Ethan Bernstein, associate professor at Harvard Business School, studied how coworkers interacted before and after their company moved to an open office plan. The research shows why open workspaces often fail to foster the collaboration they’re designed for. Workers get good at shutting others out and their interactions can even decline. Bernstein explains how companies can conduct experiments to learn how to achieve the productive interactions they want. With Ben Waber of Humanyze, Bernstein wrote the HBR article “ The Truth About Open Offices .”

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

In the mid ‘90s, the Italian designer Gaetano Pesce made a bold attempt to rethink the office. He created one in New York City that was more akin to a lounge or a coffee shop than the cubicle farm that was the norm for the day. Workers signed out a laptop on arrival, and then sought out a nook in which to work. Pesce’s creation paved the way for a brave new world where walls, physical and mental, were broken down. And since that day, workers have been more, and since that day, workers have been more and more productive and innovative.

Yeah, not totally.

By now most of us know that the promise of the open office as some kind of paperless and idea-percolating Mecca hasn’t quite played out that way. For one, there’s the lack of privacy, the excess of distractions. Sometimes those just make it hard to get your work done at the office.

Today’s guest has been studying why open offices are practically more closed and disruptive than they were made out to be. And his research identifies new technologies that are pointing to better ways to make the most of the office.

Ethan Bernstein is a professor at Harvard Business School, and he’s a coauthor of the HBR article, “The Truth About Open Offices”. Ethan, thanks for being here.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Thank you, Curt. It’s a pleasure to be here.

CURT NICKISCH: Your research shows that as organizations move from closed offices to open office architecture, that interactions between workers actually goes down. Can you explain that? Because that just seems very counterintuitive to a lot of people.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Stephen Turban and I – my coauthor on the academic article – Stephen and I set out to understand what actually happens when employees move from more cubicle spaces to open spaces. There’s lots of viewpoints, lots of opinions. We wanted to measure it.

And so we took the opportunity with two Fortune 500 firms that were going from cubicles to open spaces, to instrument workers with a badge around their neck that would record face to face interactions. And we could then pair that with their interactions over email, their interactions over IM, and see how the patterns of behavior, the patterns of interaction, changed as a result of that move from cubicles to open spaces.

These firms both wanted to increase collaboration as a result. What they experienced instead was a drop of roughly 70 percent in both cases of face to face interactions, substituted with electronic interaction – with email, with IM. Good or bad, it was an unintended consequence of the move and was certainly not what had been billed to them in terms of what open spaces would create – the vibrancy, the nature of interaction, the collisions that people would have within the open space.

CURT NICKISCH: Why do you think that is? Because I presume that those workers had access to the same digital electronic communication methods before when they were in cubicles.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: It could be a number of things. So first, we could have made a mistake. So we went back, we checked all the data. We looked at the different kinds of floorplans. We tried to make sure everything was representative, that we hadn’t made any errors in the way that we compared the data, and honestly, every way we cut this data came out with the same result.

And so then that brought us to the question of, well, is this a human thing? And that’s where we started feeling like we got some traction. And that’s why we positioned what we saw as not a change in the architecture, per se. They certainly changed the architecture. The architecture of the space from closed to open. Or at least from cubicle to more open.

But the anatomy, the actual interactions that human beings decided to have or not to have in certain parts of that space didn’t go the way they expected the architecture to push it. Which is in some respects a nice finding about humanity. We’re not controlled by the spaces we work in. But it also reminds us that because of that, we react to the spaces we work in in ways that might not have been intended by the designers.

CURT NICKISCH: What do you think is really happening here? Like, why are people changing their behavior in this new space?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Why do people put on headphones instead of having conversations? Why do people put their head down and stare very intently at the screen rather than feeling like they’re more open to collaboration? Why do all of these behaviors emerge?

Well, to some extent, it’s normative. These are norms that emerge. We want to look busy, so we look intent on our work. We want to be able to focus, so we put on a signal to everyone that we need to focus. All of these norms form relatively quickly, and actually they form even faster when you’re in an open space, because you can all see each other.

I’ve seen people trying to replicate the function of the walls they used to have without them. Those walls do serve a function. And in some places, some companies, some office spaces, they’ve gone so far as to build themselves pods, booths, rooms. Some of the fastest growing startups, like ROOM in New York, growing because people want to buy phone booths for the inside of their offices, not because they need a phone, but because they need a booth. They need a place where they can actually feel some privacy to get their work done. You can do that without a booth, too. It’s a little bit harder.

