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Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk? - feedback and research.
« Last post by IainB on July 23, 2018, 11:00 AM »@AzureToad:
I'd be very interested - studies of work environment design and ergonomic have shown that these factors can have profound effects on the worker's productivity and sense of well-being.
However, some recent research seems to indicate that the supposed benefits of open plan offices are not as straightforward as had been hypothesised/believed: The Open Office Revolution Has Gone Too Far
I don't usually like to quote HBS as it's comment often seems to be biased (e.g., self-serving) or of dubious merit, but the link is about what could be some properly-done - and thus worthwhile - objective research.
Some interesting and salient points:
I'll follow up once it's arrived and have had a chance to use it a bit.Have you got any feedback yet for those of us as might be interested, please?-AzureToad (November 17, 2017, 05:13 PM)
I'd be very interested - studies of work environment design and ergonomic have shown that these factors can have profound effects on the worker's productivity and sense of well-being.
However, some recent research seems to indicate that the supposed benefits of open plan offices are not as straightforward as had been hypothesised/believed: The Open Office Revolution Has Gone Too Far
I don't usually like to quote HBS as it's comment often seems to be biased (e.g., self-serving) or of dubious merit, but the link is about what could be some properly-done - and thus worthwhile - objective research.
Some interesting and salient points:
Those [late 20th century open plan office studies] are fine for understanding individual perceptions, but aren’t so good at quantifying real behavioral responses and organizational performance outcomes from open offices. The gap between perceptions and real outcomes has now become the battleground for employees and employers on this issue.
Technology—in this case specifically, wearable technology—has enabled us to track individual or dyadic interactions at a really refined level. It’s not just “did you do this?” but “you did X, Y, and Z at this particular time with these other people.” If I was going to dive into researching open offices, I wanted to do it more empirically, tracking variables that were previously unfathomable to measure beyond proxies and guessing.
It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with open offices. My understanding, from speaking with real estate managers and architects, is companies’ conversations about the built environment tend to start with cost per square foot. If the question is how to lower costs, the answer is more people per square foot, and open offices will always have the upper hand on that dimension.
My hope is that this research throws a bucket of ice water on the idea that there’s no tradeoff—that you will naturally both save in real estate costs and get more collaboration from this kind of design.
His colleague then piped up and pointed out that all of the “noise” (as an indication of interactions) actually comes from behind the closed doors of the separate, team-based spaces. That should make us wonder: if all the noise is coming from behind closed doors, isn’t that where people are interacting and working well together? Wouldn’t you maybe want more of that?
Here is perhaps one way to summarize the shift in perspective that is suggested by this work. In the past, when it comes to workplaces, office design (and many other artifacts of organizational life) have catered to the observer and not the observed. Unfortunately, it’s the observed who make our organizations successful. So maybe everything, from office design to people analytics, ought to shift slightly in mindset to optimize for their work more often.
whole-page (including scrollable windows) image capture of Microsoft's OneNote Web Clipper (can be used with the free version of OneNote):
