, this comes across like a breath of fresh air and becomes a great draw while hiring.When Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo, she revoked the work from home option for the employees. She said that having colleagues meet each other and having chance conversations was a way to brew new ideas that get lost when the workforce largely goes virtual. The Yahoo PR team quoted Steve Jobs view that “chance encounters” increase creativity as the reason to get everyone to be physically present in the office.Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators and more famously the biographer of Steve Jobs said that Jobs obsessed over the location of bathrooms at the Pixar headquarters so that people bumped into each other and that improved creativity. Isaacson says:Creativity is a collaborative process. As brilliant as the many inventors of the Internet and computer were, they achieved most of their advances through teamwork. Like Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel, some of the best tended to resemble Congregational ministers rather than lonely prophets, madrigal singers rather than soloists.The architects advise the entrepreneurs now to have an open office and put lots of meeting rooms that people can use if they need to work undisturbed. Does that mean that it is disturbing and chaotic to work in an open office? Almost 70% offices in US have an open office plan. Should we follow suit?
Nature of work
There are two stages of creative tasks. The first one is when we need a lot of ideas to be generated, different perspectives need to be examined. That is when it helps to have your senses bombarded with multiple interactions. Open offices can be helpful in this phase. But then we all need to finally converge and choose from a million options. That is when having a quiet space to work uninterrupted matters. When everyone has their little private bubble in the office, the meeting rooms are used to gather people and brainstorm. In open offices, individuals use meeting rooms to seek privacy and a space they can work uninterrupted. Even a 2 second interruption can lead to doubling errors.
How many people
When you go to a party, there are lots of conversations happening simultaneously. Our brains can tune out the rest of the clutter and focus on just that one conversation. This is called the cocktail party effect. But when that chat is frequently interrupted by someone or a group of people every now and then, it is frustrating. Interruptions sap our attention and leave us depleted. Research shows that the increased opportunity for interaction in an open office actually gets balanced out by the dissatisfaction caused by the increased noise and loss of privacy.
Just the right amount of sound
Working in an environment where one experiences frequent interruption and high levels of noise impacts productivity. Uncontrolled interactions lead to a drop in the ability to recall information. But working in an absolutely silent interaction free zone is not helpful either. Researchers find that working in a moderate level of ambient noise – like what one experiences in a coffee shop is actually ideal and that it boosts creativity.
In conclusion
With large groups of employees working from home, and being geographically distributed, the office is indeed becoming a lonely place. There is a point where the office moves from having “distributed individuals and groups to having a distributed workforce.”There seems to be a balance to be struck between the creative outputs that are triggered by random conversations with colleagues. But when people lose control over when and where these conversations happen, the same conversations seem to drain productivity.Office design is an emerging area that needs attention. Every CEO may not have the appetite to get involved in the design of the office space like Steve Jobs. That does not mean it can be left to chance.---------Jon me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduri