Neither open nor equitable: The high cost of open offices

Abstract

Steven Bell’s October 2023 C&RL News article, “We’re All About Openness: Except When it Comes to Our Workspaces,” is propaganda for open offices masquerading as “an objective look at the open office environment.” Bell minimizes the costs that open offices pose to employee well-being and to the functioning of the organization, and falsely equates the move to open offices with greater openness and equity. While I don’t disagree that there are ways to use design to mitigate some of the harm to employees and their ability to work productively in open offices, research suggests there will still be significant harm and it will not be felt equally. As a fellow open office dweller, I felt it was important to offer another perspective, supported by scholarship on the topic.

Bell suggests in his article that the verdict on open offices is mixed and that it’s just as easy to find evidence supporting open offices as critiquing them. In looking at systematic reviews on the topic, including several that have been published over the past three years, I found this to be far from the case. In fact, the scholarly consensus on open offices is uniformly negative and the move to open offices comes with many detrimental impacts on employee well-being, organizational health, and work output.