Open plan and cellular offices

From the Center for the Built Environment survey, the architecture researcher Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear sorted 42,764 responses from 303 office buildings by how enclosed the workspace was. Enclosed private offices outperformed open plan on most measures of indoor environmental quality, and clearly so on acoustics and privacy. Open-plan occupants do report that the layout improves interaction with colleagues, and that is worth 0.21 units of overall workspace satisfaction. Worse acoustic quality costs 0.41, worse sound privacy 0.20 and worse visual privacy 0.46. The three penalties add up to 1.07 against a gain of 0.21, a net loss of 0.86.

The management researcher Tobias Otterbring sent a short survey to 1,500 Swedish real-estate agents and got 271 usable answers. Subjective wellbeing was 1.99 in cellular offices, 1.83 in shared rooms, 1.36 in small open-plan and 0.78 in medium-sized open-plan. Ease of interaction with coworkers ran the same way, from 2.62 down to 1.80, and job satisfaction from 3.15 to 2.78. Otterbring’s model puts those in sequence: the more people share a room, the harder interaction gets, the lower wellbeing goes, and job satisfaction follows.

The architecture researcher Michal Gath-Morad built 36 office models by parametric modelling and had 713 people rate them for beauty, attention, pleasure, safety, distraction and interaction. Partition height did the most work. On a scale of 1 to 6, rated distraction behind high partitions was 2.66; with low partitions 3.37; in fully open space 3.30. High partitions also raised perceived safety. Curved contours were rated more beautiful and more pleasant than angular ones, and the Bürolandschaft layout scored highest for both safety and interaction, which is neither the open plan nor the cell.

The medical researcher Casey Lindberg put sensors on 231 workers in four US federal office buildings and recorded their movement and heart rate. People in open bench seating were more active at the office than people in private offices, by 31.83%, and more active than people in cubicles, by 20.16%. They also reported 9.1% lower perceived stress than the people in cubicles. Higher activity at the office went with lower physiological stress outside it, measured as heart rate variability in the evening. The comparison that produces this result is open bench against cubicles and private offices. Every other study here compares open plan with cellular offices.

A survey by Shahzad put the same questions to 167 people doing sedentary work in two buildings in the summer of 2012: a Norwegian cellular office where every occupant had an openable window, blinds, a door and control of the temperature, and a British open-plan office where the aim was one uniform comfort zone for everyone. Health was surveyed for eyes, nose, chest, throat, headaches and tiredness. The Norwegian occupants reported what the paper calls a health rate up to 40% higher. The interviews put the difference down to control rather than to the temperature itself. Shahzad also reports the price: the Norwegian building used much more energy than the British one.

Kim and de Dear pooled 42,764 responses and Lindberg put sensors on 231 people, which are the two ends of the evidence here. Otterbring’s 271 agents all work in one industry in one country. Gath-Morad’s 713 raters judged parametric models and not rooms they work in. Shahzad surveyed 167 people across two buildings.