But let’s see, how do I block out noise? I put on headphones. How do I block out vision? I focus my eyesight somewhere. How do I avoid interruption? I go somewhere else. I work from home. I work from Starbucks. There are ways that we can achieve the same function that those previous walls provided. And we just do so unfortunately at the cost of what the company’s trying to make us do, collaborate.

CURT NICKISCH: We should say this up front. One of the big attractions to open offices is that they cost a lot less. You don’t have to pay for walls. You can fit more people into the same amount of space. So if you’re working in an innovative place, like San Francisco, the idea of giving everybody a closed office with a door, just is cost prohibitive.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: And that’s been true in many parts of the world for a long time. Certainly in Japan, they haven’t had many places, if any, that had private offices, per se, for quite a while, where real estate is expensive. But I don’t think anything that I’ve said or anything that I hear anybody saying these days suggests that we should go backwards in time to any of the previous iterations of private offices, open offices, cubicled offices. We all want to move forward. The question really is, how?

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. In a way, open offices were a way to go back in time. Right? When I was a technology reporter, I would cover startups, and they loved getting the space that used to be the boiler company. They would go into that space where people used to work around a boiler and make things. Clear that out, and they were trying to emulate that same kind of working together. Edison’s lab was, you know, a place where people worked together and sang until midnight working on things. Right? And so, startups were trying to go back in time to sort of get that same kind of innovative energy.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: There’s been a lot of back to the future in open office spaces, and office spaces in general. But if you were to look at the open office, and others have done this and looked at the history, some track it back to Frank Lloyd Wright and his work, for example, with SE Johnson in the ‘30s.

Some track it back further to factory work. Factories were quite open. Some track open offices back to, I’ve even seen some people suggest the Romans and how they organized, or for that matter, the Italian merchants and how they thought about conducting their businesses.

Regardless of where you go back to, there’s certainly that theme. We want more open, more collaborative, more interactive spaces that are also less expensive, because you’re not wasting space on things that one person’s not using now, and therefore some other person could be.

CURT NICKISCH: In your research you found that one company, for instance, realized that certain people were seen as bottlenecks in the company, and they set up processes or arranged the architecture to that it would bypass people who were seen as bottlenecks, only to find out later that those people were also gatekeepers for quality, and they were important people to have as bottlenecks because they were ensuring that you didn’t have to revisit and address problems again down the road. And that’s the sort of, I guess that’s one of those unintended consequences, both of an open office, but also of trying to optimize the open office, that maybe data lets you make the mistake and also recover from it.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Data is very helpful for running real experiments, because without data, you actually can’t tease apart the effect of what you’ve just changed, and the mechanisms, the why that you’re asking me right here today, for why those things happened. For example, Mori discovered that their bottlenecks were gatekeepers, were valuable gatekeepers.

CURT NICKISCH: Mori is a real estate company in Japan.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: And so when they went to a different kind of space in an attempt to try and make people collaborate directly with one another, they discovered that they’d achieved that, but to some extent over time at their peril, because they didn’t actually want you to bypass the people who were gatekeepers for quality. So, the data is helpful not just for understanding the effects of what you’re doing, but also the effects of how it impacts your bottom line as opposed to perhaps someone else’s.

CURT NICKISCH: I mean, one of the attractions of open offices is that you’re supposed to bump shoulders with people. Right? You’re supposed to bump into people who are in different departments, but may have insights into your, the problem that you’re working on. If you knew that two people had to talk to each other to figure out how to solve a problem, you would just set up a meeting. Part of innovation is the, there’s a bit of randomness in it. Right? So I just wonder if designing these spaces for optimal collaboration gets you to a place where you may be less innovative overall.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Depends on which interactions you design it for. If you just design it interactions, then sure, some of the places that I’ve studied, like Mori, have discovered that more interaction is not necessarily better.

So perhaps your most innovative people in a professional services firm, are the partners. And you open up the office, and now the most valuable asset is more available to all the project teams that need more of the partners’ time to get the projects done. But what you really want are those partners to be focused on, at least some of their time, the next innovative and great idea that gets the firm beyond its competition.

Now that they’re more accessible and available, until they find a way to hide, by going to Starbucks or by finding a room that no one knows that they’re there, or by booking a meeting room and becoming a meeting room tyrant, right, one of those people who books a meeting room but just sits there by themselves for an hour. That you’ve actually undermined —

CURT NICKISCH: Thanks everybody for showing up.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: When those people become more accessible directly, you actually might undermine, as you put it, the innovation of the organization. Now that begs a question, how do you know what pattern of interaction you want?

