The Open Office Is Naked by Theo Compernolle

Author:Theo Compernolle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: creativity, stress, productivity, efficiency, knowledge worker, multitasking, ict, burn out, communication and collaboration, architecture of offices

The basic challenge for executives: resolving the privacy-contact dilemma

When a company plans an office, it wants to reduce the footprint of each employee, reduce the number of desks, especially in organizations where a lot of work is done outside the office, and increase communication and collaboration. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, on the contrary. The challenge is to achieve this without undermining the quality and quantity of difficult, complex intellectual work or of other brainwork like reading, analysis and writing that require prolonged periods of undisturbed, undivided attention and focus. Breaking down all the walls and squeezing in as many people as possible per square foot, however, is certainly not a solution to increase contact, communication and collaboration and certainly no way to increase productivity and profit, on the contrary.

If we set aside the cost-cutting aspect, I think that executives and architects, out of ignorance, too often make the wrong choice when they have to choose between two seemingly mutually exclusive opposites: the need for privacy (focus) and the need for contact.

On the one hand, they want to break up the isolation created by the single office to enhance social contact, interaction, communication and collaboration.

On the other hand, they forget that the ever-increasing level and complexity of brainwork needs ever-increasing privacy to protect the focus, attention and concentration needed for analysis, synthesis, abstraction, reflection, creativity, innovation and all other kinds of non-routine brainwork.

By “privacy” I mean the absence of all unwanted acoustic, visual and tactile contact, together with some personal influence on light, temperature and the layout of a personal space. As I have already explained, the intrusion of noise is the worst disturbance because individual workers have no way to protect themselves against it except by buying and wearing excellent earplugs or headphones.

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