Hey Google, I hate your open-plan office!

Disclaimer: This is a bit of a rant.

A new newsletter every weekend. That is the schedule I forced upon myself when I decided to publish my writing on Substack and no longer keep it to myself. I knew a week like this one would come. A week where login into Substack was the least of my worries, where work and dirty laundry piled up higher than a skyscraper, where the house was a mess, and the fridge was empty because no one had time to buy groceries.

And I know I could easily skip this week and not write anything.

I know that.

But I want to stick to something, and I don’t want to feel like a quitter. Somehow, feeling like a quitter is worse than actually being one. So here I am, at work, using my hour-long lunch break to write something. Anything!

I am not sure where I read this advice, but somewhere I read that if you don’t know what to write about, write about what you’ve been talking about. And the most exciting conversation I had this week (mostly in my head) was about the horror that are open-plan offices. The constant noise, the distraction, colleagues chewing, moving, breathing! All while you try to concentrate on your work.

If your workload is easy to manage, you probably barely notice any of this. You might even enjoy the casual conversation with your colleagues. But if you have a to-do list longer than a roll of toilet paper, an open-plan office is your enemy. I only got half of the things done I would’ve at home. But I promised myself to go to the office more often because I am worried that otherwise my sweatpants will be permanently fused to my skin.

At the end of the day, I explained my grievances to my husband, starting the conversation with: “I don’t want advice, I need to rant, and you are going to be angry with me.” I described the horror that is an open-plan office in all its annoying glory. He tried his very best to be angry with me, but he couldn’t relate. He has a single office at the company he works at, with a decorating budget (I wish I was kidding).

The evening ended with something I often do when I am as riled up as this: Research how the fuck we got here. Because I needed to know: Who invented open-plan offices, and why would someone come up with something this stupid?

If you get the impression that I am still angry about my week in the office, you are right. In fact, I am still very annoyed by it. You have to understand: I am writing this newsletter while sitting at a desk, a “hot desk” in the famously mentioned open-plan office. It is a smaller, only four-person office, but one room down, there are four more people.

I should be concentrating on my analysis, trying to get this code to work. But I couldn’t focus, and I kept seeing this stupid red word “failed” every single time I ran the code. So I decided to take a break and write my heart out because this unreasonable aggression needs to go somewhere productive. Otherwise, I am afraid, I might hurt someone.

Let me paint you a picture of what 10 seconds in an open-plan office are like:

• Ella* is aggressively typing on her keyboard. Constantly hitting the backspace button, deleting a sentence, re-writing it, deleting it again. The keyboard is loud, and she must be really angry because the way she is typing makes me think she is writing a declaration of war.

• Ally* is humming to herself, almost singing while thinking something over.

• David* is talking on the phone, in his very loud phone voice (which is completely different from his normal voice).

• Alex* is sitting in the room next door, but his deep baritone laughter can be heard throughout the entire office.

• Jessica* and Ida* are chatting by the coffee machine about their weekend shenanigans - for the past hour(!).

• Marika* walks around in her high-heeled boots that echo throughout the entire office.

• Somewhere, someone is flushing a toilet.

• A microwave is beeping.

• A phone is ringing.

• The printer is printing.

*all names are made up

10 seconds! That is all the noise I am hearing within 10 seconds! A time in which I am expected to work effectively. But I am not working effectively. My focus is lost, and as a result, my analysis keeps failing, over and over.

And yes, I am wearing noise-cancelling headphones. But they can only do so much. After all, with that much going on, they wouldn’t even know what noise to cancel out first.

Within these 10 seconds, I wondered who is the person that came up with an open-plan office? And why did they think this was a good idea?

New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library. "Central Building, Room 100, including card catalogs" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1911 - 1930.

The history of the open-plan office

To make it short, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the first open-plan office in 1906. His vision: imitating a factory floor, with one big space for all the workers. Turns out, he was ahead of his time because the open-plan office didn’t take root. Not fully. Only an open area became a common theme, mainly used by secretaries and administrative staff. Executives and senior employees still had their own, private offices.

The history of how we went from that unpopular concept to the “beloved” open-plan offices of today is a bit murky. It is widely accepted, however, that open-plan offices gained more popularity through a German-born concept called Bürolandschaft (office landscape) of the 1950s. It is believed to go back to the German consulting firm Quickborner, led by the brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle.

The idea behind it: organize an office space without hierarchy, to reflect the post-war egalitarian trend in Germany. Emphasizing that all employees are equal and as substantial to the company as its leaders (well, that didn’t happen!). Another vision was to create a more communicative workplace (I am still laughing). By removing walls and barriers, people could communicate and collaborate more easily.

But how did a small German office concept become such a popular and widely accepted way of office planning?

The answer: Google.

The open-plan office as we know it today started its reign in 2005 when Google reinvented its headquarters. Companies wanted to be as successful as the tech giant, so they did what Google did: Google embraces an open-plan office concept → Google is successful → embracing an open-plan office culture will make us successful.

