Much has been spoken over the last few months about the trend towards people working from home most of the time or at the very least, working some type of hybrid arrangement.

People I talk to have mixed views on this and I hear all sorts of arguments from being in the office 100% of the work week, to working all the time at home, to somewhere in the middle with a hybrid model.

Covid has of course catalyzed this discussion because we didn’t really have a choice for almost 2 years. We got used to working at home. People who had never, ever thought about working from home were forced to for long periods due to them contracting Covid, a family member getting Covid or their company having an outbreak and they had to work from home – and guess what? Most liked it.

Companies then had problems getting people back to the office. Their staff liked this new opportunity of a work/life balance, no commute and close proximity to the family.

In a study by Gallup in June 2002of over 8,000 remote capable US employees, the findings showed that 50% were working hybrid, 30% worked exclusively remote and only 20% were at the office.

In a more recent research by Gallup, they studied the experiences of 14,000 US employees and found that 59% preferred a hybrid working environment, 32% preferred exclusively remote and only 9% wanted to be at the office full time. The trend is obvious.

Why? Well, a lot of the studies report that the number one reason for not going to the office is to avoid commuting. That makes sense and was probably the biggest “Ah Hah” that we discovered during Covid. Hey, I can get up and make breakfast, catch up on e-mails and talk with the family all in the time I would normally be sitting in the car.

But I think there’s a bigger reason behind this move towards staying out of the office. It’s the office itself.

The first open plan office concept was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1906, but it wasn’t until the 1950’s that it was formalized when Germany embraced this shared space idea, so as to prevent the appearance of hierarchism in the post-war egalitarian trend in German Society.

The popularity of these open-plan offices took another jump over four decades later in 2005 when Google reinvented their HQ. Other companies wanted to appear as innovative as Google, so they did away with cubicles and redesigned their offices to match the open-plan concept. They put in fun games and followed the fun environment that We Work espoused.

In 2015, Facebook also followed this trend and built the world’s largest open-plan floor which now holds about 2,800 employees on a 10-acre campus. Apple followed in 2017, opening a 275-acre campus for 12,000 employees with an all-open plan design.

This was just following the trend that according to a survey in 2014 by the International Facility Management Association showed that 70 percent of companies had an open floor plan.

This was meant to be cool, and innovative and provide more opportunities for interaction and brainstorming. But did it?

Employees at Apple Park report they feel distracted, counterproductive and most of all, have a lack of privacy.

There is more and more research that is questioning the wisdom of the open-plan approach. For example, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, at Harvard Business School and Harvard University, took a look at people who switched from individual cubicles to an open office plan. What they found in fact, was instead of more collaboration after the switch there was in fact less. What they found was that participants in the study spent:

• 73 percent less time in face-to-face interactions
• 67 percent more time on email
• 75 percent more time on instant messenger

So what does this mean? Maybe we really don’t like the open-plan office spaces. And if that is the case, maybe that’s the primary reason for people not being willing to return to an office environment on a full-time basis.

They don’t like people hearing all the conversations they have, and the lack of privacy. They don’t like the constant noise preventing their concentration and focus. They don’t like feeling they are in a goldfish bowl. Maybe the forced staying at home because of Covid magnified these feelings and allowed people to stand back and realize they simply didn’t like this new environment and now they could have a say and change it.

There is no doubt that studies have proved conclusively that people do not want to go back to the office full-time. But what I’m suggesting is they have not really discovered why. Maybe if we want our people to spend some more time in the office, we should make the office itself more accommodating to what they need and want, such as more private areas to make calls and have small meetings. Perhaps it’s time to change the office environment itself.