The counterintuitive finding from wearable devices

In 2018, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban published the first study to empirically measure how in-office interaction changes after the removal of cubicles and walls — using wearable sociometric devices and electronic communication server data rather than self-reported surveys. They tracked 152 employees at two Fortune 500 companies before and after their transitions to open-plan designs. The finding contradicted every rationale that had been used to justify the transition: face-to-face interaction decreased by approximately 70%, while email volume rose by 56% and instant messaging increased by 67%.

Rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and instant messaging. The mechanism is a self-protective social withdrawal in response to perceived surveillance. When everyone can see and hear everyone else, the interpersonal risk of any given face-to-face interaction — being overheard disagreeing, being seen struggling, having a difficult conversation observed — becomes significantly higher. The response is to move interaction to channels that restore the privacy the architecture removed.

The paradox has a specific structural logic. Open offices were designed to increase spontaneous interaction by making colleagues physically visible and accessible. But human social behaviour is not governed purely by physical access — it is governed by the perceived interpersonal safety of the interaction. By removing the physical boundaries that provided privacy, open-plan design simultaneously removed the psychological safety that makes face-to-face interaction feel low-risk. The result is the inverse of the design intent.

The irrelevant speech effect: noise as cognitive impairment

The most direct cognitive mechanism by which open-plan offices reduce productivity is the irrelevant speech effect — the documented finding that background speech, even when semantically irrelevant and not directed at the listener, impairs performance on tasks requiring verbal working memory. The mechanism is not distraction in the general sense but a specific interference effect: ambient speech occupies phonological processing resources in working memory that the same resources are simultaneously needed for reading, writing, analytical reasoning, and other language-based cognitive tasks.

Open-plan offices routinely reach 60–70 decibels — louder than normal conversation. At 65 decibels and above, cognitive load increases sharply as the auditory system begins competing with working memory for processing resources. This means the average open-plan office exceeds the threshold for comfortable focused work by a significant margin, creating an environment where sustained concentration is structurally impaired rather than occasionally disrupted. The irrelevant speech effect is not modulated by instruction to ignore the speech or by familiarity with the speakers — it is a bottom-up phonological interference that operates regardless of the listener’s intention.

The privacy-communication trade-off and interruption costs

Kim and de Dear’s analysis of a large-scale workplace survey established the privacy-communication trade-off as the central psychological tension of open-plan design. In enclosed private offices, workers can modulate their accessibility: they can signal availability through an open door and unavailability through a closed one. In open-plan offices, this modulation is impossible — all workers are permanently visible and perceptually accessible to all other workers.

The removal of the ability to signal unavailability produces two compounding consequences. The peripheral awareness required to track others’ behaviour and assess whether an interruption is about to arrive consumes attentional resources continuously, even when no interruption occurs. And the permanent accessibility signal produces a higher rate of interruptions than enclosed environments generate.

Every interruption in a knowledge work context requires the worker to reconstruct their cognitive context after the interruption resolves — the active working memory state, the set of considerations in play, the thread of argument being developed. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine found that after a single interruption, workers took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task at the same level of focus. An open-plan worker experiencing four significant interruptions per day may be losing one to two hours of productive cognitive time to reconstruction costs that would not exist in an environment where interruptions were controllable.

The systematic review: a productivity tax that outweighs cost savings

A systematic review of 46 empirical articles on office concepts and performance found that open-plan offices consistently produce lower performance levels — a productivity tax that outweighs the initial real estate cost savings that typically justify the design decision. The evidence is particularly clear on the two claims that most commonly justify open-plan adoption: collaboration and cost. Bernstein and Turban’s 70% face-to-face reduction demolishes the collaboration argument. The productivity tax finding challenges the cost argument by demonstrating that the real estate savings are partially or fully offset by productivity losses. The cost-benefit calculation that justifies open-plan design is empirically unsound on both its supporting claims.

The 40-year evidence problem

The Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation reported in 1984 — after surveying approximately 6,000 workers at 70 sites — that respondents in open-plan offices held back on talking to one another to avoid disturbing neighbours or broaching confidential subjects in public. This self-reported social withdrawal finding from 1984 was corroborated four decades later by Bernstein and Turban’s objective wearable device data. The research showing that open-plan offices undermine both collaboration and productivity has existed for most of the period during which open-plan design has been the dominant corporate standard. The adoption was a triumph of cost accounting and management ideology over environmental psychology evidence that was already substantial and consistent.

If the work environment described in this article is significantly affecting your wellbeing, concentration, or ability to do meaningful work, that is worth acknowledging — particularly if the distraction and loss of privacy has been sustained over months or years. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres.

A book worth reading alongside this

Deep Work by Cal Newport is the most practically grounded treatment of why cognitively demanding knowledge work requires extended periods of uninterrupted focus — and why the open-plan office is structurally incompatible with the environmental conditions that serious thinking requires. Newport’s framework draws directly on the irrelevant speech effect and interruption cost research documented in this article, and his prescriptions — time-blocking, deliberate isolation, communication discipline — are the behavioural antidotes to the cognitive costs the architecture imposes. For any entrepreneur designing their own working environment or managing a team, this book provides the most direct available account of what the research demands in practice, and why protecting focused time is not a personal preference but a prerequisite for the quality of output that knowledge work requires.

Have questions about this article?

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If the work environment pressures described in this article are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP therapist finder: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Bernstein, E.S. & Turban, S. (2018), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 373(1753). Kim, J. & de Dear, R. (2013), Journal of Environmental Psychology, 36, 18–26. Mark, G., Gudith, D. & Klocke, U. (2008), ACM CHI Conference Proceedings, 107–110.