Do open plan offices really work? Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• Open plan offices are supposed to foster collaboration and teamwork.
• They’ve become the norm in the ad world.
• Not to mention in Silicon Valley, where “collaboration” is not just a buzzword but a belief system akin to Scientology and gluten intolerance.
• Disclaimer: I’m no architect or interior designer, I have no particular training in creating work environments and I don’t have hard data about the productivity, or lack thereof, of open plan office spaces.
• However, I personally find them intrusive, distracting and annoying.
• What kind of collaboration can there be when everyone is wearing noise cancellation headphones?
• Forgive me for stating the obvious but I tend to believe the open plan office concept is just a thinly-veiled ploy to cram more people in tighter quarters.
• A glass-half-full euphemism to maximize -or maybe minimize- square footage.
• A glamourized real estate gimmick.
• As in a “charming fixer-upper in up-and-coming neighborhood” to describe a boarded-up crack den in a gang-infested nook of the inner city.
• In my humble opinion, the open plan office is also a stealth HR strategy to increase control.
• A thinly veiled maneuver to breathe down employees’ necks and watch over their shoulders.
• Taylorism with silk gloves and a human face.
• Sugarcoated sweatshops.
• And don’t get me started about open plan offices in Hispanic circles (been there, done that).
• A cacophony of constant chatter, meandering small talk and pervasive chusmerío (gossip).
• A wall of white noise.
• A gigantic, unproductive water cooler.
• A round-the-clock coffee break.
• A big prison yard with flashy designer furniture.
• “… the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” (quote from My dinner with André, the 1981 film directed by Louis Malle, and written by Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn.)
• Just saying.

To be continued next week.