And that’s where I think we suggest, you know, you can’t design it. You have to take a design thinking approach. So the only way to get there is to experiment lots and lots of smaller, less expensive, more flexible experiments, hopefully not conducted, necessarily, from the top down, but even across the employees that you want to be more innovative and collaborative. And let them see the results through all this data that gets collected. And ultimately improve and change, little by little, the office space together.

CURT NICKISCH: What strikes me about a lot of companies is that they just have the space they have for whatever reason. Decisions were made long ago, and now you’re trying to make the most of what you’ve got. Do you have any advice for people who are in the spaces that they’re in, and you’re, if you’re a manager, how can you, what should you be thinking about to try to use the space better, in a space that’s already been designed the way it’s designed?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: First, realize that while openness is supposed to create collaboration, it actually is an excuse not to, for most. There’s limitations. And the same limitation goes for free or flexible space. Free space really isn’t. That’s why it doesn’t get used. And so you can’t go in with assumptions of what you would like to be true of the architectural spaces. You have to go in with an understanding and a belief and a reality around what will actually happen behaviorally when you put people in those spaces. Not always. Not for everyone.

Similarly, we assume that copresence means collaboration. Proximity, we way in the article, is important. But at some point we’re all a little bit too close to have any kind of real conversation. And so even that, I don’t think people can take for granted. Managers have to be wiser consumers of the advice that they’ve been given by their architects and real estate managers going forward.

Now, you’ve posed the question now, what if you can’t change your space? I’m saying, even if you can, it’s not really going to help. So step two, if it’s all about cost. Just tell us. We’ll help you. We, the people working in your office space, will help you save money, and maybe you can give us some of the savings to reinvest to make the space work for us.

Because I don’t think the manager has the best solution to the question of how to make this space more collaborative and more supportive of meaningful collaboration. I think the people who need to collaborate within it do. And sometimes the best thing you can do as a manager is look the other way and let office hacks and other things happen in your space, and perhaps even beyond looking the other way, take some of that money you’re saving and give it to the folks to run experiments, to try new things, to make the space work.

Go and let them buy a phone booth. Put it up and see how it, how much it gets used. If it gets used all the time, buy another one. And buy another one until they’re not all being used. And at some point, if you look around and realize, this makes no sense, now it’s time to try and make sense of it all as a collaborative group.

But first, let people play with the space the way they ought to. And if you don’t do that intentionally, you’ll never get it, because, when was last time, Curt, that you felt truly empowered to change the way your office space looked? Not just like the picture on your desk, but moving around a desk, a chair, something big, a piece of furniture?

CURT NICKISCH: I mean, I’m somebody who tends to sort of suffer through what I have, and I’m not necessarily somebody who really likes to try to mess with things. So, I probably worked at places that might have been more accommodating had I just asked. Right? So, there’s some of that, that the world I want to work in might have been on the tip of my tongue.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: As far as I can tell, the world is full of Curts. People who might not feel comfortable asking, or might even ask, but the ask doesn’t get heard in the way that it would like, the manager would like to, or the person would like it to be heard. The ask might get stopped by a real estate manager. It might get stopped by policy. It might get stopped by all sorts of things.

And that’s actually holding back this entire conversation. So organizations that are doing this well, managers that are doing this well, are finding ways to allow experimentation to happen. Rigorous, legitimate, thoughtful experimentation such that at the end of it, we’ll know a better solution than we have today, by looking at the data from all these sensors, by trying one intervention at a time in a space collectively, by tracking A/B kind of testing, so we do it here, and we don’t do it there. We have a control group and an experimental group.

These are all things that we do all the time in academia. But there’s absolutely no reason not, that we live in a wealth of sensors and data, why organizations can’t do that, from everything from the kinds of sensors we used, to the kinds of sensors they put in the ceilings these days, to the temperature sensor on the wall that’s called a thermostat, to the Fitbit on your wrist, to any other one of a number of sensors you could incorporate. And if people know that that data is theirs, not yours, the manager’s,. but theirs, the group’s, to try and improve the space they’re in.

CURT NICKISCH: I will say, just to add onto the me suffering through situations, I did ask recently to try a different desk, and I’m giving it a shot. I’m sort of Airbnb-ing a different part of the office for a while to see how it works. So you know, and it was an immediate yes. So I think, yeah.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: And that’s wonderful. And I think most organizations and managers would like to say, yes. There are cost implications.

