An empirical study on the effect of open offices: "the volume of face-to-face interactions decreased significantly (approx. 70%)"
rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb…
rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb…
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell what's going on from the text of the study.
In "Study 1", they got 52 people from a floor with people in "technology, sales and pricing, human resources (HR), finance, and product development, as well as the top leadership"
In "Study 1", they got 52 people from a floor with people in "technology, sales and pricing, human resources (HR), finance, and product development, as well as the top leadership"
These are really different things and one might expect different results. perhaps even directionally different results, depending on the composition, but the actual composition isn't mentioned at all (nor is the idea that it might matter).
Another strange thing is the magnitude of the result: 5.8h/day -> 1.7h/day. Was that really all the result of the changing office plan and not a result of any other factors? No way to tell since there was no control and other changes that might've co-occured aren't discussed.
I don't mean to pick on this too much -- open office advocates typically have zero evidence for their claims. It's nice to see a study on this even if it's unclear what the result actually means in practice.
