Frederick Winslow Taylor, American inventor and engineer, is widely regarded as the founder of ‘scientific management’. Broadly speaking, Taylorism guides a way of working designed to improve organisational efficiency. Workers are required to have more clearly defined roles, work more effectively, and accept clearly defined levels of hierarchy within the organisation.

One of the tenets of Taylorism is the open-plan office. A workplace trend that has cemented itself as the dominant office design. Although study after study concludes open plan is a detrimental design, employers rarely consider alternatives.

How did Taylor’s office design become so popular with bosses?

In 1906, the opening of the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York marked the birth of the modern office building with its vast open floors. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was inspired by the grandeur of cathedrals, both for aesthetic reasons and to meet the growing need for employee supervision and control. Taylor’s open-plan office layout fit incongruently into Wright’s cathedral-like aesthetics, and Taylorism, as it came to be known, became popular with bosses.

After World War II, the Taylorist office design went out of fashion, as union membership grew among office workers, and as the demography of offices changed. What had been a male dominion for 100 years was now a co-ed space. As the popular UK publication headlined in 1968, “Would you let your daughter work in an open space?” Organisations needed to provide a comfortable environment for all workers, which facilitated the ‘modest tray’ to cover the front of the desks and the legs, office partitions and later, the cubicle.

Until the 2000s office workers largely enjoyed semi-private workspaces, which allowed some buffer from the often-noisy open spaces to concentrate on work, and to customise a small space to make an optimal work environment. However, Silicon Valley became a model of innovation and productivity. Most office workspaces ended up not with a Frank Ghery designed inspiration space, but with rows and rows of desks sans partitions, and ‘break out’ spaces with no privacy, or comfort, for meetings.

COVID-19 threw a giant spanner into the way office spaces worked, with working from home exploding.

Although bosses argued for a return to the office, they also took advantage of staff using their homes as a workspace, and downsized offices to reduce budgets. And with smaller spaces, open-plan design is by far the favoured option for employers. When staff are forced back into the office, they now often need to hot desk, or work in sub-optimal situations; even having to go to cafes to work in some instances. The office is often not an attractive proposition.

Countless studies have measured how open-plan affects workers. There are very few conclusions that favour the open plan design, particularly when measuring staff well-being.

“Architectural Design Innovations for Health and Wellness: Leveraging AI and Digital Technologies”, a feature in the international, peer-reviewed Buildings published research which used 26 people, aged in their mid-20s to mid-60s, fitted with wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets to measure how hard the brain is working by tracking electrical activity in their brains. Each participant was monitored while completing the tasks in two different settings: an open plan workspace with colleagues nearby, and a small, enclosed work pod with clear glazed panels. In open-plan participants’ brains had to work harder to maintain performance. Even when we try to ignore distractions, our brain must expend mental effort to filter them out. In contrast, the pod eliminated most background noise and visual disruptions, allowing participants’ brains to work more efficiently.

Moreover, separate studies done by Ipsos and Workspace Futures have shown open-plan significantly increases illness rates, with up to 62 per cent more sick leave compared to private offices. The design facilitates the rapid spread of viruses, increases stress from noise, and is linked to higher rates of Sick Building Syndrome (headaches, respiratory issues).

The PSA’s Industrial Manager Dylan Smith says “it’s clear, empirically, and what we hear from our members consistently that we all work better and much more efficiently in well designed, partitioned workspaces, and we are way healthier if we avoid the open plan office design.”

Mr Smith added, “And if bosses allow some percentage of working from home into the mix, we’d have a healthy, amazingly performing NSW public service.”