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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 21 2018, @03:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the 'cos-the-boss-is-watching dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Workers in open-plan offices are more active and less stressed than those with desks in cubicles or private offices, research suggests. This could be because they make the effort to find privacy to talk away from their desk, the researchers said. The US study used chest sensors to track movement and heart rate in hundreds of people in different buildings over three days.

The potential health benefits should not be ignored, they said.

But they said the study was observational only and factors like location of stairs and lifts could be at play too.

The University of Arizona study, published in Occupational & Environmental Medicine, claims to be the first to measure activity and stress in office workers, rather than asking them in a survey.

It said office workers tended to be a sedentary group compared to other workers, making them more likely to have health issues, including heart problems, tiredness and low mood.

Being less active during working hours has also been linked to greater feelings of stress. In the study of 231 office workers in government buildings in the US, those in open-plan offices - with no partitions between desks - clocked up 32% more physical activity than workers in private offices and 20% more than those in cubicles.

And those who were more active had 14% lower levels of stress outside the office compared to those who were less active.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45247799


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @05:13PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21 2018, @05:13PM (#724269)

    More active, sure. More productive, depends of the kind of worker you are: a solver or a begger.

    Open-Plan offices encourage beggers to continually interrupt other workers to solve their issues in detriment of their assigned tasks. And once you fall in the solver category are doomed.
    That may be good for the company or not, but definitely rarely for those solvers not being able to develop their work as quick and far as otherwise could because instead are solving every other fellow worker problems. And you can be absolutely sure that won't be rewarded by anyone.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 21 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday August 21 2018, @06:30PM (#724295) Journal

    Open-Plan offices encourage beggers to continually interrupt other workers to solve their issues in detriment of their assigned tasks. And once you fall in the solver category are doomed.
    That may be good for the company or not, but definitely rarely for those solvers not being able to develop their work as quick and far as otherwise could because instead are solving every other fellow worker problems. And you can be absolutely sure that won't be rewarded by anyone.

    And if we follow that a bit further...pretty soon the "solvers" begin to feel that nobody in the office seems to be actually doing their work or have a clue what's going on, so why should they? Which then results in them redirecting a large portion of their effort into developing strategies for not being hassled. And at that point you probably do start to see the drop in productivity, but if the "solver" is smart about it their own work doesn't suffer, it's all the "beggars" whose output declines, and that makes it hard to attribute the cause of that decline because nobody was actually doing their own work in the first place.

    • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:30PM

      by Hyperturtle (2824) on Tuesday August 21 2018, @08:30PM (#724360)

      Also...

      You can have an entirely 100% remote workforce that has beggars with high productivity scores and solvers that are doing horribly, because no one measures who is doing the work. The solvers look bad making the beggars look good. The numbers and metrics are for who has work done and how much, but not who is actually doing it. Those that read those reports are not really involved in what's going on, so those solvers also better have soft skills to explain to management what is going on.

      If you do not, and choose to focus on your own work, you get beggars that claim they are not doing the work because the Solver would not help them. Suddenly, good deeds get punished even more. Why are you not helping? You're holding things up! When the real truth is they don't know how to do it. And you have no one to blame when your work isn't done.

      All of this can take place remotely. No need for an open office. in fact, when working from home, that door is always open. Otherwise people wonder where the hell you are, why aren't you responding to IMs within a few seconds, etc. Calls can be done via voip or actual phones, meetings via lync/skype/whatever, IMs too, email is email.

      You don't need to be there in person to have someone beg you to solve their problems. You don't even have to be in the same country or paid the same wage to be expected to solve the beggar's problems. You don't even have to speak the same language very well as long as the work being done is the same.

      You might not last long in the position if you keep solving their problems and not focusing on your own projects, though; which classifies as being doomed in my book. The smug satisfaction of hearing of their IT meltdown on The Register a year or two later doesn't quite equal a steady paycheck, so it's best to try to leave on your own terms... rather than helpfully proving for management the beggars can do their jobs better than you can do yours.

      Solvers often want to be helpful; and for that they often get abused. The smart solver is better off with finding strategies to not get hasseled. The beggar productivity drops, but perhaps that'll then reveal who is doing the actual work. With any luck, there'll be some changes... but none of that happens in a vacuum.

      If you solve the problems and say nothing to your management about what the expectations are, it won't get any better because the metrics will always show they're getting work done.