Why open offices hurt collaboration and what can be done about it
Last year Ethan Bernstein’s research hit a deep cultural nerve. “I never would have imagined I’d be a person to get hate mail,” said the Harvard Business School associate professor in organizational behavior, whose offending paper, authored with Harvard graduate Stephen Turban ’17 threw a bucket of cold water on the hot trend of open office layouts. The study, “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration,” concluded that the new configurations actually reduced interaction, contrary to the intended result. It became one of the most-mentioned scholarly articles of 2018. “It was respectful, but it was still hate mail,” said Bernstein. The strong response, which also included a significant amount of fan mail, reflects how important work environment is to job satisfaction. It also mirrors an ongoing societal debate about the value of open-office environments — wide, exposed rooms with long tables instead of desks, or clusters of cubes or workspaces with...