CURT NICKISCH: And political implications.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: And political implications. But consider the alternative. The alternative is a world full of Curts out there who aren’t asking, and are instead solving it for themselves.

If I don’t give you the chance to change your space, your first attempt, generally, headphones, office hacks, looking intently, going to the bathroom when you see somebody you don’t want to talk to. Your second, work from Starbucks. Work from We Work. Work from somewhere else. Your third, just work from home.

And again, not necessarily good, not necessarily bad. It depends on the needs of the organization, the needs of the task, the needs of the group and the team. But that’s not happening with any of those things in mind. That’s happening because I want more space, I want more privacy, I want more closed off space. I can’t get it at the office. I get it somewhere else. I can’t get it at the office. I can’t really get it somewhere else. I’m just not even going to go in. And that’s when you get people saying, my most productive day of the week is the day of the week I get to work from home.

CURT NICKISCH: It shouldn’t be that way.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: It doesn’t have to be.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What about flexible offices? Are they the answer because they give you…

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: The best of both worlds, flexible spaces. Here’s the challenge with flexible spaces – which people have said is just the solution, just more different hybrid solutions to all of the problems we’re talking about here. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. If you build an office space that’s a hybrid space where people choose the space in which they want to work, they’ll choose the space that fits their needs best.

If the whole point of opening up an office space is to create collaboration between different kinds of people, similar people are going to choose similar kinds of space and then that’s where the similar people are going to hang out.

So you’re not going to get the collisions you want. You could potentially create as we suggest in the article some smart events, some other ways to bring those people together. So it might be part of the answer. But collaboration is a team sport – hopefully a diverse team. And so if flexible is the answer, that completely undermines the idea that we’re bringing diverse people together in similar spaces to interact.

CURT NICKISCH: You know, there is this pendulum between going back and forth to, back to the future, going back and forth to open offices, closed, people wishing they had what they used to have, wanting something more futuristic. But what’s interesting about the latest move to open offices is that it has really come at the same time that electronic communication, and digital communication, and collaboration tools, have really taken off. And that has changed all of this. Right?

That has made it possible for some people to work differently in really powerful ways and also in unproductive ways. So I just wonder what you make of thee converging trends, and how to think about office spaces where you also have an overlying digital architecture?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Collaboration is omnichannel. And that’s a great thing. It does mean that the research that my field has done over time on media richness, from which the assumption and findings are that the face to face interaction is the richest form of collaboration, and that’s the one that’s most therefore productive. Perhaps needs to go back and do a little bit more research to see if that’s indeed still holds, that that finding still holds.

CURT NICKISCH: Maybe we’re getting better at the digital stuff.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Maybe as we get better at figuring out how to collaborate digitally, maybe it exceeds the potential of face to face collaboration.

So far I’ve seen no such evidence. And so I remain with what we know, with the caveat that the context, as you suggest, has changed. That said, that’s an overall finding. So if I’m in a global enterprise, where the person next to me is less likely to have a good answer, and the person across the world from me is likely to have a better answer, because she is the expert, and I reach her through email, and I reach the person next to me by turning and asking him a question, I’d much rather, as manager, have me talk to her, the expert, the global expert, who we hired in some other part of the world. So clearly that’s, it’s not a bad thing.

A couple of points. One, from the data, we saw electronic communication networks, and we saw face to face networks in our two Fortune 500 companies. Those two networks were not the same. In fact, they weren’t even 50 percent overlapping. So the people with whom I am an employee of one of those companies, interacted with face to face, and a person with, people with whom I interact, let me start again. So the people with whom I interacted face to face, and the person with whom I interacted with electronically were large different people.

If you move my collaboration from face to face to online, you have dramatically changed not just the medium, but also the players in my collaboration network, and as a result changed the way I work. For better or worse, I don’t know. But if you don’t know if it’s for better or worse, it’s probably for worse.

At the very least, it’s unintended and unintended is not usually the way we like to manage organizations. So what does that tell us? Sure, don’t assume that face to face is the answer, but for the moment it’s our best answer. And if you’re prepared to go more electronic, understand that it’s not just going to change the medium through which your people collaborate. It may actually change the people with who they collaborate to get work done, and you need to know whether that’s going to be a good or a bad thing for the productivity of your organization

CURT NICKISCH: Ethan, thank you so much for coming in to talk about this.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Thanks Curt. I hope you enjoy going back to your open office.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Ethan Bernstein. He is a professor at Harvard Business School and a coauthor of the HBR article, the “The Truth About Open Offices”. You can find it in the November-December 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review and at HBR.org.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch.