Why Open Offices Aren’t Working — and How to Fix Them

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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."

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	How do you navigate gender in your workplace?
0:04.0	HBR's fan favorite podcast Women at Work is back with personal stories, the newest research,
0:09.2	and practical advice on navigating disability, career failures, and joining a board.
0:14.0	Listen for free to H-BRA's women at work wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:37.0	In the mid-90s, the Italian designer Gaetano Pesci made a bold attempt to rethink the office.
0:50.0	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.
0:57.5	Workers signed out a laptop on a rival and then sought out a nook in which to work.
1:03.2	Peshi's creation paved the way for a brave new world
1:06.5	where walls, physical and mental were broken down.
1:09.6	And since that day, workers have been more and more productive and innovative. Yeah, not totally. By now
1:16.7	most of us know that the promise of the Open Office is some kind of paperless and idea
1:21.7	percolating Mecca hasn't quite played out that way.
1:25.8	For one, there's the lack of privacy, the excess of distractions.
1:30.4	Sometimes those just make it hard to get your work done at the office.
1:34.0	Today's guest has been studying why open offices are practically more closed and disruptive
1:39.5	than they were made out to be, and his research identifies new technologies that are pointing to
1:44.3	better ways to make the most of the open office. Ethan Bernstein is a professor at
1:49.3	Harvard Business School and he's a co-author of the HBO article The Truth about open offices.
1:55.0	Ethan, thanks for being here.
1:57.0	Thank you, Kurtz.
1:58.0	Pleasure be here. Your research shows that as organizations move from closed offices to open office architecture,
2:12.4	that interactions between workers actually goes down.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.