This article was originally written in a 2017 edition of the Leesman Review, in response to a plethora of poorly thought-out think-pieces decrying the open plan office on little data. In 2021 due to a surge in the number of articles about the future of work, yet ignoring the heterogeneity in our preferences, we revisited this article.

Fast forward to 2022 where we’re still seeing articles calling for an end to the open plan office, only to find it based on a minuscule sample, or worse, conjecture? We believe this is another important time to come back and update this article with the most recent Leesman data. This illustrates why we shouldn’t take any sort of concept at face value as we attempt to plot our next workspace steps.

The open plan witch hunt – revisited

It appears the pitchforks haven’t been lowered. Dr Peggie Rothe first wrote this article in 2017, after seeing a flurry of headlines being fed to the public, covering everything from ‘Does open-plan get the worst out of workers?’, ‘Open-plan offices suck’, and ‘10 rules for surviving your open-plan office’, to my personal favourite: ‘Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell’.

The witch hunt against open-plan environments is still in full swing. Despite everything we’ve learned about both home working and office-based experiences.

A few years prior to my publishing the rebuttal, an article I co-authored was referenced in The New Yorker, in an article titled ‘The open-office trap’. While our findings predominantly identified positive experiences among the participants, the article chose to focus on the small proportion of negative findings. Two days later, a Finnish business magazine retold that story from The New Yorker with the headline ‘All studies agree that open plan is a terrible idea’, even though that was far from what we had concluded. It also seems that what gets published is sometimes heavily influenced by the author’s own experiences.

I later sent an email to the same Finnish magazine, where I pointed out that their statement of there not being any difference between activity-based working (ABW) environments and open-plan offices was incorrect. The response I got was that the reporter had worked in both and she thought they were the same. So based on her personal experience, it was published in a nationwide business magazine.

Taking these attention-grabbing headlines at face value is extremely risky.

A case in point of this happening more recently is the claims of the death of the office and the office desk, most notably in the Wall Street Journal, which we responded to in January 2021.

It would be naïve to claim that the open-plan solution is completely without challenges. In fact, I would never deny that an open-plan office which is expected to support all activities from focused work to telephone conversations, mixed with poor acoustic and no variety of settings, is a poor solution. But that does not mean the entire concept is flawed and that all open environments are bad. When research is conducted on poorly designed open-plan offices, I would expect to see results that show it is bad. Some of the damning headlines have in fact been based on findings from research, some of which have respondent numbers reaching statistically interesting sample sizes.

But if all those respondents are from one or two organisations with poorly designed workplaces, it’s against all laws of statistics to generalise and conclude that open offices are generally flawed as a concept.

We looked at all offices in our database with 50 respondents or more and plotted them on a graph (Figure 1) that compares the Lmi against the proportion of respondents in enclosed offices. The message is clear if rather self-evident: both open environments and more enclosed office concepts can be successful or can fail. While most of the workplaces with an Lmi below 50 are predominantly open environments, so too are the high performers. Out of the top 10 workplaces (based on Lmi), there are no locations with more than 50% of the employees in a private or shared office. Out of all the buildings with an Lmi of 70 or above, only 9% are predominantly enclosed offices.

So why do we keep seeing studies that conclude that open-plan workplaces are bad? One of the main challenges is sampling. Plotting the workplaces we’ve measured on a graph based on their Lmi and the proportion of respondents in enclosed or open environments illustrates that some open concepts are perceived to be very poor, while others provide an outstanding experience. Now imagine a study that looks at just one or two of these offices, and the organisation that agreed to participate in this study happens to be one of the dots at the bottom left of the graph. All of a sudden it becomes quite evident that we can’t conclude that all the other open offices are either good or bad, only based on that one office. But this is still happening.

Journalists already turned their attention to, and took a stab at, flexible concepts such as non-allocated or ABW, but before organisations start planning their future workplaces, after prolonged remote working, let’s have a look at whether the proportion of employees in flexible settings is connected to workplace experience (Lmi). In the same way, flexible working can go horribly wrong, or be very successful (Figure 2). If flexible means that you’re choosing between identical desks in an open-plan environment with bad acoustics and no variety, it is no surprise that the results are poor. But it can be very productive if activity profiles, behaviour and workplace design have reached alignment through a successful change journey. Just look at our highest performing Leesman+ workplace – in that office 77%, of the respondents say that they primarily use a flexible setting.

Let’s be really clear. There are good and bad workplaces and the reasons for them being so can almost certainly not be pinned singularly on whether they are open plan or not, or whether they feature allocated or flexible desk strategies. There are multiple other variables at play.

Yet media sensationalism means that employees who may be moving from enclosed offices pre-pandemic, to more open and flex solutions are being fed a predefined notion of it being ‘the worst thing that could happen’. I’ve been saying this for a while – the biggest challenge of every single open-plan office is not the concept itself, it’s how it’s being talked about in press. ABW met the same fate in recent years and as we can see, concepts around hybrid working models are also now at risk.

Those expressing opinions need to exercise restraint and, frankly, better understand the difference between real research and a Google search. And those consuming those opinions should look beyond the headline and check sample sizes and the circumstances around a project before falling prey to shabby conclusions. At Leesman, we are committed to providing the industry with statistically robust, independent insights on the relationship between employees and the spaces they work from – that now includes homes, offices and soon everything in between. Our collective database is the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. And with additional data points we’ll be collecting as part of a new solution launch, I promise our insights are only going to get more robust and more exciting.