You may hate your open plan office. It may negatively affect your productivity. It may engender sexism and gender inequality in your office. It may reduce collaboration and increase emails. But, like most design issues, offices are complicated–and a new study suggests there is one very good reason to embrace the open plan: It’s making you healthier.
At least that’s what a new study, published in the British medical journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine this month, suggests. The research is part of a $3.3 million, U.S. General Services Administration-funded project called “Wellbuilt for Wellbeing,” studying how workplace design affects health. According to the authors, workers in open plan offices tend to move around more, as opposed to people in cubicles and private offices. The former ended up less stressed, while the latter were more anxious and unhappy at the end of the day.
This way, the authors were recording both their physical stress levels and their perceived stress levels, rather than just one or the other.
The results were surprising considering the derision many people feel for the open office paradigm. Workers in open offices were 32% more physically active at their jobs than employees in private offices, and 20% more active than people working in cubicles. Most importantly, however, the workers who were more active had “14% less physiological stress outside of the office compared to those with less physical activity at the office.” Physiological stress is the response to an external stressor like our environment, which triggers a biological response in our bodies.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that illnesses connected to workplace behavior cost more than $225 billion a year just to the U.S. economy, and such research is crucial to understanding how to promote healthier workspace design.
In any case, the group’s research clearly indicates that our offices affect our health. The question is how, exactly, to balance physical health, emotional well-being, and collaboration with the right design.