Change. It’s something that most people readily admit they don’t like. Yet ambitious managers and business owners are driven to look for “new and improved” ways to accomplish more with less.

This is one of the reasons so many businesses turned to open office layouts. They wanted to change the ideal feel of the modern office into something less “stuffy” and transform it into an open environment.

The hope was that employees could share ideas and brainstorm solutions without being incumbered by walls or feeling siloed.

For many businesses, the reality of open offices turned out to be much less effective than they had planned. 

The setting facilitated noise and distraction that interfered with everyone’s ability to concentrate. In most office environments, employees work in smaller groups, not a large one.

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Open offices — whereby employees are seated in an open floor setting with no barriers to separate them from their colleagues — have been extensively studied in the last decade. 

Because of their inherent openness, there is a seemingly intuitive logic that is continuing to damage employees’ ability to work and their long-term health. 

The assumption was that open offices were ideally suited to promote an active exchange of ideas. 

What many companies don’t realize is that, because of this openness and lack of barriers, open offices don't offer privacy and hamper productivity. Filled with noises and distractions, they take away from employees the ability to concentrate on their tasks and do their work effectively. 

Research indicates that employees lose an average of 86 minutes a day due to distractions in the office, and they take 23 minutes on average to return to their tasks. 

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