Modern Hell | Unsplash, by Alex Kotliarskyi

Nothing is that simple

While the original idea, to increase collaboration and communication, might have been noble, reality shows that it is not working. The Harvard Business Review has done some extensive research about open-plan offices:

In a number of workplaces we have observed for research projects or consulting assignments, those structures have produced less interaction - or less meaningful interaction - not more.

One of the most damning results, in my opinion, is this: “When the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%, while electronic interactions increased to compensate.” The explanation for this, according to the researchers, is that people in the office create a fourth wall¹, allowing to distance themselves from their surroundings and their colleagues. If someone looks like they are concentrating on their work, no one will interrupt, according to the Harvard Business Review.

I feel they asked the wrong questions here. Because you can try and build a fourth wall all you want, but at the end of the day, that wall is still a product of your imagination. And if a colleague really wants to talk, they will talk, even if it is to themselves. No wall, real or not, will stop them.

In another study, the researchers did ask the right questions and 76% of respondents said that they hate open offices. Most cited lack of privacy (43%), a third (29%) said that they have trouble concentrating, and 21% said they can’t think straight in an open-plan office.

I am all of the above.

Hot-Desking: May the odds be ever in your favor!

And in a completely insane twist of events, open-plan offices weren’t the end of office-layout experiments. The grotesque evolution that followed is called “hot-desking”. Because people “collaborate so much” desks aren’t occupied all the time. So to save costs, companies turned their offices into a war zone, where no one has an assigned desk anymore. Instead, you have to join the daily hunger games to find the best desk in the cornucopia and fight off the other tributes. In an ideal world, you book a desk a few days prior, and it is yours. But in reality, some people always show up unannounced.

Open-plan offices are one thing to endure, but hot-desking is another. The basic idea behind an open-plan office was not only to increase collaboration but to create an office space without hierarchy, emphasizing that all employees are important. Hot-desking seems to accomplish the exact opposite, where many people say they don’t feel as supported by management now that they don’t have an assigned desk anymore. And not only that, but “hot-desking will kill your company” (a pretty bold statement, but the headline sure made me click).

I can confirm that having to secure a good desk in the office makes me sweat. My stress levels are high long before that first email is sent. Because I am not booking a specific desk, I am just booking a space in the office. Hence, any desk that is free could be mine. But you see, there are desks, and then there is the desk. The one in the corner, where no one can watch my screen, right by a window for excellent people-watching, far away from the door, and only one colleague across from me. I am not a morning person, but whenever I go to the office, I become one, only to secure myself this perfect species of a desk.

All the research I am citing here doesn’t seem to have a good solution to the problem. As the Harvard Business Review put it:

A single best physical or digital workspace architecture will never be found. That’s because more interaction is not necessarily better, nor is less.

Open-plan office survival guide

I can complain about open-plan offices and hot-desking all I want, but there is no escape for me. If I work from home for too long, I become a recluse and weird. Not funny weird, but weird weird. As introverted as I am, being around people from time to time does help my mental health.

So, I will stop complaining and end this rant with something positive. A non-complete survival guide to working in an open-plan office and how to win the hot-desking hunger games.

1. Invest in good noise-cancelling headphones.
   This will be the best investment you ever make. Not only do they work as a headset for video meetings, but they will cancel out most of the noise around the office. The two I can recommend (and have used myself) are the Bose QuietComfort series and the Sony WH-1000XM4.

2. Arrive before everyone else.
   Whether you are a morning person or not, if you are the first person in the office, you not only get the best desk, but you will be able to enjoy some much-needed quiet time. Use it to relax and read the latest Substack newsletters, or use it to answer some emails in peace.

3. Bring your own keyboard and mouse.
   Hot-desking is not only stressful but since Covid, I don’t feel it is the healthiest thing ever invented?! Bringing your own keyboard and mouse not only means you keep your germs to yourself, but you can make them your own. So buy the nice keyboard and add some personality back into your office days. And a little extra tip, as someone who has been working a desk job for over a decade now: Your body will turn on you if you don’t invest in an ergonomic mouse and a good keyboard.

4. Have disinfectant wipes ready at all times.
   While bringing your own keyboard, mouse, and laptop will only entertain your own germs, the desk itself was probably used by more people than you. Wipe that shit down before you start. You never know what happened there.

5. Bring your own coffee.
   If coffee ever ceases to exist, I am sure the entire world economy will crumble. And judging by office coffee standards, companies want the economy to crumble, because I’ve never encountered an office coffee that my tastebuds actually enjoyed. So, for your own sanity and the safety of your coworkers, bring your own coffee.

6. Set boundaries with everyone around you.
   If you pull your headphones down for every person that comes to your desk, you won’t get anything done. Set a boundary with your colleagues:

   • Headphones on = I am working, leave me alone.

   • Headphones off = I am daydreaming about my home office, wanna chat?

If you’ve made it this far, I applaud you. And thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

XOXO
Annika

1. A term coined by French philosopher Denis Diderot, describing the imaginary barrier between actors and audience on stage.