Even the Pandemic Can’t Kill the Open-Plan Office

Originally published on May 14, 2020 online by CityLab.

Excerpts from the article:

Even before coronavirus, many workers hated the open-plan office. Now that shared work spaces are a public health risk, employers are rethinking office design.
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Open offices were popularized in the 1980s as a scheme to lower real estate costs and break down divisions between teams; with fewer walls, bosses can claim they’re emphasizing transparency and collaboration while maximizing their square footage per employee. Despite evidence-based complaints that the layout is distracting and noisy, hampers productivity, and actually discourages in-person interaction, by 2017, 7 in 10 offices had adopted the model. (Among the proponents of open-plan office design is Bloomberg LP, the parent of CityLab, and the company’s founder and majority owner, Michael Bloomberg.)

Coronavirus introduces a new challenge to the primacy/tyranny of the open office. In the short term, architects, designers, property managers and public health professionals say that pretty much every aspect of this kind of workspace will have to change, to get fewer people inside it at a time. But don’t mourn — or celebrate — its death yet: A pivot to walls is probably still a long way away.
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All this leaves offices with a geometry problem: How are they supposed to safely space out their old workforce, with the same amount of square footage? The short answer is, they’re not. At least not for a while.

Bergmeyer, a design collaborative with open-plan offices in Boston and L.A., is currently planning to invite employees back to work on Monday, May 18, but the return will be done in phases. In the Boston office, people will come back in three waves, over three-week cycles. About a third of the office will be sorted into each wave, and divided in two again: half will come in Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and the other half on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If people want to avoid rush hour on public transit, managers are suggesting people stagger their arrivals each day, just making sure they’re around during “peak business hours” — from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern time, when workers on both coasts are online.

“It was like a giant chess board, trying to figure out how to take into account each one of our employees’ preferences, but also make some sort of regularity to it,” said Rachel Zsembery, Bergmeyer’s vice president.
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To accommodate teams that might have some members staying remote and others coming into the office, “Zoom rooms” may become fixtures of the coronavirus workplace. Bergmeyer is turning all of its smaller conference rooms into video chat spaces, for example, and experimenting with backgrounds that work well for remote meetings.

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