Studies show that in open offices, employees have significantly less face-to-face interaction than they do when they have spatial boundaries. A separate study by Oxford Economics concluded that noise pollution in open offices has reached “epidemic levels,” with 63 percent of employees stating that they lack quiet space for work, which in turn has a “negative effect on their productivity, satisfaction and well-being”. The Harvard Business School recently published studies showing that in open offices, employees have significantly less face-to-face interaction (by about 70 percent) than they do when they have spatial boundaries, while electronic communications surge by as much as 50 percent. These problems seem to come with the territory of open office life. Noise pollution is real, and it’s impacting employees' lives My colleagues and I mostly used email and online chatting to communicate so that we wouldn’t have to shout. It was tough to book a conference room because editorial was competing with every other department whose employees were just as eagerly seeking peace. I was also constantly distracted by the conversations around me. Much of my job as an editor required quiet time to read, write and call sources and little of this work could get done comfortably in an environment stripped of privacy and gushing with noise. One aspect I’ve never been remotely nostalgic about was the open office setting, which the last company I worked for transitioned to shortly before I left.Ĭubicles aren’t great (and I don’t miss those, either), but at least they afforded me a sense of privacy and clear boundaries. Once I switched from full-time employment to full-time freelance (aka, being self-employed and working from home), there were a lot of things I came to miss about office life, such as the set schedule and being around co-workers.
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