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Quotation of the Day for January 27, 2014"It turns out that although there is a lot of hype from companies that sell open office furniture and related goods about how fantastic open offices are, and all that, research published in peer review journals clashes with the hype. In every study that I can find that has survived the peer review process, people in open settings are found to be less satisfied, less productive, and experience more stress than people who work in closed offices. And when people move from closed to open offices, they like them less, report being less productive, and report more stress. So long as people are doing work that is largely "individual" and that requires thinking and intense individual concentration, these findings make a lot of sense to me. "Yet, as Lovaglia's Law predicts, many administrators and building designers seem to be have a hard time "hearing" such evidence and keep pushing for open office designs - they prefer to talk about selected anecdotes instead. Indeed, there are popular articles on how management can overcome such 'irrational' resistance to change. But those articles don't seem to mention that, at least for people who don't do highly interdependent team based work such as is done in engineering and scientific labs, open offices don't appear to work very well, so such resistance to open offices might, in fact, be rational." - Robert Sutton, workplace researcher. [http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/lovaglias-law-a.html] Submitted by: Terry Labach Jan. 23, 2014  |
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