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Open Office Plans Turn Workers Into Unhinged Bullies

The open office plan seems to have been created either to save money on cubicles or to promote a culture of openness and communication.

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The open office plan seems to have been created either to save money on cubicles or to promote a culture of openness and communication. Either way, it seems like the experiment has been a resounding failure.

They seem to be anecdotally despised, and a recent, rather large study of Swedish workers might explain why: open office spaces seem to have about a 67 percent higher risk of workplace bullying than private offices or smaller shared office spaces.

The research was conducted by psychologists Michael Rosander of Linköping University and Morten Birkeland Nielsen of the National Institute of Occupational Health, and published in the journal Occupational Health Science.

Drawing on a national probability sample collected by Statistics Sweden, the study analyzed responses from more than 3,300 workers across Sweden. Participants reported their office type and then completed a detailed questionnaire to assess repeated negative behaviors.

The list included things like exclusion, belittling remarks, or being assigned meaningless tasks. The types of offices included private, small shared, traditional open-plan, and activity-based open offices.

Open Office Layouts May Be Bringing Out Everyone’s Worst Behavior

The researchers found that workers in traditional open-plan offices were significantly more likely to report bullying than those in smaller private offices, even after researchers controlled for personality traits, age, remote work habits, and time spent in the office.

To put it another way, it didn’t matter if the office was filled with more or fewer frustrating coworkers than any other. According to the authors, the difference appears to be directly tied to the environment itself.

The researchers have a few theories as to why. The removal of physical barriers doesn’t allow people to retreat into their own private little world when tensions are high. The person you have a problem with is still right there in your line of sight, and you’re in mayors. That constant proximity can turn a minor conflict into an ongoing problem that no one can escape.

The researchers also found, ironically, that open offices might reduce real interactions. Studies cited in the research show that switching to open layouts can significantly reduce face-to-face communication, sometimes by as much as 70 percent.

You’d think people would be more open and willing to communicate when the literal barriers between them are taken down, but quite the opposite is true. Workers avoid interrupting one another when barriers are removed, causing misunderstandings and any lingering frictions between coworkers to linger and even build quietly over time.

There are different types of shared offices, and some have proved more successful than others. Activity-based offices are those wherein employees can freely move between different work zones depending on their tasks. Those didn’t show a statistically significant increase in the risk of bullying. That ability to quickly relocate gave workers an escape pod to jettison themselves from conflict.

The study was observational, so it doesn’t show a proof of cause as much as it shows just a strong association, but it does add to the growing mountain of evidence suggesting (maybe by this point flat-out screaming) that office design shapes workplace behavior, and an open office plan isn’t really as “open” in the utopian ideal it suggests, and maybe just leave the door open for animosity and hostility.

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