Office Design Can Affect Productivity, Study Shows; Proximity To Co-Workers Can Impact How Much Work Gets Done

The Vancouver Sun (Vancouver, B.C.), Apr 12, 2008 pE7

Office Design Can Affect Productivity, Study Shows; Proximity To Co-Workers Can Impact How Much Work Gets Done. Derek Sankey.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT April 12, 2008 Southern Publications Inc.

The physical design of workplaces around the world has long been a point of humour and frustration for employees, depending on their outlook, but new research suggests that different office designs can significantly help or hinder productivity in the workplace.

Tim Welsh, an assistant professor in the faculty of kinesiology at the University of Calgary, recently published an article in the Journal of Human Movement Science based on an experiment he carried out with graduate students that shows the design of office workspaces and proximity to co-workers, can play a big role in how much -- or how little -- you get done in an average day.

"You can't ignore the social benefits of having an open environment where people just feel better like they're not locked into a little closet," says Welsh, "but when you're actually looking at performing tasks, having other people performing tasks around you creates the opportunity for these interference effects to develop."

In other words, open-concept offices are great for social and team collaboration, innovation and fostering communication. When it comes to getting job tasks done, however, we may be paying more attention to what others are doing than to our own work.

"Designers have to be very careful about what they want to maximize in their particular environment," he says. "If they're looking to maximize idea generation, communication and just a general feeling of social well-being, then open-concept offices would be the better way to go.

"If you're talking about trying to get people to do individual tasks . . . it's in those situations in which you'd like to have people in a more isolated environment, which facilitates efficiency," Welsh says.

A quick walk through some of the graduate student offices on campus illustrates one of his points. Since the cubicles are often very "cozy" with several students working side by side, concentration is hampered and those distractions slow people down and lead to more errors.

It's about finding a balance that suits each department's needs within an organization, says Vancouver-based office design consultant Veronica Kohut.

"You can't really begin to design an effective workspace until you know who's going to be using it and why," she says.

For example, a team of engineers may require open, collaborative spaces to use when they're embarking on major projects and planning sessions. However, once tasks have been assigned to each employee, productivity is higher when they have some relative isolation to complete their tasks but without feeling "shut in," says Kohut.

Even when employees aren't aware of it, the actions of co-workers often have a direct impact on a person's own productivity.

"If you're performing a task next to someone else, then quite often what happens is that you're also representing the task of the other individual," says Welsh.

He uses the simple analogy of sitting down for a glass of beer in a restaurant. If the beer is the only drink on the table, the brain has no choice and instantly grabs the beer. Put a glass of wine beside the beer and the brain hesitates before making the selection, even though it knows which one to pick up.
In a workplace setting, however, things get more complicated. Like a complex assembly line, if you are doing a particular task and the person across from you is doing a different task, you'll be slowed down regardless of their performance because of a built-in "response-interpretation mechanism" that's hard-wired into our central nervous systems.

Welsh believes his team's research, which he hopes to expand into more practical workplace scenarios, could have particular implications for some industrial work settings.

"In a situation where speed and accuracy in performing a certain task are important, I think an argument could be made for a work setting in which people work in isolation -- or at least with people who are doing very similar tasks," he says.

Kohut says the research doesn't negate the benefits of open-concept workspaces and recommends doing a full assessment before making any changes, given the perceived social benefits to environments where there is more collaboration and communication.

"An employer may be able to gain some productivity if their workers are more isolated, but think about the implications on morale and how that could also translate into lower productivity if a person is in isolation eight hours a day," she says.

Credit: Canwest News Service