What Is the Purpose of Having an Open-Office Layout?
A company's choice of office layouts can have a significant impact on staff collaboration, morale and effectiveness. Different layout choices channel employees to behave in different and predictable ways. Open-office layouts are growing in popularity because they eliminate the physical barriers that preclude staff members from sharing information quickly and naturally.
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Layout Options
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Employers have several office-layout options, each of which present a trade-off between employee collaboration and employee privacy. The most private version--each individual employee has a private office with a door--provides seclusion for staff, but reduces the free flow of information among them. The middle-of-the-road option is represented by the stereotypical "cubicle farm," with employees assigned to cubicles that provide a degree of privacy but also some barriers from one another.
Open Office Layouts
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In a typical open-office layout, staff members are provided with desks arranged in a larger room. This would look like the typical big-city newsroom. Staff are packed tightly together with no walls or obstructions breaking their line of sight across the workspace. Staff can be arranged with their desks facing the walls, in a smaller space, although it is more common to have pairs or quads of desks facing each other in clusters by business unit.
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Optimal Industries
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Because open-office layouts maximize communication among employees, this arrangement is ideal for teams where real-time information sharing is critical. You would see this kind of layout in journalism newsrooms, police squad rooms, quality-assurance departments, help desks and marketing agencies. Industries where privacy is important, like financial planning, are less suited to an open-office layout.
Advantages
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Advantages of an open-office layout include improved employee collaboration, easier large-group communication and more effective sharing of real-time status information. For example, information can be seen easily if shared using large display panels or whiteboards. Employees can see each other and speak to each other without leaving their desks, which improves idea sharing.
Disadvantages
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The downside to open-office layouts is that employees have no protection against the distractions of their peers. Staff members who do better with a more quiet environment may struggle to concentrate amid the noise and distractions of an open-office plan. In addition, open-office environments are less effective in areas that are primarily call centers, as the background noise often leads to communication challenges among telephone agents.
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References
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