Open-Plan Offices Could Be Hurting Employees’ Brains, New Research Suggests |
Open-Plan Offices Could Be Hurting Employees’ Brains, New Research Suggests
Your company’s design choices may be accelerating employee burnout.
BY KIT EATON @KITEATON
Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images
Lots of ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of the open plan office layout, and you may have strong opinions about your office configurations based on your experience. If you’re pro-open plan, it might be worth looking at a new study that measured the actual impact those office environments have on workers’ brain waves. It turns out that compared to more separated and private office arrangements, peoples’ brains have to work harder in open plan setups, increasing the risk of burnout. If your office plans are changing, consider investing in some interior walls.
The new study, from researchers in two Spanish universities, involved fitting test subjects aged between their mid-20s and mid-60s with wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) devices. The workers were then asked to tackle typical office tasks in both an open plan environment and in a more private work “pod” with glass walls, while the EEG sensors made detailed real-time measurements of their brain activity.
When the workers were trying to answer emails, recall information and respond to notifications in an open plan space, the brain waves associated with concentrating harder steadily intensified. Meanwhile, the types of brain waves linked to fatigue, and to accessing memory in real time also increased. The worker’s indexes for alertness and brain use also rose, as did a measure of their brain’s “engagement” in their tasks.
Conversely, in the “pod” environment, as they tackled office tasks, the test subjects’ brain activity linked to real time information processing declined over time, as did the type of brain waves associated with “passive attention.” Overall, the activity in the front parts of the workers’ brains, the regions that help a person focus their attention and filter out distractions, calmed down during the experiments.
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Altogether this means that when working in an open plan environment, surrounded by noise, movement and distractions from other people, workers’ brains had to work progressively harder over time. While in a more private pod-like room with less noise, movement and visual clutter, their brains actually relaxed into the tasks they were tackling.
The data involved under 30 people, and it did show some variation in the stress levels of different subjects’ brain activity that people experienced in open plan environments. This means that some people may do less badly in open plan rooms than others, Phys.org reported. But the data support the argument that open plan offices put extra strain on workers’ brains, and could even be contributing to increased levels of employee burnout.
The article also linked to a 2013 analysis of over 42,000 office workers across the U.S., Canada, Australia and Finland that measured employee satisfaction in their office environments. This study found lower satisfaction in open-plan versus more closed-off spaces, mostly due to increased noise and lower privacy. This backs up the new brain wave data.