Open space culture arrived in offices with the confidence of a solved problem. Knock down the walls, the thinking went, and ideas would move as freely between people as sound moves through a room. Three decades on, the psychology and the data tell a considerably less flattering story about what open space culture actually does to attention, trust and performance.
The premise was never really about wellbeing. It was about cost. Removing walls and cubicles cuts real estate spend, sometimes by close to a fifth, and packs more people into the same floor area. Collaboration became the word used to sell that decision back to employees as a cultural upgrade rather than a financial one, and open space culture has been marketed on that word ever since.
The trouble is that the central claim behind open space culture, that stripping away physical boundaries increases interaction, does not hold up. In one of the more rigorous field studies on the subject, researchers at Harvard fitted employees at two Fortune 500 companies with sociometric badges before and after their offices were converted from cubicles to fully open layouts. Face-to-face interaction fell by roughly 70 per cent. Email and instant messaging rose sharply to fill the gap. People did not become more open when the walls came down. They became more private, just through different channels.
This is not a design failure so much as a predictable psychological response. Attention operates under what researchers call the audience effect: when people believe they are observable, they self-monitor. Conversations that would otherwise be quick and informal become deliberate, because anyone within earshot is a potential audience. Open space culture increases visibility, and visibility, past a certain threshold, does not produce openness. It produces performance.
The cognitive cost runs deeper than social awkwardness. Sustained attention needs a stable environment, because the mind treats unpredictable movement and sound as information worth checking, even when it has nothing to do with the task at hand. Each check is small, but it is not free. This is the part open space culture rarely accounts for: the issue is not decibels, it is unpredictability. A colleague’s call arriving without warning and without an off switch costs more cognitively than a constant, louder hum ever would.
Large-scale survey research backs this up. A 2013 study of more than 42,000 office workers across the United States, Finland, Canada and Australia, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that employees in open-plan layouts reported significantly lower satisfaction with sound privacy and visual privacy than those in private offices, and that the modest gain in ease of interaction was nowhere near enough to offset it. The same body of evidence that open space culture leans on for its collaboration claim is the evidence that undermines it most directly.
This is where open space culture reveals a conceptual error rather than just a design flaw. It assumes culture is a property of architecture, that removing physical barriers between people automatically removes the psychological ones. But psychological safety, the belief that one can speak candidly without being judged or penalised, is built through repeated behaviour: how disagreement is received, how mistakes are handled, whether someone actually listens when interrupted. None of that is solved by glass walls or the absence of a desk partition. A team with poor psychological safety in an open floor plan simply has poor psychological safety with better acoustics for everyone to notice it.
None of this makes enclosure automatically superior. A comparative review of office concepts found that fully private, single-occupancy offices scored best on distraction, interaction quality, satisfaction and performance, followed by activity-based working, where people choose a space suited to the task, with fully open layouts scoring worst on nearly every measure. The pattern is not walls versus no walls. It is control versus no control. People who can choose when to be visible and when to withdraw report better outcomes than people whose visibility is constant and non-negotiable, regardless of what open space culture calls the floor plan.
Dubai, ambitious, fast-moving and heavily invested in glass-walled, collaborative-looking offices, is a useful test case. Open space culture photographs beautifully. It signals modernity and flat hierarchy. What it does not automatically deliver is the thing it was named for: an actual culture of open exchange. That has to be built through how leaders respond when someone challenges them in a meeting, not through whether the meeting happens at a shared table or behind a door.
The more accurate way to think about open space culture is as a bet that transparency and interaction are the same thing. They are not. Interaction can be forced by proximity. Trust cannot. Mistaking one for the other is what has kept organisations investing in a layout that the evidence, gathered across tens of thousands of workers on multiple continents, does not particularly support.
If your organisation wants better collaboration, start by questioning the environment that claims to create it. I work with organisations in Dubai and internationally on workplace psychology, leadership, wellbeing and cognitive behavioural approaches to performance. For workshops, consultancy or corporate programmes, get in touch to discuss what would actually fit your team.
References
Bernstein, E. S., & Turban, S. (2018). The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1753), 20170239.
Bernstein, E. S. (2017). Making transparency transparent: The evolution of observation in management theory. Academy of Management Annals, 11(1), 217–266.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Gerlitz, A., & Hülsbeck, M. (2024). The productivity tax of new office concepts: A comparative review of open-plan offices, activity-based working, and single-office concepts. Management Review Quarterly, 74, 745–775.
Kim, J., & de Dear, R. (2013). Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 36, 18–26.
Haka, M., Haapakangas, A., Keränen, J., Hakala, J., Keskinen, E., & Hongisto, V. (2009). Performance effects and subjective disturbance of speech in acoustically different office types: A laboratory experiment. Indoor Air, 19(6), 454–467.
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