The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration

Ethan  Bernstein; Stephen  Turban

Article | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences

The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration

Abstract

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into “open,” transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors, and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined—using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers—the effect of open office architectures on employees' face-to-face, email, and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, 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 IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behavior of workspaces that trend toward fewer spatial boundaries.

Keywords: Open Office; transparency; collaboration; Collective Intelligence; workspace; workspace design; architecture; cubicles; boundaries; spatial boundaries; Human behavior; propinquity; co-location; Interaction; sociometers; people analytics; Buildings and Facilities; Communication; Design; Human Resources; Leadership; Management; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Networks; Social and Collaborative Networks; Technology; United States;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Bernstein, Ethan, and Stephen Turban. "The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration." Art. 239. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences 373, no. 1753 (August 19, 2018).

Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018

Safecast: Bootstrapping Human Capital to Big Data

Ethan Bernstein and Stephanie Marton

On March 11, 2011 at 2:46pm, a 9.1-on-the-Richter-scale, six-minute long earthquake unleashed a tsunami that ravaged the Tohoku region of Japan, damaging the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power facility and releasing sufficient radioactive material into the air and ocean to make it one of only two “level 7” nuclear disasters in history (second only to Chernobyl).
But just how much radioactive material had escaped was not clear. A tense time was made worse by sporadic disclosures of fragmented information. Those who had power or cell service, mostly friends and family outside the region, were glued to their television and smartphone screens, but, by definition, no one could see the radiation they feared.
Frustrated by their own desires to know what should have been knowable, three technologists—Sean Bonner, Pieter Franken and Joi Ito—founded non-profit Safecast around a volunteer-centered, open, citizen-science, “crowdmapping” model to monitor radiation levels. With the help of thousands of volunteers, by 2018, Safecast had become not just the “go to” source of information on radiation issues in Japan and elsewhere, but also the vanguard example of citizen science.
Yet as Safecast’s dataset strengthened exponentially, the sustainability of its financial model weakened. The same open, crowd-based model that made the founder’s data collection sustainable was still financially unsustainable. Was there a business model that could sustain the organization financially without undermining their volunteer-based operations, and if so, what would it look like?

Keywords: citizen science; creative commons; Open Data; open architecture; volunteer-based organization; human capital; Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility; 311; nuclear; radiation; crowdsourcing; bgeigie; geiger counters; kickstarter; sustainability; sustainable business and innovation; Design; Energy Generation; Social Entrepreneurship; Human Capital; Innovation and Invention; Crisis Management; Organizational Structure; Organizational Design; Technology; Business Model; Energy Industry; Technology Industry; Japan; North and Central America; Europe;

Citation:

Bernstein, Ethan, and Stephanie Marton. "Safecast: Bootstrapping Human Capital to Big Data." Harvard Business School Case 419-033, October 2018. View Details

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The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration

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