I posted 42 Rules to Lead… to alert you to at least one hobby horse of Jonathan Rosenberg of Google, which is going to have a negative impact on productivity: open offices.
I have since discovered, via Greg Linden, The Open-Office Trap by Maria Konnikova, which appeared January 7, 2014, in the New Yorker.
Maria writes in part:
The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees’ satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.
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Maria points out numerous other studies that confirm serious productivity and even health issues with open office structures.
I think the answer to Rosenberg’s “Crowded is Creative” call is “evidence based” evaluation.
Rosenberg may have a good slogan, but like “land, peace and bread,” it doesn’t take you anywhere you want to go.