Why Open Plan Is Now The Default Office Design

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Back in the day, offices were very much a set of closed off rooms in which small teams and even individuals operated on their own, closed off from the rest of the workforce.

A manager might have his own office, and next door, his secretary might have their own office too.

The team who dealt with one area of the business would all be in a room together, and if you wanted to talk to people from other departments and teams you'd have to go and find them.


In the nineties, however, this all seemed to change almost overnight, and in just about every office and industry in the world – especially more forward facing ones like IT. Now, open plan offices with a few conference rooms and perhaps a corner office or two for the very top people are the default, and it is very unusual to take up a new job in a middle management position and be shown to a nice little room of your own with your name on the door.

Here we take a look at why open plan is better suited to the modern age, and what the benefits are from a working and design perspective:

 

Open Plan Offices Are Conducive to Networking and Collaboration

These days, things in companies tend to be a lot more interdepartmental, and so you need to know people outside your own field. You may work in accounts, but you probably need to talk to someone from the software department about coordinating a new upgrade to your systems, or someone in logistics about getting to a meeting at a client's location to finalize a payment.

In a less technologically advanced age, things like this didn't matter so much, you knew the people you needed to know and everything else the business did wasn't important in your work, but now everything is connected, being able to see the people you need to work with and simply stroll over to them makes a big difference in terms of teamwork.

 

Open Plan Is More Flexible and Conserves Space

Another reason why the modern office tends to be open plan is that companies tend to scale up and down very quickly, perhaps bringing on board a team of consultants for a month for a special project or quickly expanding a department.

Open plan offices are much easier to cram extra people into, and also to reshuffle people when you want to reorganize the seating arrangements to make up new temporary teams. Open plan offices also make 'hot desk' arrangements, where people simply sit at whatever desk they want to when they come in each day rather than having their own desk, meaning part time employees or those who sometimes work from home don't take up a desk at all times, possible.

Like it or hate it, the busy, sometimes noisy, open plan office is here to stay, and it is easy to see why from a budgetary and practical point of view, companies love it. However, it is likely there are still plenty of bosses who yearn for the days they could get some peace in a room of their own!

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons
•  License: Creative Commons

The author of this post is Joe Clarke. He works for Global Contract, well-known for modern business furniture. When he is not working, he is either playing the piano or hitting the basketball court.