Open-plan offices: what 25 years of research has found

By the early 2000s, roughly 70% of American office workers were in open-plan environments. The trend was driven by a combination of architectural fashion, cost savings (no walls = more workers per square foot), and the explicit claim — repeated in articles and TED talks — that open offices would increase collaboration, accessibility, and team performance.

Twenty-five years of empirical research has produced a fairly consistent picture: the productivity-enhancing claims were wrong. The cost-saving claims were correct.

1. The Harvard study

The most influential single study in the modern open-plan literature was Bernstein and Turban's 2018 Harvard analysis of two Fortune 500 companies that transitioned to open-plan workspaces. The researchers tracked employee behavior via sensors before and after the move.

The results contradicted the design predictions:

• Face-to-face interaction decreased by 70% after the move to open-plan
• Electronic communication increased by 50% (email and instant message)
• Productivity, as measured by company metrics, declined modestly

The framing the architects had advocated — that open spaces would produce more collaboration — was the opposite of what happened. Workers in open spaces avoided face-to-face contact more, not less (Bernstein & Turban, 2018).

2. The mechanism

The leading explanation: open-plan workers, exposed to visual and acoustic information about other workers' availability and conversations, developed protective behaviors:

• Wearing headphones to signal unavailability
• Avoiding personal conversations to maintain privacy
• Communicating electronically to avoid disturbing others
• Working from home or coffee shops when possible

The "collaborative" environment produced collaboration-avoidance.

3. The concentration findings

Beyond collaboration, the noise and visual distraction of open-plan environments measurably reduce performance on complex cognitive tasks. A 2018 meta-analysis aggregated 18 studies and found:

• Open-plan workers report substantially more interruptions
• Cognitive task performance declines under typical open-plan noise levels
• Self-reported stress and dissatisfaction are higher
• Sick leave is higher in open-plan vs. private-office environments (Pejtersen et al., 2011; Kim & de Dear, 2013)

The effect sizes for cognitive work are non-trivial. For tasks that require sustained attention, open-plan environments impose real costs.

4. The cost-benefit reality

The honest cost-benefit on open-plan environments:

Real benefits:

• Lower real estate costs per worker
• More flexible space arrangements
• Easier supervisory oversight (where that's desired)

Real costs:

• Reduced face-to-face collaboration (despite intent)
• Reduced concentration on complex work
• Higher worker dissatisfaction
• Higher sick leave
• Reduced retention

For some kinds of work (light coordination, routine processing), the costs are small. For other kinds (deep cognitive work, creative production), the costs are substantial.

5. The hybrid resolution

The post-2020 shift to hybrid work has partly resolved the problem by allowing workers to do deep cognitive work at home and use the office for collaboration. This is closer to the architects' original collaboration claim than the pure-open-plan implementation produced.

The office, in this synthesis, is for meetings and casual encounters; deep work happens elsewhere. The economic logic of expensive open-plan offices is harder to justify in this configuration than the original prediction implied.

For workers in environments still implementing the 2010s open-plan model: the productivity cost is real and largely shouldered individually. The standard mitigations — noise-canceling headphones, scheduled focus blocks, working from less-public rooms — all help. They are also a tax that workers pay to compensate for design choices that the evidence didn't support.